A SOUND OPPORTUNITY by Scott Budman
Here in Silicon Valley, we’re famous for exporting innovative products. Sometimes, though, the coolest things in the world come to us.
About a week ago, Valley VCs, entrepreneurs, big companies, and a few reporters got a first peek at something truly disruptive in the world of sound technology. For someone like myself, who has long been fascinated with the early days of music, recording, and sound systems, this was a revelation.
Think about the speakers you have in your house. The ones that pump out music, movies, TV and computer sound. Now divide by about a hundred thousand. That’s about how much space you’ll eventually be saving, thanks to some amazing speaker technology that’s just about to hit our shores.
A Taiwanese research company called ITRI (pronounced “ee-tree”) has created a speaker literally the thickness of a piece of paper. In fact, a super-thin membrane on the inside is coated with paper, so the effect is that you’re hearing sound .. from paper.
Here’s what it looks like in action: www.qik.com/budman
ITRI holed itself up in a small Redwood City hotel room, inviting people to check out what it calls “FleXpeaker.” Powered by your iPod, stereo, or anything that has a plug-in, FleXpeaker broadcasts with pretty decent sound for something that thin.
The goal, according to ITRI scientists, is to eventually fit snugly into your car, laptop, TV, even on entire walls of movie theatres. Talk about surround sound. It’s a tech cliche to say the possibilities are endless, but think about how much planning and negotiating you and your friends put into where to put stereo equipment, and imagine just throwing your speakers up onto a wall, or hanging them from the ceiling.
Not a bad way to save space, and start conversations at the same time.
Like paper, the FleXpeaker can be folded, rolled up, even cut with scissors to fit in whertever you want it to. It uses very little power, so ITRI can stake its claim to green tech as well. After the Wall Street Journal took a listen, it gave ITRI its Technology Innovation Award in Consumer Electronics, beating out hundreds of much bigger, well-known companies.
I wouldn’t sell your living room speakers yet. I haven’t heard them, but when I hear that they need a little tweaking, I wonder if they need tweaking or they are at their design limit. There was little in the article about the sound. With speakers, sound matters as much as form factor. Bose makes tiny cubes, but most audiophiles think they sound like… tiny cubes.
There are some limitations to what you can do with a flat panel, and they may be up against them.
There are already transducers that are flat, but these electrostatic speakers need to be big and flat to make good sound, and they still lack bass. (They are also fairly pricey.) Any panel can be turned into a speaker by adding a stick on transducer, but they don’t sound great. The resonance frequency of the panel matters, and material, size and thickness affect that.
Still, if my next laptop comes in a case made out of this stuff, it should be better than the earbud sized speakers that most laptops carry. I just hope it turns out to be cheap.
Think of the surround sound you could get with these speakers. Do the speakers create a clean clear sound?
Tom;
I’m afraid the only way you’ll get surround sound with them now, is to wrap several sheets around your walls. It’s early. But there are, it seems, good possibilities.
-sb
Very interesting Scott. Any info on its efficiency? What kind of output will it take to drive it compared to traditional speaker design materials?
MisterH;
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
As for specifics, these are good questions, with answers I’ll leave to the researchers themselves.
This is probably a good place to start: http://www.itri.org.tw/eng/news-and-events/news-detail.asp?RootNodeId=050&NodeId=0501&NewsRoomNBR=185
It’s the ITRI site.
-sb
No more woofers/midrange/tweeters/sub-woofers to blow out?
Is this a hoax? To make sound you need to move air how can you do that with something that is very thin? I followed the links and found nothing convincing! There was stuff about cutting it to fit!!! I looked at the date wasn’t April the first so does sound like a magical unbelievable idea.