Material Turns All Surfaces into Stereo 142
An anonymous reader writes "According to James Bullen of NXT, 'The UK ministry of defense was experimenting with a way to dampen the sound in helicopters and developed a honeycombed material that did the opposite — conducted sound.' Cambridge-based NXT christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more.
NXT is working on ways to put the technology to use in touch screens that promise to be part of a new rage in 'natural interfaces' for computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic devices.
Toyota has SurfaceSound in the head liners of four of its car models.
NXT recently made a deal with greeting card giant Hallmark to use the technology in 'big cards with big sound' when opened, Bullen said."
That is making a speaker inside things (Score:5, Informative)
For that you need something like these speakers from Thinkgeek [thinkgeek.com], which stick on to any surface and make that surface the speaker.
Sterno!? (Score:5, Informative)
which, although a boon to the catering industry, would be somewhat troubling.
Fortunately, they're just talking about NXT [nxtsound.com]'s cool speaker transducers that have been around for quite some time now (yawn...). Given that the laws of acoustics do still apply, even if the speaker is flat, the "cabinet" needs to be properly designed to produce good sound.
I've got a portable speaker that incorporates the technology. Logitech mm28 -- I think I paid $15 for it, although it's discontinued now. Although it does sound fantastic for a tiny $15 speaker, the bass is a bit lacking, and the thing distorts all to hell when the volume is turned up. To be fair, it can be driven *quite* loud, which seems to indicate that the transducers are quite powerful, and that Logitech forgot to include some sort of volume-limiting circuit. It's more or less the most simplistic NXT design you could imagine, as it's a rounded rectangle panel with an NXT transducer a third of the way from either edge.
All in all, with a bit of refinement, it could be turned into a great product, and it's easy to see how there could be many applications for this. Even though it might not produce audiophile sound (at least, not as lotitech had it configured), I imagine that it could be quite handy for "hiding" speakers in various locations, and could definitely be used to improve the sound quality of mobile phones. It also avoids many of the pitfalls of other "flat panel" designs.
Poking around their website reveals that they've got a pretty nifty portfolio of technologies backed up by some hard science -- they've even applied the same technology (in reverse) to produce touch screens.
re:great .. more noise pollution :( (Score:2, Informative)
ed
Re:Stereo = misnomer (Score:4, Informative)
Not new, and advanced by Jose Bertagni (Score:5, Informative)
When you DAMPEN something you make it wet (Score:2, Informative)
This is a pet peeve of acousticians everywhere.
Sound and vibration are DAMPED.
DAMPENING is for dishtowels.