>It seems to me that a bigger, thicker, heavier cone would have reduced "compliance," if that is the right term, and therefore require a greater degree of damping than a smaller, lighter cone.
By the time you've built a speaker with a given pair of high-pass poles it doesn't matter whether the driver in question is a 26 gram 8" mid-bass, 166 gram 12" sub-woofer, something smaller, or something bigger.
Most of the damping is electrical. For instance, the Peerless 830452 bass drivers in my Orions have an electrical Q of .22, mechanical Qms of 3.90, and total Qts of .21 (those drop a bit in the H-frames due to the mass of the air).
When you make the motor stronger to maintain efficiency in spite of the heavy cone and stiff air spring, it's stronger when braking too.
>Putting it another way, couldn't the smaller, lighter, more compliant driver get away with a higher-Q enclosure, which would partially offset its limitations in low frequency extension and volume?
No. Qs higher than .707 produce a pass-band peak which is audible.
While a reasonable psycho-acoustic trick to give the impression of missing octaves for tiny speakers you don't want it in sub-woofers where tightly spaced equal loudness curves make a small peak especially noticeable. High-Q resonances are what give box store sub-woofers that anoying one-note boom-boom quality.
By the time you've built a speaker with a given pair of high-pass poles it doesn't matter whether the driver in question is a 26 gram 8" mid-bass, 166 gram 12" sub-woofer, something smaller, or something bigger.
Most of the damping is electrical. For instance, the Peerless 830452 bass drivers in my Orions have an electrical Q of .22, mechanical Qms of 3.90, and total Qts of .21 (those drop a bit in the H-frames due to the mass of the air).
When you make the motor stronger to maintain efficiency in spite of the heavy cone and stiff air spring, it's stronger when braking too.
>Putting it another way, couldn't the smaller, lighter, more compliant driver get away with a higher-Q enclosure, which would partially offset its limitations in low frequency extension and volume?
No. Qs higher than .707 produce a pass-band peak which is audible.
While a reasonable psycho-acoustic trick to give the impression of missing octaves for tiny speakers you don't want it in sub-woofers where tightly spaced equal loudness curves make a small peak especially noticeable. High-Q resonances are what give box store sub-woofers that anoying one-note boom-boom quality.