Just for fun, the audiophile light amplifier

Ya, Thomas Edison did that circa 1880. ;-)

As he didn't have any LCD panels or photodiodes available he used a parabolic mirror and a selenium cell as the detector

Whoops! I meant Bell, not Edison!

On a sunny day (Sat, 27 May 2017 07:12:47 -0400) it happened bitrex wrote in :

Yea, I considered selenium, as in the old lightmeter I had, but it is so slow.

On a sunny day (Sat, 27 May 2017 07:13:23 -0400) it happened bitrex wrote in :

That is OK, Edison is blamed for many thing even for inventing the light bulb...

But the main thing here is that I think it will work. Bias the LC so the crystals are twisted halfway, and, if it was fast enough and had say a tuned ferrite antenna as input you could perhaps use half of the wave to open it and use it as rectifier / AM radio.

That reminds me of one of my favorite speculative tools for extracting optimal financial gain from the boutique audio community, the so-called "Electron-Bombarded Semiconductor":

Most people have never encountered one of these gadgets. It's essentially a power tube with DC-microwave bandwidth and very low output impedance, no plate transformer needed to drive a speaker.

One of the inventors on the '961 patent lives near me and still has some of the hardware in his basement. I keep hoping he'll be inspired to power it up one of these days so we can see how much warmth, imaging, presence, soundstage, and cash can be obtained from it.

-- john, KE5FX

On a sunny day (Sun, 28 May 2017 22:16:40 -0700 (PDT)) it happened "John Miles, KE5FX" wrote in :

Interesting, I had a similar idea where the electron beam was deflected by outside EM waves, as radio receiver.. Vidicons were so much fun to play with to study the effect of electron beam rotation (spiral) and magnetic influence.

My idea can be taken much further. I have a nice 100 W solar panel, add, in front of it (on the sun side), a large liquid crystal. Now you have very high impedance input voltage drive (like a MOSFET) and several amps at 18 V or so controlled output. Near infinite power gain (if there is sun). I am sure you can connect a woofer to it, no extern supply needed.

LC solar panel panel | [ ] / O ---------------- | - - - - [ ] - - - - - - - [] sunny sound sun | [ ] \ |