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Re: From Wayne Parham - Re: Patentable claim

Hi John!

I don't mean to be offensive to Tom or to Mark. But I'll admit to being a bit "testy" and I've described my reasons in the post on my forum on this subject. You can read it there, if you're interested.

But there are a couple things that I think merit discussion, over and above this prejudice. The first is exactly as stated - I'm wondering what is or was considered patentable. And the second relates to the first, which is that is I believe the device has technical problems that aren't insurmountable, but that prevent it from being that which it is claimed to be. I do not believe that each of its subsystems are "time aligned" and act as if they were a single sound source. Their own measurements of the device prove my case.

A patentable claim is something that is new and unique. So what was unique here? The shape? It's a conical horn. Conical horns have been sold far earlier than this invention, in fact, they may be simple enough to be considered to be a "law of nature" or "physical phenomena." Regardless, the conical horn has been sold in America longer than a year before the patent application was made; It is probably the oldest acoustic device. This should prevent the conical horn from being accepted as a patentable claim.

Or how about the staggering of driver positions? There is prior work on baffle spacing to align drivers in this way; Said work has been sold in America far earlier than a year before the patent was applied. So simply staggering the drivers shouldn't get it. Compensation of phase and time domain anomalies has always been the claim of those who staggered spacing of the drivers, and the crossover is always mentioned in their work. So the claim of time alignment by spacing to "compensate" for the crossover shouldn't be patentable.

Further, there is question as to whether of not this simple arrangement can be made to work. I submit to you that it cannot, and there is no way to correct a loudspeaker system in the time domain. There are several reasons why, and they all can be reduced to the simple fact that a loudspeaker is not a point source - even a single driver but certainly not a driver array. But whether you agree with this argument or not, the measured results of the Unity horn showed that it did not act as a "single unified source" as the patent claimed. It had a frequency anomaly that was evidence of a time shift between adjacent driver subsystems in the overlap region. On this basis, the invention does not pass the "usefulness test" and should not be allowed. That means this claim is invalid too.

That's why I asked what claims were considered to be patentable. I wondered outloud, what was there that could be patented? The premise of this device is that it does not exhibit frequency anomalies caused by events in the time domain. But its configuration makes it inevitable and measurements confirm this to be the case.

Again, I'm sure the Unity device performs reasonably well and Danley and company are nice guys. But I just don't find the Unity to be an "evolution," that's all.

Wayne Parham

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