Thar's no replacement, For displacement.
Thar's no replacement, For displacement.
Although I do agree ... I note that clever digital magic can miniaturize other transducers beyond what the laws of physics would consider realistic. An example would be radio antennae, the physics (and for a long while, all radio technology) suggest that an antenna needs to be no smaller than 1/4-wavelength, any smaller and it just cannot transcieve enough of the electromagnetic wavefront to function - yet it turns out that many modern cellphones and Bluetooth and WiFi devices use antenna elements so utterly puny they're often printed right into the IC package adjacent to (or actually within) the intelligent digital signal processing circuits which reconstruct full signals from attenuated fragments of distorted noise. This was impossible just a decade past, everybody who understood radio would tell you there's a minimum size requirement for your antenna array, smaller is just sci-fi, but now these antennae become smaller and thinner and more power efficient with every new iPhone generation which hits the market.
Audio transducers may not have been revolutionized yet, they may never be miniaturized much beyond what they are now, but I'm unwilling to exclude the possibility. It may turn out that our audio thinking is all wrong, that some kind of computer brain smarter than a human ear plugged into a distributed-ambient-resonance-array or whatnot can drown out a jet engine without taking up much more physical space than a thick layer of paint.
My mind says Technic, but my body says Duplo.
To revive this thread after a long time of inactivity, what if manufacturers made a sound-producing semiconductor in the shape of a speaker? Such a device would have the shape of a traditional speaker, and even have the appearance of such a device, but would actually be a series of diodes and semiconductors arranged in the shape of a speaker, rather than being merely a paper or polymer cone. Would a device such as that be feasible?
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -Thomas Jefferson.
"Those who would trade their freedoms for security will have neither." -Benjamin Franklin
Even electrostatic panels have limitations in regards to output at certain frequencies, and almost all of them use a supplemental cone based woofer for the lower frequencies.
I dont think it's the appearance that bothers people, it's simply the functional limitation of any type of output device; size matters. Sure, 100+db is possible in high frequencies, but the smaller the surface area of the output device, the longer the xmax needs to be to move sufficient air to replicate lower frequencies.
I think the only real significant advancement in low frequency transducers in the last 25 years was the cyclone subwoofer, produced by... was it Phoenix Gold? I cant even remember off the top of my head. They were big, heavy, expensive, and unpopular. Which is a shame, because the larger variants have the capability of recreated extremely low frequencies; I think I've read about one in a home theatre implementation was that was capable of under 15hz.. you dont hear that so much as FEEL it.
\m/ d(-_-)b \m/
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