Glossary: Field Coil | Sweetwater.com

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Field Coil: A wire coil that, when charged with electrical current, produces a magnetic field. Field coils were utilized in early 20th-century loudspeakers, prior to their replacement by permanent magnets. Remarkably, many audiophiles consider field coil loudspeakers to be sonically superior to models using Alnico or other magnets. Speakers are the primary source of distortion in the playback chain. Field coil-based drivers, designed properly, drastically reduce these distortion levels. With this technology, the driver is controlled much more accurately. Drivers vibrate at hundreds and even thousands of times per second. Permanent magnets actually lose strength slightly with each vibration. This causes a loss of low-level information and a blurring of the signal. The more complex the music becomes, the more of a problem this loss of control becomes. The permanent magnet essentially modulates the signal. Field coil drivers, with their own power supplies, do not exhibit these irregularities in strength and so have much less distortion than their permanent magnet counterparts. However, they are significantly more expensive to build into loudspeakers, and that economic fact spelled their doom. A few contemporary manufacturers now build field coil speakers for audiophile sound systems.

F-Hole	Factory Preset	Fadeout
Fader	Fairlight CMI	Falsetto
Fan Strutting	FAQ	Faraday Shield (or Faraday Cage)
Far Field	FAT	Fat-32
FDDI	Feathering	Feedback
Feedback Eliminator	Fender "Woodies"	Fender Blender
Ferro Fluid	Ferrule	Field Effect Transistor (FET)
Fibre Channel	Field	Field Coil
Field Coil	FIFO	Figure 8
Filament	File	Filter
Filter Slope	FilterTron	Finale
Finalize	Finder	Fingerboard
Fingerstyle	FireWire	FireWire 800
Fir Filter	Firmware	Fixed Bias
Fixed Point	Flam	Flame Maple
Flamenco	Flange/Flanging	Flash
Flash Drive	Flat	Flat-picking
Flat Response	Flat Sawn	Flat Top Guitar
Flatwound	Fleck	Fletcher-Munson Curves
Flick Action Console	Flitch-Matching	Float/Floating
Floating Bridge	Floating Pickup	Floating Point
Floating Sound Unit	Floating Unbalanced Line	Floating Vibrato
Floppy Disk	Flutter	Flutter Echo
Flux	Fly	Frequency Modulation (FM)
FM Synthesis	FOH	Foil Shield
Fold-Down	Foldback	Folder
Foley	Fool	Footswitch
Formant	Format	Formatted Capacity
Forward/Reverse Bias	Found Sound	Four-on-the-Floor
Fourier Analysis	FPU	Fractal
Fragmentation	Frame	Frame Count
Frame Rate	Free Field	Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
FreeMIDI	Free Reed	Free Reed
Freeware	Freeze	Frequency
Frequency Agile	Frequency Doubling	Frequency Response / Frequency Range
Frequensator	Fret	Fret Dress
Fretless Wonder	Frondose	Front Address
Front Loaded	Fs	FSB
FSF (Free Software Foundation)	FSK	FTP
Full Code	Full Duplex	Full Normal
Full Range	Full Scale	Full Track
FUN	Function Generator	Fundamental
Funky Drummer	Fuse	Fusion