Plasma Speaker

[gdorf]

Yeah, I built this a few months ago. I thought some of you might enjoy seeing the result of a couple months of my hard work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xCKCxkhwB4

Its called a plasma speaker, and its basically speaker without any moving parts. All of the sound comes FROM the arc.

Enjoy. :)

[Beldaran]

20 Amps? Holy shit.

Nice. As someone who just recently dropped the Electrical Engineering major, I know how complicated that is.

[Chris Miller]

That is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

[Sam Atoms]

Holy Booyah!

[CaRmAgE]

That's pretty sweet.

[Pryme8]

I wonder if those can get really good audio quality?

[Anthus]

There is a concert hall that uses several of these, on a giant scale instead of speakers. This is pretty awesome. I'd be tempted to touch the arc.

[Modus Ponens]

Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's evil!

[Pryme8]

do they actually have the ability to do bass?

[Breaker]

very cool.

[gdorf]

Thanks everyone.

Beldaran: Its only 2-3amps. I'm bummed you aren't finishing up the EE degree. Last I heard you were a senior, right?

Everyone else: The sound quality is really nice. My digital camera doesn't do it justice.

This isn't a new invention, these were actually produced commercially in the fifties. These speakers can't produce much bass (not much below 200hz) but they sound VERY nice in the high frequencies. They never really took off because they aren't very efficient, safe, or loud enough to overpower physical speakers.

My next step will be mounting everything in a nice box, paired with a cone (for bass) and lowpass/highpass filters which I'm hoping will sound amazing. :)

[Pryme8]

so basically they are tweeters?

[Beldaran]

Beldaran: Its only 2-3amps. I'm bummed you aren't finishing up the EE degree. Last I heard you were a senior, right?

This was my first semester of my junior year, upper division courses. My grades were ok (3.2) but they suffered due to an increasingly tepid interest level. I was just feeling less and less like I wanted EE to be my actual job. I loved the math and analytical aspects, but actual lab work was outside my sphere of interest. Op-amps, ICs, EEPROMs, FPGAS, VHDL, Digital Logic... just not my favorite subjects.

[rock_nog]

so basically they are tweeters?
Actually yeah, I was so interested by this I did a little research, and plasma speakers are, in fact, used primarily as tweeters. Really, incredibly cool, I've gotta say.