So, when they present their findings in a paper to those gathered at the annual conference of the society for audiological innovation . . . they won't actually need a speaker.
MIT's thin plastic speakers fall flat. And that's by design
Engineers at MIT have created paper-thin speakers using a plastic film and a piezoelectric layer embossed with tiny domes. These sheet speakers could potentially be applied to any surface for sound output or input: think surround sound or noise cancellation in aircraft. The technology also has potential for ultrasound imaging …
COMMENTS
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Friday 29th April 2022 08:11 GMT Michael Hoffmann
PET indeed
Having moved with pets and having them travel in air carriers in loud aircraft or sitting on even louder tarmacs, I've long wished for some technology that can add noise-cancelling to the already compact, nay, crammed pet carriers/cages. These could be ideal as they wouldn't take up space on the inside.
Provided they can produce the required frequency range of whatever sounds need to be cancelled.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:00 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: How long ..... to give decent speakers
Sony already has a vibrating screen TV:
"the BRAVIA OLED can do things no other TV can do. Thanks to the vibrating units behind the panel, sound can move from side to side within the picture and be isolated to certain parts of the screen. Dialogue and sound effects emanate directly from onscreen objects, providing an audio experience that’s as immersive as the video. And they vibrate the screen so delicately that the movement isn’t even visible to the human eye."
https://www.wired.com/brandlab/2017/05/sights-sound-inside-acoustic-surface-powering-sonys-first-oled-tv/
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Friday 29th April 2022 08:37 GMT jmch
Interesting tech!
Re noise-cancelling - in cars and aeroplanes the sounds tend to be lower frequencies. 100Hz to 100kHz range means they're not covering the 20-100Hz bracket where a lot of mechanical background noise lies. Also, human hearing tops out around 16kHz (higher for kids, lower for adults), that's why audio headphones / speakers have audio ranges of typically 20Hz-20kHz. (at really low frequencies, vibrations are no longer 'sounds' heard in the ear but rather vibrations felt in the whole body ).
Another interesting application might also be short distance radio-wave-free low-power communications in the inaudible range.
Although I do foresee a dystopian future where every surface that isn't an ad-screen is a speaker surface spouting inane muzak.
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Friday 29th April 2022 10:17 GMT Paul Herber
Re: Interesting tech!
'Although I do foresee a dystopian future where every surface that isn't an ad-screen is a speaker surface spouting inane muzak.'
Although I do foresee a dystopian future where every surface that isn't an ad-screen is a microphone listening to everything everywhere.
FTFY
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Friday 29th April 2022 18:22 GMT Danny 2
Re: Interesting tech!
Re noise-cancelling - very pro for cars
I was driving north on a totally empty stretch of the M1, probably doing 100, when I heard a lorry about to crash into me. Except there was no lorry in front or in my mirrors. It was an RAF fighter jet buzzing me for laughs, except I was terrified and could easily have crashed. Ghost lorries in the sky. After that I drove that road with cigarette filters in my ears.
My dad's advice when he taught me to drive was life saving. "Everyone is always trying to kill you on the road. Don't pay them any attention, just concentrate on your own driving - because I pay for your insurance."
All cadet pilots are inadvertently dangerous, RAF cadet pilots are deliberately dangerous.
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Friday 29th April 2022 09:23 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
What a pity...
> At a distance of 30cm (12 inches), it's claimed, these thin-film speakers can generate high-quality sound equivalent to the volume of a typical conversation
What a pity that they chose not to demonstrate that in the linked video, then. Only when I read the video title did I understand that I ought to have been able to hear a Queen track (God bless you, Ma'am) but I can still only barely pick it out of the noise. Reminds me of the quality of LW radio from a 6-transitor receiver, I'm afraid.
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Friday 29th April 2022 09:41 GMT ClockworkOwl
Bass response...
Given how the perceived sound changes as the sheet is manipulated, I suspect the frequency response issues are mechanical in nature.
Maybe if a large sheet was tensioned in a frame you could get some good low frequency response.
I'm thinking of a solid state version of the legendary Quad electrostatic speakers...
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Friday 29th April 2022 16:02 GMT Tom 7
Re: Bass response...
They didnt go down very low though - below 100hz or so its mainly harmonics and not the actual note. The 63s are a bit better down to 60hz. I've got a pair of each and the originals on the valve amps sound superb but its a bit of a con. But then you need a large room to allow the wave to even get going.
Outside tests on seriously expensive ribbon mike and full freq analysis of output not just normal db graph.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:11 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: Bass response...
NXM: "I didn't want several hundred volts that near my head."
Whyever not? It is the amps that kill you. On an edition of BBC's 'Tomorrow's World', one of the presenters (William Woolard, I think) demonstrated static electricity by taking off a nylon jumper (it was the '70s) and claiming that he was charged up to about 4000 Volts. He then lit a gas flame by 'earthing himself' to a Bunsen burner by touching it with his fingertip.
Buy your incredibly expensive (near small car price) electrostatic headphones here:
https://mynewmicrophone.com/top-best-electrostatic-headphones/
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Saturday 30th April 2022 11:02 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Bass response...
"I'm thinking of a solid state version of the legendary Quad electrostatic speakers..."
That was my first thought when I read the headline. Same old, same old, but with different tech. I wonder if the inventors have even heard of electrostatic speakers?
I'm sure there will be uses for this new kit, and maybe it will improve, and though the tech is new, the idea isn't.
I'm still waiting for "wallpaper" screens. Walk into a shop, choose from various width rolls and the shop assistant then cuts off the length you want. Stick it on the wall. Job done :-) You could even past it up in portrait mode if you only even watch mobile phone videos :-)
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Friday 29th April 2022 09:45 GMT a pressbutton
It sounds an awful lot like NXT.
Having a quick google indicates that the NXT technology has (possibly is) in use in noise cancelling fighter aircraft cockpits (wind noise)
It has been used in hifi products but does not seem to work well below 100hz, so you need a sub
It seems to compete well with electrostatics in good implementations
Currently it seems to be used in https://symphonova.com/technology/
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Friday 29th April 2022 12:03 GMT brainwrong
wot no bass?
"The sheet-speakers supposedly require only 100 milliwatts of power per square meter of speaker area"
Er, how much power it consumes depends on how loud you want it, surely.
What size device are they testing? Was testing done at 100mW input power?
12 inches is quite close to make measurements, I thought 1 metre was standard.
They claim it goes down to 100Hz, they don't quote a figure for how loud, but extrapolating the 6dB/octave between 1KHz and 10KHz down to 100Hz suggests it outputs 46dB, so you'll need quite a lot of it to get any bass.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:04 GMT steelpillow
eet eez only waffer theen
This is one of those perennial ideas. The killer is always the sheer physical distance travelled for bass output. Almost as bad is the low-frequency mechanical resonance of a large, semi-rigid flat sheet. Nor do the two combine well. The Quad HiFi electrostatically-driven speakers of the 1970s were the bees knees - but faded away badly in the bass. I had a pair of "poly-planar" expanded polystyrene speakers that had concentric grooves filled with gunk in order to dampen the resonances. They worked quite well and more importantly were beer-proof, but were engineered for cheapness and would have needed CAD analysis to achieve High Fidelity. Then there was the Qinetiq flat speaker, where they re-discovered that the resonances make the surface flap around and eat up all the travel that was supposed to be for the bass - and the flapping makes the mid-range sound like a Hammond organ. Then NXT, who put the bloody things in TVs, thus creating the market for sound bars. Now this.
File in the same folder as broadband over power cables.