If you read the article you mention, you'll see that the NXT speakers are oposite of Ribbon Speakers in how they work.
Ribon speakers are also very old. I've seen one of the earliest and that was made in the 50s.
Moving coil cone loudspeakers date to the 1930s, with Paul Voigt in England and Kellog and Rice in the USA working on them independantly. K&R got the patent, but that's another story...
The fact is that although since the 30s speakers have got smaller and amps larger (in watts), sound quality hasn't improved, and in fact, got worse in the 70 when transistors became popular.
These speakers are nothing like the electrostatics you mention. They work on a completely different principle - the distributed mode loudspeaker. They use exciters (moving coil units) to drive a panel into breakup mode (chaotic) where it produces sound. You can turn lots of types of materials into speakers this way - the trick being where you place the exciters and the exact specs of the material.
The sound produced is an area source rather than a line or point source of conventional (or some electrostatic) speakers, which means it interacts with the room, and yes, it doesn't produce much bass.
Electrostatics however, if large enough can not only produce bass, but very high quality bass too. Martin Logan's often use a bass driver but that's so that they can make the panels smaller and cheaper. A full range electrostatic like a QUAD, is a wonderful speaker to hear as it produces very little distortion compared to a conventional cone speaker.
You can't think of an NXT panel as a normal loudspeaker - it works by driving the panel into breakup mode - the exact oposite of what you'd do with a conventional speaker.
Thanks - NXT is an interesting technology that came out of the military working on anti-noise for jet fighters....
As a high end loudspeaker, it works well and is meant to sound quite nice, but acts as an area source rather than a point source, so you'll get more room effect than normal (or wanted) and because the sound is quite "fast" it can be hard to integrate a woofer with the right sonic characteristics.
Nope! I know the materials expert at NXT who develops these speakers and you can't work them like that. The panel is driven into breakup and the patterns of vibrations on it are chaotic, so you can't cancel them out with another exciter. These speakers don't work in a pistonic fashion - they're distributed mode loudspeakers.
Because it's a distributed mode vibration speaker, you can't do things with the exciters to get stereo out of a single panel. You need two seperate panels for stereo.
Also, the NXT panel does not do any bass at all - so you still need a woofer / sub-woofer of conventional design.
Wonderful benchmarking for After Effects - completely forgetting that AE doesn't make use of the mac's second processor.... No wonder it's slower, but not twice as slow. If Adobe got off their corporate butts and made AE work well with MP on the mac, then the results would be a little differrent.
Ofcourse, my wife tells me about the new PC AE setup they installed at their TV station - it crashes all the time - completely taking down the whole system....
That's a really unfair price - unfair to you, that is. CD's are too expensive, and too little of that money goes to the artists. $2.00 a song is way too much when you can legitimately listen to the radio for free, or buy a CD with the music on for less. On a download sales model, you're doing half the work, remember!
What is needed is a system for music downloads that satisfies the needs of the consumer and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. No commercial offering has come close to this - they are all doomed to failure until they do.
What, explicitly is needed:
Compressed AND un-compressed audio file for download Artwork / track listings etc. to print Nothing to stop you burning a CD No watermarking Affordable pricing that reflects the facts that:
You've bought your computer and internet connection and CD burner etc.
You've bought your blank media and printer and paper
Musicians give their music away on the radio all the time, and the consumer doesn't pay for this. This has devalued and / or shown the true value of music and it is a very low value.
The price of second hand CD's more accurately reflects a true market value of music
Do the sums yourself and even taking into account the costs of setting up the service, the price per song / per minute is going to be pretty low, but if the service / artist do a 50:50 split on that (before costs) I'd reckon that would be amicable.
Ofcourse, this would put record shops out of business, but that's their problem. They don't offer much useful anyway (unless they sell vinyl)
That's very expensive!!! With a purchased CD I get the media, a box, artwork etc, and the music in FULL cd quality, and because the disc is pressed, nor burnt, it's more likely to last longer. I can also copy it, make mix CD's, make MP3 cd's for the DVD player etc.
If I pay for a download I want the price to reflect the work I'm doing, and the cost of my internet connection. I want full quality music, not compressed - but compressed as an option. I want all my fair use rights - to make a backup, to put it on mix cd etc.
