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Its happened to everyone, your playing an awesome song, then the drop comes and everything goes quiet.

Why is it that cheap headphones/speakers are unable to play low bass sounds?

And why don't they just keep playing what they can, why does it go quiet?

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    This is technically off topic since headphones are electronic devices and are not specific to computers, software or networking. You may want to check out What is Frequency Response?. The likely reason they go quiet is they are not capable of the frequency response required by the music being played.
    – CharlieRB
    Commented May 13, 2016 at 20:34
  • This is off topic, but what you are describing is aggressive compression (NOT "encoding" compression) and/or dynamic range adjustment. Compression usually brings the quiet sound up in volume and can seem like the loud parts "duck." Disable all loudness, compression, dynamic range in your hardware. I recently watched a movie on cable-on-demand that had such aggressive ducking I had to stop watching. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducking
    – Yorik
    Commented May 13, 2016 at 21:11

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Inside of those headphones is a cone, that cone is responsible for moving air at the frequency that the music is playing. For example, a certain part of the song might be oscillating the cone at 100Hz or 100 times/second. As we all know songs don't just have one sound the whole song. The frequency could be changing or you could have multiple frequencies. That's why you can hear both, for example, a clarinet and a trombone. Base tends to be very low frequency and at higher voltage. Those cheap, as you said, headphones may only be able to play, for example, over 100Hz @ a certain voltage. So when the base drops, per-say, the specification of the headphones are being maxed out. Depending on how maxed out they are, they could either give up or blow.

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