More Bass, Less Space
source Wired News
by Dan Orzech
posted 2006-08-01
They’re in your home, in your phone and in your car. They’re even pumping out Muzak in the elevator. Even though loudspeakers surround us, their basic design—a cone of paper that vibrates in response to changes in a magnetic field—has not changed fundamentally in almost 80 years. Until now.
Tymphany, a startup founded by musicians and audio engineers, is taking a whole new approach to loudspeaker design, one that promises to bring room-shaking sound to flat-panel televisions and iPod docks by packing far more bass into smaller speakers.
The Cupertino, California, company set out to redesign subwoofers, the speakers that produce the booming bass notes that add what Ken Kantor, the company’s chief technical officer, calls “visceral enjoyment” to music.
While audio systems have become steadily smaller over the years, Kantor says, “everything has shrunk except bass speakers.”
Accurately recreating low frequencies has usually required making speaker enclosures larger or adding separate—and typically bulky—boxes for subwoofers. The excessive size of traditional subwoofer designs has kept top-notch audio out of many places where people would really like it, says Kantor. “There just isn’t room to put bigger woofers in things like flat-panel televisions,” he says.
Tymphany hopes to change that with a remarkably simple new speaker design called the Tymphany LAT. Rather than a single, large cone-shaped diaphragm pushing air out straight ahead, the company has lined up a series of smaller diaphragms in a tube with one driver at each end. Every other diaphragm moves in sync, in a push-pull manner like an accordion. The bass is pumped out through open ports along the sides of the cylindrical speaker box.