And I want most of the money to go to the artist.
If I don't get all of these, I'm not paying - and I'd suspect that most people feel the same.
It's time to stop getting screwed by the music industry, and time for them to stop screwing artists.
If free software / open source / etc. is seen as the saviour of the computer world, what do you see as the route or force to act towards making a better legal profession?
On British TV's there's a ceefax system called teletext. In the 80's a further extension called fastext became available. Fastext was 4 (some static, some changing) links to other pages colour coded to 4 keys on the TV remote control.
See http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/computing/develhist.shtm l for more information.
BetaCam SX and IMX are both MPEG based professional formats from Sony. They compress across frames. SX is an ENG format replacement for analogue BetaCam SP.
How can they have that many games for it - I didn't know that many had ever been written for any computer or console. It seems like bullshit / april fools to me.
If it is real, I bet it's just a PC in a box... it's all it can be.
DeCSS doesn't help pirates - there were bootleg DVDs available before DeCSS was. CSS is there to stop you, the user, from doing things with your DVD that the MPAA don't want you to. Pirates just duplicate the disc, CSS and all at the pressing plant, or if they're low-tech, rip and re-encode via analogue.
Electrostatics sound great. The new Quad's are brilliant. I've not had the chance to hear the Soundlabs you mention, but I can guess that if they're anything like the big Quads, then they'll be great.
But remember, that even though the film doesn't move too much, it's very massive in area as compared to the the micro speakers (1" wide, but I'd guess the active area is less, and hardly any throw at all). Also, the bigger the electrostatic speaker is, the more distance any waveform generated has to travel before it can cancel out with the rear wave - so bigger size = better bass in more ways than one.
They don't act as a phased array. The phase is deliberately played with to direct the sound around the room. Anyway, we're talking very small speakers with hardly any throw at all, and even the company themselves admit it doesn't do bass frequencies.
Bose is all hype. Bouncing sound around a room is not a good thing. The bounce off the walls colours the sound as walls don't bounce all frequencies equally. The Bose direct/reflect philosophy has been prooved wrong time and again because adding extra room sound into recorded music adds in extra room sound that was never in the recording to begin with. Speakers should intereact with the room as little as possible if you want to hear what was recorded. That's why decent headphones sound so good (lack of crossover and low power requirements help too).
And the technology will fail. The poster below pointing out about how 1 ltd is VP funded and has never in the past 5 or so years I've been reading about them produced a commercial product says all that really needs to be said about them.
NXT who developed their distrubute node loudspeaker (doesn't do any bass worth speaking of either) is at least a commercial product with good applications.
They're one inch speakers, and they themselves say that they don't do bass. To reproduce bass sounds you need to shift air. These one inch speakers hardly move at all due to the way that they work off a digital signal.
And Bose speakers suck.
Although the article says that the sound projector sounds great, I severely doubt it.....
Each of the 254 little speakers works off a helix of plastic that expands or contracts on an electrical signal. Because the speakers are small, they do not do bass frequencies - which means you'd need a seperate bass speaker, and for home cinema, a subwoofer also, or some combined bass / subwoofer device.
The original idea of 1ltd for the digital speaker didn't include 5.1 channel support. It was just going to be a digital hi-fi speaker, but now they're using extra computer processing to send beams of sound which you're supposed to bounce off the walls of the room to make it sound like there's speaker behind you. This is a recipe for disaster because bounced sound sounds bad, and not all rooms have walls suitable for bouncing sound. And rooms with walls that are suitable, will actually sound bad, beacause of the resonances bouncy rooms set up.
This is exactly the type of DMCA lawsuit we need to get some heavy hitting computer companies interested in getting the DMCA overturned, either in part or in whole. It's also a case that the average consumer can understand, and feel ripped off by, and there's no "piracy" aligations to muddy the waters.
Piracy is wrong, but so is not letting you make backups.
Remember when it was "so you've lost your dongle - pay full price for a new copy..."
Now its "Your dog scratched the delicate DVD and level 3 no longer loads - tough, buy a new copy" - or "You broke the disc but you made a backup - now you're a criminal"
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article you mention, you'll see that the NXT speakers are oposite of Ribbon Speakers in how they work.
