How do tiny speakers play bass?

Years ago, people had to have MASSIVE speakers to hear bass. Tiny speakers used to sound terrible and high-pitched, but today, an iPhone speaker can play bass really well! What technology gets upgraded in a speaker, that improves its bass output without increasing the physical size? Ultra-thin smart TVs can even play sub-bass, and their speakers aren't very big. I thought that bass couldn't be produced if a speaker was too small. How does this work?

Dunno really, its a mystery to us all…
btw i have got a Monitor Audio bronze series subwoofer, i love it you should get one too

The drivers are designed to be capable of very long excursions (to - and - fro movement)
compared to older types of drivers.

Modern rare-earth magnets also play a significant part in this.

Actually tiny speakers don't reproduce bass very well at all. What your untrained ears are hearing is mid-bass and pretty muddy, non-linear bass at that. It still takes size to reproduce deep bass accurately. You can't cheat physics.

The Bose corporation knows this and takes advantage of it. (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) You give the average non-musician, non audiophile, a big, sloppy bass boom at around 60 Hz and a high frequency sparkle at around 8kHz and they think they are hearing high fidelity, full range sound. It's not accurate and it's not high fidelity.

Some miniaturization has taken place. For instance, my washing machine sized subwoofer does what a refrigerator sized speaker did in the 1950 - 1960s. The trade off is efficiency. The older models were more efficient because they had to be. Back then a high powered amplifier had 40 watts and tubes. I run my big subwoofer with a 1,000 watt amplifier - 1,000 REAL watts from a Crown power amp.

But this is still a pretty big speaker - and it has to be to do what it does; shake things off shelves, makes trees rattle outside - all at frequencies below the range of human hearing. You simply can't do something like that with a speaker the size of a breadbox.

Actually, they don't. They just seem to - to your ear. The science behind that is called psychoacoustics http://en.wikipedia.org/...oacoustics, and the engineering relies heavily on DSPs for audio signal processing.