K
keemarcello
Guest
Hello to all, I'm an italian HT fan, and I've visited today the TOP AUDIO VIDEO 2002 in Milan.
First, excuse me for my poor "tech" english......
Well, today I've listened to a loudspeaker, which was a panel about 1.30x0.80 meters (depth 0.30) made by many (and I mean 40-60!!!) little drivers.
Each driver had its own "little" amplifier (2w RMS).
The panel was the only speaker in the demo (all people in the room checked the cables!!), and was built to recreate the sound of a 7.1 setup.
This panel could reproduce the number of speakers you like in the position you want!
The 7.1 limitation was because 7.1 is the "current" sound format, but for how the system works (I'll try to explain now......) you could create even 9.1 (one speaker on the floor and another on the ceiling ) with a "simple" software upgrade!
How it works: Each driver is focused with some of the other to create a wave that is perfectly defined and hits the wall in a perfect "selected" point. Our ears simply don't capture this wave but only the reflection coming from the wall, and this "jokes" our brain that believes that the sound source IS the wall (but you can setup the speaker to sound "behind" the wall, or before the wall.......JUST AMAZING!).
I've seen some chapter of "We were soldiers" (area 1), and some DD trailers plus the tech demo explaining the speaker concept....and was totally blowned away by this technology!!!!!!
This is not the sort of fake and insulse 3D sound that spatializer, trusurround, virtual, and other technologies pretend to recreate........I mean that it was really like if there were 10 or more speaker.......I could hear the sound source perfectly located in space REAR (really REAR!!!), front, center with a precision almost better than any 7.1 setup in the show!!!!!
Being the firmware (on a pcb board like the one in our pc) that controls the directivity, phase, volume and other parameters of the little drivers.......it was explained that the panel firmware could create all the speaker we wanted in the position we liked!
Have you heard something like that before??!??
I was so stupid not to ask anything about maker and model (wasn't written anywhere, I doubt Boston......but on the site I found nothing!). Only downside seem the low frequency limit of the panel (seem like 50hz, but I can be wrong).......but you could connect an external sub if the panel isn't enough!!!
Tomorrow I'll go just to hear this beauty again, and let you know!
Please if you know something similar let me know ASAP!!!!!!!
Roberto