Ribon speakers are also very old. I've seen one of the earliest and that was made in the 50s.
Moving coil cone loudspeakers date to the 1930s, with Paul Voigt in England and Kellog and Rice in the USA working on them independantly. K&R got the patent, but that's another story...
The fact is that although since the 30s speakers have got smaller and amps larger (in watts), sound quality hasn't improved, and in fact, got worse in the 70 when transistors became popular.
These speakers are nothing like the electrostatics you mention. They work on a completely different principle - the distributed mode loudspeaker. They use exciters (moving coil units) to drive a panel into breakup mode (chaotic) where it produces sound. You can turn lots of types of materials into speakers this way - the trick being where you place the exciters and the exact specs of the material. The sound produced is an area source rather than a line or point source of conventional (or some electrostatic) speakers, which means it interacts with the room, and yes, it doesn't produce much bass. Electrostatics however, if large enough can not only produce bass, but very high quality bass too. Martin Logan's often use a bass driver but that's so that they can make the panels smaller and cheaper. A full range electrostatic like a QUAD, is a wonderful speaker to hear as it produces very little distortion compared to a conventional cone speaker.
You can't think of an NXT panel as a normal loudspeaker - it works by driving the panel into breakup mode - the exact oposite of what you'd do with a conventional speaker.
Thanks - NXT is an interesting technology that came out of the military working on anti-noise for jet fighters.... As a high end loudspeaker, it works well and is meant to sound quite nice, but acts as an area source rather than a point source, so you'll get more room effect than normal (or wanted) and because the sound is quite "fast" it can be hard to integrate a woofer with the right sonic characteristics.
Nope! I know the materials expert at NXT who develops these speakers and you can't work them like that. The panel is driven into breakup and the patterns of vibrations on it are chaotic, so you can't cancel them out with another exciter. These speakers don't work in a pistonic fashion - they're distributed mode loudspeakers.
Because it's a distributed mode vibration speaker, you can't do things with the exciters to get stereo out of a single panel. You need two seperate panels for stereo.
Also, the NXT panel does not do any bass at all - so you still need a woofer / sub-woofer of conventional design.
Wonderful benchmarking for After Effects - completely forgetting that AE doesn't make use of the mac's second processor.... No wonder it's slower, but not twice as slow. If Adobe got off their corporate butts and made AE work well with MP on the mac, then the results would be a little differrent.
Ofcourse, my wife tells me about the new PC AE setup they installed at their TV station - it crashes all the time - completely taking down the whole system....
That's a really unfair price - unfair to you, that is. CD's are too expensive, and too little of that money goes to the artists. $2.00 a song is way too much when you can legitimately listen to the radio for free, or buy a CD with the music on for less. On a download sales model, you're doing half the work, remember!
What is needed is a system for music downloads that satisfies the needs of the consumer and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. No commercial offering has come close to this - they are all doomed to failure until they do.
What, explicitly is needed:
Compressed AND un-compressed audio file for download
Artwork / track listings etc. to print
Nothing to stop you burning a CD
No watermarking
Affordable pricing that reflects the facts that:
You've bought your computer and internet connection and CD burner etc.
You've bought your blank media and printer and paper
Musicians give their music away on the radio all the time, and the consumer doesn't pay for this. This has devalued and / or shown the true value of music and it is a very low value.
The price of second hand CD's more accurately reflects a true market value of music
Do the sums yourself and even taking into account the costs of setting up the service, the price per song / per minute is going to be pretty low, but if the service / artist do a 50:50 split on that (before costs) I'd reckon that would be amicable.
Ofcourse, this would put record shops out of business, but that's their problem. They don't offer much useful anyway (unless they sell vinyl)
That's very expensive!!! With a purchased CD I get the media, a box, artwork etc, and the music in FULL cd quality, and because the disc is pressed, nor burnt, it's more likely to last longer. I can also copy it, make mix CD's, make MP3 cd's for the DVD player etc.
If I pay for a download I want the price to reflect the work I'm doing, and the cost of my internet connection. I want full quality music, not compressed - but compressed as an option. I want all my fair use rights - to make a backup, to put it on mix cd etc.
And I want most of the money to go to the artist.
If I don't get all of these, I'm not paying - and I'd suspect that most people feel the same.
