Woofer
loudspeaker driver designed to produce low frequency sounds
A woofer or bass speaker is a technical term for a loudspeaker driver designed to produce low frequency and mid-frequency sounds, typically from 50 up to 2000 Hz. The name is from the onomatopoeic English word for a dog's deep bark, "woof" (in contrast to a tweeter, the name used for loudspeakers designed to reproduce high-frequency sounds, deriving from the shrill calls of birds, "tweets"). The most common design for a woofer is the electrodynamic driver, which typically uses a stiff paper cone, driven by a voice coil surrounded by a magnetic field.
The voice coil is attached by adhesives to the back of the loudspeaker cone. The voice coil and the magnet form a linear electric motor. When current flows through the voice coil, the coil moves in relation to the frame according to Fleming's left hand rule for motors, causing the coil to push or pull on the driver cone in a piston-like way. The resulting motion of the cone creates sound waves, as it moves in and out.
At ordinary sound pressure levels (SPL), most humans can hear down to about 20 Hz. Woofers are generally used to cover the lowest octaves of a loudspeaker's frequency range. In two-way loudspeaker systems, the drivers handling the lower frequencies are also obliged to cover a substantial part of the midrange, often as high as 800 to 1000 Hz; such drivers are commonly termed mid woofers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Woofer” as loudspeaker driver designed to produce low frequency sounds. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1324405. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000 and 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Woofer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.