Planar Speaker Asylum

RE: here is a Wendell Diller follow-up on hot-rodding Ferdinand Posche's "VW", REALLY

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In Reply to: RE: here is a Wendell Diller follow-up on hot-rodding Ferdinand Posche's "VW", REALLY posted by JLindborg on June 25, 2011 at 02:01:52

The resistance per inch changes as you say. But by using smaller driver sections in parallel, the resistance seen by the amp can be lowered.
Say a full panel with original wires is 4 Ohms. If we replaced the wire with foil that had 1/4th the mass and 4X the resistance per inch, then the full panel would be 16 Ohms.
We "could" do it that way and if we had an amp that could drive 16 Ohms with 4X the original power it would give us the same current in each part of the conductor as we had with the original wires at 1X power, except now the foil only has 1/4th as much mass.
BUT, if we divide the foil into two parts, and do the left half of the panel as if it's a separate driver, and do the right half the same way, then each one of those is only 8 Ohms, because each is only half the length of the 16-Ohm full panel. (We could also run them next to each other, interleaved in alternating columns, instead of as left and right halves on the membrane. But it doesn't seem like it would make any difference in the sound.)
Then we just connect them in parallel and the amp will see 4 Ohms, just like the original wire.
We'd still need 4X the power, I think, to get the same current as when we used 1X power with the wire. But the foil's mass is now only 1/4th of the wire's mass per inch.
Zoom Zoom!
Cheers,
Tom

Edits: 06/25/11

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