It's time to stop getting screwed by the music industry, and time for them to stop screwing artists.
If free software / open source / etc. is seen as the saviour of the computer world, what do you see as the route or force to act towards making a better legal profession?
On British TV's there's a ceefax system called teletext. In the 80's a further extension called fastext became available. Fastext was 4 (some static, some changing) links to other pages colour coded to 4 keys on the TV remote control.
m l
See http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/computing/develhist.sht
for more information.
BetaCam SX and IMX are both MPEG based professional formats from Sony. They compress across frames. SX is an ENG format replacement for analogue BetaCam SP.
Don't sell things to lawyers...
How can they have that many games for it - I didn't know that many had ever been written for any computer or console. It seems like bullshit / april fools to me.
If it is real, I bet it's just a PC in a box... it's all it can be.
DeCSS doesn't help pirates - there were bootleg DVDs available before DeCSS was. CSS is there to stop you, the user, from doing things with your DVD that the MPAA don't want you to. Pirates just duplicate the disc, CSS and all at the pressing plant, or if they're low-tech, rip and re-encode via analogue.
He's SVP digital at Panavision - What's that got to do with the RIAA?
All we need is Apple to put them in Macs....
More like a TARDIS wall, I'd say....
Electrostatics sound great. The new Quad's are brilliant. I've not had the chance to hear the Soundlabs you mention, but I can guess that if they're anything like the big Quads, then they'll be great.
But remember, that even though the film doesn't move too much, it's very massive in area as compared to the the micro speakers (1" wide, but I'd guess the active area is less, and hardly any throw at all). Also, the bigger the electrostatic speaker is, the more distance any waveform generated has to travel before it can cancel out with the rear wave - so bigger size = better bass in more ways than one.
They don't act as a phased array. The phase is deliberately played with to direct the sound around the room. Anyway, we're talking very small speakers with hardly any throw at all, and even the company themselves admit it doesn't do bass frequencies.
Bose is all hype. Bouncing sound around a room is not a good thing. The bounce off the walls colours the sound as walls don't bounce all frequencies equally. The Bose direct/reflect philosophy has been prooved wrong time and again because adding extra room sound into recorded music adds in extra room sound that was never in the recording to begin with. Speakers should intereact with the room as little as possible if you want to hear what was recorded. That's why decent headphones sound so good (lack of crossover and low power requirements help too).
And the technology will fail. The poster below pointing out about how 1 ltd is VP funded and has never in the past 5 or so years I've been reading about them produced a commercial product says all that really needs to be said about them.
NXT who developed their distrubute node loudspeaker (doesn't do any bass worth speaking of either) is at least a commercial product with good applications.
They're one inch speakers, and they themselves say that they don't do bass. To reproduce bass sounds you need to shift air. These one inch speakers hardly move at all due to the way that they work off a digital signal. And Bose speakers suck.
Although the article says that the sound projector sounds great, I severely doubt it.....
Each of the 254 little speakers works off a helix of plastic that expands or contracts on an electrical signal. Because the speakers are small, they do not do bass frequencies - which means you'd need a seperate bass speaker, and for home cinema, a subwoofer also, or some combined bass / subwoofer device.
The original idea of 1ltd for the digital speaker didn't include 5.1 channel support. It was just going to be a digital hi-fi speaker, but now they're using extra computer processing to send beams of sound which you're supposed to bounce off the walls of the room to make it sound like there's speaker behind you. This is a recipe for disaster because bounced sound sounds bad, and not all rooms have walls suitable for bouncing sound. And rooms with walls that are suitable, will actually sound bad, beacause of the resonances bouncy rooms set up.
This technology will fail.
This is exactly the type of DMCA lawsuit we need to get some heavy hitting computer companies interested in getting the DMCA overturned, either in part or in whole. It's also a case that the average consumer can understand, and feel ripped off by, and there's no "piracy" aligations to muddy the waters.
Mod Chip != Piracy.
Piracy is wrong, but so is not letting you make backups.
Remember when it was "so you've lost your dongle - pay full price for a new copy..."
Now its "Your dog scratched the delicate DVD and level 3 no longer loads - tough, buy a new copy" - or "You broke the disc but you made a backup - now you're a criminal"