Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper | Hacker News Reader

Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper

phys.org

95 pointsprostoalex31 comments

I’d love to have something like this over my board gaming table and not only play location ambiance through it but play clips in the spatial location of my players based on what they here.

If you could put one IN the table, maybe you could vibrate your players and have them run up the middle... touchdown!

So is this feasible to create as a hobbyist?

Well, ignoring snazzy materials that take a pretty sophisticated factory like the original link, you could make something like this via a bunch of small full range drivers mounted in a ring and some of the dsp stuff available now. The computational requirements are low enough you could probably fit it onto a lot of maker style hobby controller boards too.

Probably easier to mount and get my fiance on board too.

Fun idea :)

I suspect this is Polyvinylidene Fluoride Piezoelectric Film (PVDF). Not a new material -- there was a failed Kickstarter to make speakers out of this stuff 4 years ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/richardhaberkern/speake...

Fascinating - there's a video from the paper in a book format they did here https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~schg/t-paper/wordpress/t-bo... (2015)

Looking forward to cool applications, though it's probably going to be leaflets & magazin ads with sound first

> it's probably going to be leaflets & magazin ads with sound first

Advertising is truly the worst thing humans have done in history, IMO. All advertising has done is made everyone think they aren't good enough and to buy too much crap and kill our planet and even cause wars and uprisings.

Also: Don't try to confuse things you advertiser-pricks: "advertising" is whenever you cram your crap in front of my face or into my ears in places I don't want to or need to see it, like TV ads, print ads, or a speaker in the newspaper someday.

No, industry events aren't "advertising", that's "networking" and people choose to go there. No, it's not "advertising" if Amazon tries to suggest useful things I might need/want, that's a "recommendation" and people choose to see them (somewhat). No, classified ads are not "advertising", regardless of the name, that's a "market" and people choose to look there.

As much as I hate ads, as a former small business owner, I can tell you it's not easy growing a biz on word-of-mouth alone.

How much of it not being easy is due to other people's ads though?

Soon I'll be able to have high quality sound embedded in my business card. And when I open a magazine while killing time in the line at my favorite box grocery store, I'll get musical ads. And maybe my driver's license can talk to the cop and tell him I'm a good guy. And maybe I could make some paper dolls and integrate them with Alexa and have conversations with them.

I want smart toilet paper. For example, it could tell me if the scout wipe came back clean without me even needing to take a look.

I got a birthday card, probably in 1983 or so, that opened and made music (it had a battery, speaker, amplifier, and memory chip, all stuffed inside a piece of paper). A bit bulky, but I can't see w hy that tech couldn't be improved in the past 37 years.

I seem to remember reading about paper thin Ambisonic speakers since I was a kid in the 80s reading Stereo Review. It looks like this sort of thing is finally coming to fruition. I am assuming that you would need to augment these with a traditional subwoofer since you cant move much air with paper thin diaphragms.

Yes, those were first made in the 1980s. They showed up in a book called "The Best of Japan" (1987), a picture book of 1980s Japanese technology.

Probably coming soon to musical Xmas cards.

Now if the e-paper display people ever get their act together and get the price down, this could have more potential.

Needing a subwoofer would make this technology useful for home cinemas where the deep bass can acceptably be issued from a single subwoofer. However, for music in surround-sound mixes, it would be less ideal because those music mixes often assume a full bass range is available from each of the five positions in a 5.0 setup.

There's no directionality below around 200Hz, because the wavelength is around 1.7m, which is slightly wider than the space between the average pair of ears. (Unless you're a whale.)

It doesn't matter if you mix in n.0 for any value of n>1 - all you get from multiple subwoofers is phase cancellation at room nodes, not location information.

There must be some reason, then, that classical music labels producing surround-sound SACDs recommend full-size speakers at all 5.0 positions, and call a subwoofer a compromise for those unable to have full-size surround speakers.

It’s because most ‘subwoofers’ are glorified fart boxes that have terrible harmonics, coupled with the fact that placing a subwoofer in the wrong spot can create poor room frequency response. Two subwoofers is preferred. Four subwoofers is the sweet spot. Any more and you get diminishing returns. Full-range speakers can work for a lot of music because most music has hardly any information below 40 Hz, the point where many ‘full-range’ speakers become inaudible.

For content with significant sub–80 Hz content (i.e. movies, organ music, and Drum & Bass), subwoofers are more economical and arguably better for several reasons. One, bookshelfs+1 or 2 subwoofers is cheaper than all five full-range. Two, the subwoofers will offload power from the amp. Low frequencies have a tremendous amount of power in typical sounds. Three, the subwoofers can be placed anywhere so long as the cutoff frequency is set to 80 Hz or less. Above 80 Hz, the consensus is that the sound becomes locatable. The arbitrary placement of subwoofers is important because it allows you to place the subwoofer in a place which will excite room modes or attenuate room modes such that a more desirable room response is achieved. These positions are usually not where you would want to place speakers.

This reminded me of Magic Alex who conned The Beatles into a job as the electronics director at Apple (music not computers) in the early 1970s. Some of his claimed inventions were:

“telephone that responded to its owner's voice and could identify who was calling,[10] a force field that would surround the Beatles' homes, an X-ray camera, paint that would make anything invisible, car paint that would change colour by flicking a switch, and WALLPAPER SPEAKERS,[11] which would actually be a part of the wallpaper.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex

Intriguing, it sounds like this uses the piezoelectric effect, but could you DIY a surround sound electrostatic speaker using the same kind of form factor?

Well, not electrostatic, as that requires static charge, stators, and rather high voltages (10s of kv) which is unlikely to happen in a piece of paper.

The basic approach reminds me of the flat panel speakers that came out of QinetiQ I think in the early 2000s, that a large surface vibrating somewhat chaotically doesn't suffer from the directional phasing you see with pistonic movement of the surface. I'd definitely like to hear how this setup sounds.

I guess another interesting fact is that many traditional speaker cones are made from paper, it's amazing stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k Tech Ingredients did a fairly good video on Distributed Mode Loudspeakers.

And you know what would happen if man playing a lot with sound, right?[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBHIc6LwH6o

I think the real killer application of this would be as active sound cancelation for open-offices, also to remove driving noise from inside cars.

I wonder if a large array of these in a fence could work to remove noise pollution from a house, e.g. one near a freeway or airport?

So you can almost have quiet zones and sound zones in same open space.

Perhaps there could be dilineation zones using white noise generators to separate two discrete parts of a social space.

It'd be like rolling a radio dial, except your feet are the dial

Speaker advancements have lowered my quality of life. Unfortunately, I live in one of those neighborhoods where people walk around with those little speakers blasting at full.

This is not relevant to what is being discussed. Also if anything that is due to battery advancements.

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