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RE: Advice from Magnepan

Posted by josh358 (P) on February 14, 2012 at 06:57:47

In Reply to: RE: Advice from Magnepan posted by pictureguy on February 13, 2012 at 23:09:33:

Sure, you can make a phased array with audio, and it's sometimes done, particularly in sound reinforcement applications. A famous example, though it uses analog components and isn't steerable, is the Quad ESL-63, which uses a phased annual ring array to create a spherical wavefront from a planar diaphragm.

One practical difficulty in using a phased array in audio is that the frequency range is so wide that wavelengths range from about half an inch to about fifty feet. To achieve good directionality, a phased array has to be wider than the wavelength that's being steered. So it's easier to steer the highs than the lows.

Another practical difficulty is expense -- to avoid spatial aliasing, you need drivers that are small compared to the shortest wavelength, and even if you use a binary weighting scheme for the size of the drivers you end up with a lot of drivers and channels of amplification, lots of processing power, many DAC's, etc.

There's also the difficulty of getting a given driver to cover a wide enough frequency range.

Both of these factors have made the approach more popular in sound reinforcement than at home.

Even more interesting than phased arrays or arrays with fixed weightings is wave field synthesis, which has the potential to completely recreate a three-dimensional soundfield. Wave field synthesis is already being employed in some soundbars and commercial/experimental installations, but the power of current systems are limited by cost, e.g., the arrays are one rather than two dimensional and of limited size and resolution. A two-dimensional WFS array that covered the front wall might require 1000 or so channels and drivers. It seems to me that planar technology would be ideally suited to such an approach, since the drivers could be printed on a few large membranes. But you'd still need 1000 channels of conversion and low power amplification as well as the processing power to drive them, so it's something that's going to have to be done in LSI by the large consumer electronics companies if it's to become economical for the home. I think we'll move their incrementally, with one-dimensional arrays first, maybe a few to give a coarse approximation of height.

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