Kenwood lights up your life with prototype OLED-illumed speakers
By Paul Miller 
posted Apr 27th 2009 4:19PM
posted Apr 27th 2009 4:19PM
[Via OLED-Info]
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and how much of Franklin's would someone have to break to get some fanciness in one's livingroom?
Apparently
3 yen
Hmmmm, just what I want, more ambient light in my home theatre system causing glare and all sorts of other nastiness...
This seems like a step backward? Give me speakers that suck light out of my room and blast it out as mind melting soundwaves
I like the idea as I live in a human sized dwelling and could benefit from the space savings. Those are sort of ugly though.
It's the first step in integrating speakers into laptop monitors.
i really just cant wait to get some flat speakers myself :) hope they dont turn out to be too exepncive when they come out... how much can a flat piece of what looks like aluminum can cost compared to the complex speaker systems we have lived with for 100 years?
a macbook looks like a flat piece of aluminum, and look how much they cost...
andres: a Macbook IS a flat piece of aluminium.
I thought half the battle with designing a good speaker was the enclosure, which I understand is why most of these flat speakers lack depth, and acoustically I don't see them matching your average bookshelves anytime soon. Hell i'd have some small bose cube speakers above flat panels, and I am one of the most vocal haters of bose.
bdav: you're right, cone based speakers do require rigid enclosures with minimal reverb to prevent the sound reflected from the inside of the cone and magnet structure from interfering with the sound produced from the front of the cone. Flat panel speakers (NXT, planar/ribbon, electrostatics) don't have magnets on the backside of the cone, so the lack of enclosure actually allows the inverse wave to radiate cleanly from the back of the speaker, which helps the spatialization and imaging. I have $1500 B&W speakers in my living room and old Monsoon MM-1000 planars in my bedroom, and in the highs, at least, the Monsoons can generally keep up with the much more expensive B&Ws.
I agree with you in that they can pack punch with the highs, but its always seemed to me that if you're going to go discrete, may as well go the whole hog with in-wall or celling and keep some of the lows.
because most flat panels are bipolar, they can't actually be placed discreetly - flat panels of an adequate size to be of moderate range (think Magnepan and Martin Logan) require at least 2-3ft behind them to prevent reflections from the wall.
in-walls/in-ceiling speakers are never properly placed for correct imaging, but i guess if discreet is the goal, imaging isn't necessarily an important goal.
I have to say I didn't know that - now I do thanks! Whenever I have seen them set up they have been placed against / close to walls - I guess (much as I did), people assume they are intended to be discrete - nobody I know seems to take much care in hifi setup, its slightly disappointing when you see people with decent kit not being used to its potential!
This actually could be excellent if they were electrostatic speakers; the accuracy is well above that of traditional woofer systems.
If they could figure out an OLED panel that was also an electrostatic speaker?!
It could be literal surround sound. A wall that literally could create sound anywhere on it.
That'd be something else.
Nah, these look like they're just a surface, which means they're probably just NXT based - remember the flat computer speakers Benwin sold about a decade ago? That technology. Probably nothing to get excited about aurally.