If you live in a fairly small apartment then you probably don’t have a lot of space to set up some bulky speakers. Fortunately there are some fairly small speaker models on the market. However, the big question is whether choosing a small speaker means that you’ll have to make a tradeoff in terms of sound quality. In this article I will explain how the size of a speaker can affect the sound.
There is a law in physics that states that the air volume inside a speaker enclosure will directly affect the low-frequency response. If you are looking for a speaker that can play fairly low frequencies then that means that such a speaker would be fairly bulky. That is why most subwoofers are much larger in size than full-frequency speakers.
However, manufacturers of full-frequency speakers have come up with some neat tricks to improve the low-frequency response of small speakers. Some of these techniques use folded channels inside the speaker enclosure. The bass reflex box is one very simple design that has been around for ages which gives fairly decent frequency response.
To reduce size, instead of buying two fairly large speakers you can instead get two small-sized speakers and add a single subwoofer.