I have some funny ideas in my head that lean more towards the material science aspect (sorta) rather than electrical, but I'm not quite sure how to put that into words yet. And it's all brain floof anyways.
I've got all these scribbled notes that are hard to follow because I'm trying to draw analogies that are flawed due to the nature of the thing. Keep in mind this is also all just mental diarrhea. I could be wrong, so very very wrong.
- electricity is not this instantaneous thing, electrons have to move, there is a mass and momentum there
... particle-wave/energy duality, let's treat it like particles
- think of it like a fluid (voltage is pressure, flow is current, blah blah whatever analogy works, it won't be perfect)
- hydraulics: push on one end, the pressure isn't instantaneous, no equilibrium, there is a compression gradient that builds because pressure is particles pushing into one another, so it takes time for that compression to spread out across the rest
- but things like damping factor and output impedance... sorta like viscosity and the size of the reservoirs on either side of the conduit
- damping factor is stopping power derived from the input; low output impedance effectively shunts most of that energy back into stopping power (but how!?!), high output impedance means your energy gets wasted
- why is damping only considered purely from the output impedance vs load impedance? sure I can use a liquid with high viscosity and that works, but shear forces are way stronger with nearby solid walls. Push gushy liquid through a tube, it'll slow itself down. Push the equivalent amount of liquid through ten tubes that add up to the same cross section, you'll have a much harder time because there is a greater amount of surface area even if cross section remains the same
- also consider the energy coming out the end of the tube, it'll produce ripples at the surface of the tank, some energy can travel hit the other side and bounce back; but a big reservoir doesn't care, all that energy coming out is inconsequential compared to the bulk\
- sure electrons will travel through a wire, through a transducer, a coil, go through magnetic fields, etc, but an electron does not go in one end and magically come out the other; it pushes all the stuff in front of it; in AC that electron will never actually make it to the other end
- you have a tank of electrons on either side of the load, like a hydraulic
- how does an amp control the flow? strong force over a small area? low force over a wide area? The resultant pressure is the same but your implementations are different, and your distortions/implementations/complexity will be different, and the resultant energy dispersion on the other end will be different as well
- everything has momentum, electrons have momentum, but momentum is this weird mathematical concept because it's not actually a real thing (unlike energy) but the mathematical construct manages to remain constant
- so ok, tada you've got high damping factor, good stopping force, but force alone is not enough
- in physics, we need impulse which is a function of force and time
- fluid is gushing along a pipe, poof you flip a switch and reverse pressure and your pumps or whatever at the far ends start going the other way, but all that fluid in the middle is still going in its original direction even though it feels pressure going the other way (and that pressure takes a while to even get there since it starts at the ends and the compression wave takes a while to equalize over the entire body)
So the gist of it: stop treating electricity/voltage/blahblah as magical instantaneous things; there is a "mechanical" interaction to the electrons themselves
- even more complicated since all these reactions on the subatomic scale are also embodied within the macroscopic transducer which is a true mechanical result of the magical electricity that are operating on a completely different time scale
argh headache, gonna stop now
tl;dr: there's something we don't know how to measure/calculate yet
older more scattered version of my thoughts
I'm looking at electricity not as this massless energy that simply exists and flows as directed, but more as the physical movement of electrons
we're tempted to think of things as instantaneous, but it's not
There is this mass and momentum in the individual electrons, but also an overall energy flow (like waves in water)
oh crap I'm approaching particle-wave duality here
envisioning two tanks of viscous liquid connected with a short tube
damping... is like the size of the tank? good damping factor is like a big tank; you can push liquid stuff through the tube,
in a small tank those pertubations will ripple visibly, some energy flow will be visible on the surface as it makes a wave, the waves will hit the far end of the tank and bounce back
in a large tank, that energy that goes in is negligible in comparison and you hardly see the ripple, all that energy is absorbed into the medium
could also be thought of like viscosity
fluid is slower, or objects inside are harder to move, or internal energy is absorbed rather than transmitting and bouncing back and forth (poor damping does lead to excessive ringing...)
low output impedance... basically shunts the counterEMF entirely back onto the driver, so all that energy is used for control
like high viscosity? energy is converted to shear (stopping) force, rather than transmitting away