June 17, 2006

You may have noticed that we are heading for an increasingly compact world. Smaller homes, smaller cars and, of course, smaller electronics. For personal audio, bantamweight’s the thing, while vision, too, is now flatter, lighter; freeing up more room in our increasingly cramped homes. But there is one glaring exception — the monolithic speakers that clog the living rooms of hi-fi fans.

While Bose makes small speakers (but large subwoofers to go with them), you should hear the rude things that some hi-fi fans with sensitive ears say about them. The British company NXT, which some years ago developed flat-speaker technology (which it has since licensed to scores of companies worldwide), has not seen it adopted by the hi-fi set either. A newer version, called the Balanced Modal Radiator form, has, however, begun to win some attention.

For a decent sound, audiophiles argue, you need big macho, expensive speakers — up to five of them, according to the prevailing wisdom. But all that may be about to change.

Apart from a few upstart usurpers battling to invade with digital versions, speaker technology remains remarkably unchanged since its inception just over 100 years ago. And, like the internal combustion engine, it is an old technology that relies on refinement to increase performance. The results of the latest changes to its design — slimmer, digitised and some going hypersonic — are decidedly unproven, say hi-fi gurus, many of whom still cling to their home-made behemoths; a last stand against the feminisation and miniaturisation of our gadgets. But others see that it is time for something new, something more handy.

“The basic loudspeaker design has remained constant for almost 70 years. A fundamentally new approach is long overdue,” says Dr Tony Hooley in Cambridge, the inventor of a new digitally driven speaker system.

He is right. Loudspeakers are a cumbersome technology — basically a coil of wire in a magnetic gap connected to a cone of stiff paper in two large boxes. Surely it cannot remain the favourite of the high-end users, the music lover, or sound-sensitive for much longer. Everything else is going digital; why not the paper cone too? “Conventional loudspeakers are by far the weakest link in the chain between recording live sound and sound reproduction. Analogue loudspeakers are inefficient, expensive, fragile and require costly amplification systems,” says Hooley.

Audiophiles are spending money — up to £20,000 in some cases — on ways to reduce the inherent distortion found in conventional speakers. Hooley’s idea is to replace these large analogue speakers and their hefty transducers (the magnets at the back of the cones) altogether, thereby eliminating the worst of their problems.

Hooley’s system uses an array of small transducers, each driven by a separate and unique digital data stream. The 23 tiny speakers handle all sound processing, too, so no amplifier is needed. What’s more, Hooley claims that only one speaker is needed to create perfectly sublime surround sound.

So far, Yamaha and Dolby are convinced and have signed up for this new British technology. Already in production is Yamaha’s £600 Home theatre system, the YSP-800, which uses Hooley’s technology and has impressed the press.

Not just Yamaha, but other Japanese audio makers seem keen on this type of one-speaker system. Tokyo-based hi-fi expert Mitsuhito Miura has come up with a convincing full-bodied surround sound out of one bazooka-like tabletop speaker. Available this September from M Systems , the “Miura” speaker also looks great.

True, it is a bit of a cheat: you will find conventional loudspeakers concealed at each end of the tube. But the tube’s acoustics produce the same hi-fi experience that big stereo speakers do without demanding you find the “sweet spot” — the place in a room where the signals from each speaker reach you simultaneously.

As Hooley points out, that is another problem with conventional hi-fi: the need for a sweet spot is an error in itself. With two speakers, if you stand somewhere else in the room, the sound waves from the speakers will be out of phase, destroying the stereo signal that the studio engineer has worked to create.

With both the new British and Japanese technologies, the sound produced anywhere in the room is “sweet” — there is none of the phase interference. At around £1,000 each, you will not save much money buying just one Miura or YSP-800 speaker. But the emergence of such speakers shows the mould is finally being broken, says Steve Harris, chairman of the British Federation of Audio, an industry grouping of speaker makers.

Harris points to a new product from NXT called the Balanced Modal Radiator (BMR) — a speaker, not a central heating element — which has begun to win the approval even of audiophiles, who have previously been sniffy about the range offered by NXT. “My first impressions, and that’s all I’ve had so far, would indicate that it’s very promising,” he says.

As with previous NXT products, the BMR system can be disguised as a framed painting, or even incorporated into a car’s inside door panel. The NXT system works like a piano soundboard: though the material is stiff, it amplifies sound fed into it. In the NXT model, that is achieved by a tiny transducer attached to the back. NEC, Fujitsu, and Toyota have already signed up to use it. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service

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