Remember those magical speakers with invisibility cloaks? They’re back, and they reek more of “awesome” than ever. Though not available to the public quite yet, these handy dandy speakers are planned to be implemented into your everyday flat-panel televisions, desktop monitors, laptop screens, and mobile devices. They’re a slim technology made from a membrane and little micro motors embedded into the screen. The motors vibrate the membrane on each side of the screen and bring about what we call sound directly from the screen itself, eliminating the need for miniature crummy speakers planted in leftover space on our ever-smaller display technology. Anyone who doesn’t integrate them into their products when this technology becomes available is foolish. In my mind’s eye, I see people not needing to buy those funny portable iPod speakers anymore as well as me not needing to put my head on my netbook in order to hear the sound played on it. Glorious.
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Although the article didn’t address it, wouldn’t there be the potential for picture distortion, especially at high volume?
What about frequency response? From what I can see of the technology, it would seem that frequency response would vary from large screens to small. For instance, can a 52″ ‘speaker’ produce 18kHz or above with any quality? Would a 10″ netbook screen produce any decent bass?
Also a note about ‘stereo’ sound. For stereo sound, the farther the speakers are apart from each other (within reason), the better the stereo experience. From a single screen true stereo sound is really just marketing speak (as it is with all built in tv speakers). This could not create a real stereo experience.
I would stick with my old school 15″ Fisher 3 ways. Besides this does absolutely nothing for surround sound. Impressive idea but lackluster implementation.
The bass issue is just an extra selling point for larger screens, IMHO 😉
For the rest, I would imagine that specific areas of the screen could be used to replicate a particular frequency. So a high frequency would utilize a few small areas on the screen, and the low would occupy greater real estate.
Seriously, though, I would think a 10″ screen could do fairly well at normal volumes, but I do worry about sound and image distortions at higher volumes.
I think it will be a very interesting ride!
I love being a geek 😉
–The loon
More trash to drive up the costs of a device.
Try to get one of lemons using this tech repaired. Odds are it won’t be possible, and you’ll be stuck with something that has no sound.
This is almost as stupid as buying a TV set with an intergrated VCR or DVD player.
I’d love to know how the latest technology, led or oled, for all screens is now all of a sudden the ‘best’ option for speakers as well. Hear this.
Emo Labs, Inc., developers of invisible speaker solutions for display products, today unveiled the industry’s first fundamentally new loudspeaker technology
Not only there are many patents on this subject, I’ve read about NXT “display” speaker about a decade ago IIRC.
Not sure about real product though.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/result.html?query_txt=flat+panel+s…
Edited 2009-09-25 11:42 UTC
NXT SoundVu tech
http://www.nxtsound.com/426.html
Please update and let us know if anyone is planning on making a netbook around this technology!
~posted from an ASUS 1005HA which we all know could use better sound! http://bit.ly/44CHFm