Came across this paper, suggesting that the most important single factor for "subwoofer speed" is the lack of self inductance, never heard anything like this before...... but seem to make sense...... any opinions on these things?
http://web.archive.org/web/20010810141852/lambdacoustics.com/library/whitepapers/bl_mms.htm
So subwoofer speed is just pure plain nonsense, it's just a need for sub's with minimal self inductance and ability to play high frequencies?
Sub speed is not pure nonsense but I think their point is that it's not possible to choose a woofer without considering the self inductance. Personally, since the Le is one of the parameters used to determine the proper cab and crossover, the paper is kind of pointless, other than raising a point that should be fairly obvious when looking at a full set of parameters.
The paper mentions "The acceleration of a driver is described by;
Force/Mass
Many people and even other speaker companies confuse this and say the force is equal to the Bl parameter of a speaker. After all it is called the "Force Factor" right?"
All this really does is call out people/companies who use Force factor as the term for the actual force from the signal/voice coil/flux interface.
A driver with high self-inductance and high mass can't react as quickly as a lower inductance/mass driver but a magnet with higher flux can counter this. Also, if the woofer has these "problems", it's still usable, just not for a wide bandwidth and this is all part of good driver selection.
IMO.