The term speaker may refer to a single sensor (also known as a driver) or a complete speaker system consisting of a housing and one or more drivers.

In order to fully and accurately reproduce frequencies with a wide range and uniform coverage, most speaker systems use multiple drivers, especially to obtain higher sound pressure levels or maximum accuracy. A single driver is used to reproduce different frequency ranges. The driver is named subwoofer (for extremely low frequency); Bass speaker (low frequency); Mid-range loudspeaker (mid-range); or Tweeter (high frequency); Sometimes it's a UHF speaker to get the highest audio frequency or even higher. The terminology of different speaker drivers varies from application to application. In the bidirectional system, there is no mid-range driver, so the task of reproducing mid-range sound is assigned between the bass speaker and the tweeter. Home stereo uses a designated tweeter with a high-frequency driver, which may be designated as "high frequency" or "high frequency" by professional concert systems. [need to quote] when multiple drivers are used in the system, a filter network called audio crossover separates the input signals into different frequency ranges and routes them to the appropriate drivers. The loudspeakers system with N separate frequency bands is called an "n-way loudspeaker": a two-way system will have a bass speaker and a tweeter speaker; The three-way system uses woofer, mid-range, and tweeter speakers. The type of speaker driver shown in the figure is called dynamic (abbreviation for electric) to distinguish it from other types of speakers, including mobile iron speakers and speakers using piezoelectric or electrostatic systems.

In 1861, John Philip rice installed an electronic loudspeaker on his telephone; It can reproduce clear tones, but later modifications can also reproduce low voices. Alexander Graham Bell patented his first electronic loudspeaker (capable of reproducing understandable speech) as part of his telephone in 1876 and then obtained an improved version of Ernst Young Siemens in 1877. During this period, Thomas Edison obtained a British patent to invent a system that used compressed air as the amplification mechanism of the early cylindrical phonograph, but he finally chose the familiar metal horn driven by the film attached to the stylus. In 1898, Horace short applied for a design patent for loud speakers driven by compressed air; He then sold these rights to Charles Parsons, who obtained several British patents before 1910. Several companies, including Victor Talking Machine and path é, have produced recorders using compressed air speakers. The design of compressed air is significantly limited by the poor sound quality and the inability to reproduce sound at low volume. Variants of this design have been used in public address applications, and more recently, other variants have been used to test the resistance of space equipment to the very high sound and vibration levels produced by launching rockets.