Researchers Make Paper Speakers For LCD TVs

narramissic writes "Engineers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have developed stereo speakers in paper (video) that are are well suited for thin devices like LCD TVs and will be used in cars starting next year. According to an ITworld article, 'The special paper is made by sandwiching thin electrodes that receive audio signals and a prepolarized diaphragm into the paper structure. A special Flexpeaker adapter between the MP3 player and the speaker is used to play music through the paper.' ITRI says it hopes in the coming year to develop a chip that will do away with the adapter and allow people to plug a digital music player directly into the speaker. ITRI is also working on wireless technologies and will show off its first Bluetooth enabled paper speaker in July."

Comments

Paper?

[oldspewey]

Hasn't paper been the primary material in speaker design since, well, since speakers?

Re:Paper?

[APL bigot]

Flat paper speakers. Yawn. This is old news decades ago. You can do this in your living room. I did decades ago. Interleave aluminum foil and the pages of a newspaper. Your making a capacitor. Connect the separate sheets of aluminum to the final audio amplifier in a tube amplifier. One connection to ground, the other to the anode of the final amplifier tube. And yes, there be high voltage here. You now have a talking newspaper. Slashdot is supposed to be a nerd site, why are the vast majority here unaware of this?

Re:Paper?

[SkyDude]

You can do this in your living room. I did decades ago. Interleave aluminum foil and the pages of a newspaper.

Newspaper? What's that?

I'm guessing if one were to use the New York Times, only the left speaker would work. If using the Boston Globe, the speakers would only work when there's a discussion of gay marriage. And, if the speakers were made from the Chicago Trib - well, it wouldn't work at all.

But are they MONSTER Paper Speakers?

[Anonymous Coward]

MONSTER Paper Speakers are made with the finest trees in the world. You won't hear better sound than from their fine pieces of papyrus.

Re:But are they MONSTER Paper Speakers?

[MadnessASAP]

Monster does the most ridiculous things to try to get money from unsuspecting customers. My favorite was $150 for 6' of Fiber Optic used for Digital audio. I'm no expert but I bet I could get an undersea data cable for less per foot then that. The really insane part was that since it's a digital signal and it was over such short distances you could use a cheap piece of plastic and get the exact same result.

So...

[Jaysyn]

They've been making paper speakers for a long time. This seems to be a driverless paper speaker, which apparently is a big deal. I guess technically the prepolarized diaphragm *is* the driver, but it isn't your standard cone / cylinder shape.

Re:So...

[Burning1]

In my experience, the issue isn't that most people can't recognize the difference between good sound and bad sound; the issue is that most people have never even heard good sound to begin with.

Sure... We go to the theater and hear *loud* sound, and then get it into our heads that a base line capable of collapsing a lung means the equipment is of good quality.

Frankly, these days even if you have good equipment, the source material is so bad that you can't actually tell.

Greeting cards...

[dirkbaztard]

would benefit greatly from this. Full stereo cacophony instead of the over-driven mono racket would be a blessing.

Re:Greeting cards...

[DanWS6]

Even better: banning greeting cards and the holidays that were created for them.

This is what they are selling

[Krneki]

I think this is what the story refers to:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/03/researchers-cre

Dear lord, this is horrible...

[Chyeld]

The goal for the researchers is to be able to mass produce standard poster-size speakers (A2, or 60centimeters by 44cm) costing just US$20 each. Movie makers could then put out posters with soundtrack music or movie highlights emanating from them as people walk by.

Kill me now, please. Just kill me now.

You thought those talking birthday cards were annoying? Just try walking in the mall as all 100,000 posters located in random locations start talking all at once, producing the noise which finally wakens those who must not be named and end reality as we believed it to be.

It could be

[treeves]

Well, it's a great idea ON PAPER, but...

Piezo-electric

[CrAlt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric

So they rediscovered the reverse piezoelectric effect and then glued it to some paper.

Wow, I guess the 50 year old earphones on my crystal radio are cutting edge...

Re:Electrostatic

[earlymon]

Magnaplanars were a diaphragm with an embedded serpentine wire conducting the AC audio signal. The diaphragm was sandwiched between permanent magnets that ran vertically, floor to ceiling. Looking at the diaphragm was not unlike looking at a long continuous paper clip. The permanent magnets were long and thin (about a 1/2" cross-section).

Many people mistook them for electrostatics.

With an electrostatic (the first speaker designed by AT&T, ever, using a pig's diaphragm and gold plating), the diaphragm is coated with a conductive material, then stretched between two metal plates. In the set I have, a 75 kV bias is applied to the diaphragm and the AC audio signal is routed to the front/rear metal plates.

Then, there's the ESS Heil HF driver. That used metalized paper, with the metalization stripped away in a serpentine pattern, then given an accordion fold, then immersed in a high magnetic field (big permanent magnets!) and the AC audio went through the fold, and sound was produced in accordion fashion.

Then, there was the Ohm-F HF driver - a metal-foil cone attached to a normal moving coil transducer.

Because of their exotic designs and shapes, many people confused these others with electrostatics - but electrostatic refers to one and only one technology.

The tech in the article seems to be something altogether new, and I'm looking forward to its advance.

That being said, remember - you cannot cheat the laws of physics. When the diaphragm moves forward, creating an over-pressure, the rear side is creating a canceling under-pressure. (Every action having an equal and opposite reaction sort of thing.) With conventional speakers, the "opposite" wave is trapped or mitigated inside an enclosure and does not enter the room to cause cancellation.

With a large diaphragm, you almost need an enclosure in back the size of the room. Impractical in the extreme, these are simply made and marketed as flat panel diaphragms and the rest of the speaker-room response is left to the owner.

But every Magnaplanar and electrostatic speaker owner will tell you - the worst sounding rig you can get are bi-directional planar speakers crammed up against a wall. Why? Action- reaction: that rear wave's cancellation is a function of distance to rear reflective surface and rear reflective surface acoustic properties.

So, no, until they re-write some physical laws, a paper poster on a wall producing hi-fi is not in the near future.

That said - I guarantee if it's viable in a marketing study, some idiot will make them and people will buy them to put along-side their wall-mounted TVs.