Gear & technology
Dynamic driver
Also called moving coil driver, DD
A dynamic driver is the most common loudspeaker and headphone transducer: a coil of wire attached to a cone or dome, sitting in a magnetic field, that pushes the diaphragm back and forth when the music signal passes through it.
The design is over a century old and still dominates because it is cheap to make, easy to drive and capable of deep Bass. Almost every speaker woofer, most headphones and many IEMs use one; the Sennheiser HD 600 and the single driver inside a Moondrop Aria are both dynamic.
Its weaknesses are the ones Planar magnetic and Electrostatic designs try to fix: the cone is driven only where the voice coil joins it, so it can flex and ring, and the moving mass limits how quickly it responds. Good dynamic drivers manage these well, and listeners disagree about whether the alternatives sound better or just different.
Products listing "dual dynamic" use two such drivers, usually one for bass and one for the rest.