"new" speaker idea

Jon Slaughter · 2006-11-16T18:49:30+00:00

I have an idea for creating a new "omni-directional" speaker and was wondering what you guys think and how practical it is. (in theory it works).The a simple implementation might be: Take a balloon and a metal sphere along with a insulated rigid wire. Attach the wire to the metal sphere and put the sphere inside the balloon through its opening. Coat the balloon with a conductive paint and attach an electrode to it. Put a charged gass with an inert gas into the balloon and seal it with the insulated wire comming out the opening of the balloon. Attach the two wires to to an amplifier and play some music. The balloon should contract and expand to the sound.How it works: The balloon holds the charged particles and seperates them from the outside world while providing a diaphram that can move. The metal sphere and conductive coating provide a method of applying an electric field to the charged particles. When the field is pointing away from the metal sphere there is a net force on the balloon's surface that will cause it to expand by all the impluses of the charged particles and when the field is directed inwards then they will cause the balloon to contract(due to the elasticity of the balloon's surface).Now there are technical issues involved that I'm not sure of but it seems like it could work.One could also use a parallel plate like device where the plates are movable but enclose a charged gass(or possibly a liquid but I think this is impractical).The main issue seems to be the charged gas. The gas has to be dense enough to supply a strong enough pressure to the balloons surface to cause it to expand. The balloons elasticity also as to be taken into account. I'm just not sure if its possible get a gas that isn't to "heavy" yet still will have enough momentum generated by the electric field to increase the internal pressure on the balloon.I thought about trying to implement this but I wouldn't know where to get the charged gas and it might require a lot of fiddling...

Nov 16, 2006 44 Replies

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jasen 19 years ago

increase the mass of the diaphram and you lose responsiveness in the loudspeaker. use an ineslastic coating and everything stops working.

Bye. Jasen

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Robert Baer 19 years ago

Well...a DC bias can be used to *repel*, and might be useful to center the ballon around the sphere. Also, that bias will have the imposed AC audio signal to vary that force for moving the ballon surface in and out to generate sound like any planar electrostatic speaker does. So...the basic concept appears to have merit - the devil is in the details for possible practicality.

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MK 19 years ago

Hello All,

There is such a lot of noise in this thread that I may be repeating something already mentioned - if so then I'm sorry for wasting even more bandwidth.

The OP could learn a good deal about how to really do it by checking out

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and following up descriptions, patents and links from there. He might also speculate why none of the prior art (of which there is a lot) has gone down the balloon path. It's an obvious way to make an electrostatic speaker but not really practical (IMO). I can't see any advantage in the attempt to combine electrostatic and ionised gas principles.

Michael Kellett

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax 19 years ago

Depends what you mean by 'works'. Ionised air streaming from a charged needle is not hot.

Dirk http://www.onetribe.me.uk - The UK\'s only occult talk show Presented by Dirk Bruere and Marc Power on ResonanceFM 104.4 http://www.resonancefm.com

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Iwo Mergler 19 years ago

I'd say yes. Also smell. :-)

Is that from past experience or this particular post? He seems a bit sensitive, but otherwise serious.

Iwo

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