Humankind has endured 100 years of audio distortion

The human ear is an extraordinarily sophisticated measurement device. Tap a wine glass, plastic ruler, ceramic mug, or jingle some coins and even blindfolded, you can most likely distinguish what is the object and/or material from the sound.

In the same way, a loudspeaker expert will be able to distinguish between types of audio speakers; paper cone or plastic, metal dome tweeter, silk dome, electrostatic, all of which generate unwanted vibrations (resonance distortion) that shroud and muddy music – even in expensive audio systems.

We everyday people can’t necessarily distinguish the sound of the different speaker types, although we might have a suspicion that their audio reproduction is boring, lifeless, and unclean. Tragically though, most of us have never experienced anything better by which to compare. We just don’t know how good our favourite artists could sound if we were in the same room, live, with no membrane-type speakers in between.

Whether listening at home or at a concert venue, all that most of us have experienced is different flavours of resonance distortion emitted by various types of ‘floppy’ membrane speakers.

acousticWing®
shifting resonance distortion to ultrasonic frequencies

The acousticWing® is like no other. The ultra-rigid diaphragm looks and moves like a bird wing in flight. The driver base, too, is compact and ultra-rigid – the complete opposite of the conventional vibration-prone speaker designs that were invented a century ago.

In contrast to the examples above, this rigidity means that, if you were to tap the acousticWing®, all of the usual polluting resonance clues, that are part of the DNA of conventional drivers, ringing, vibrating, simply do not exist, and therefore play no part in distorting the original audio.

Whereas conventional speaker drivers exhibit resonance distortion modes (polluting vibrational energy) across almost the entire audible bandwidth, the rigid acousticWing® pushes all but a few barely detectable resonance modes into the ultrasonic frequency range (20Hz+), beyond the audible bandwidth, and even the few barely detectable modes occur towards the upper frequency limit of audibility.

Being the only speaker driver that is effectively rigid across the audible bandwidth, acousticWing® has no choice other than to accurately trace the input audio wave, regardless of the complexity or genre.

The result? Unmatched audio purity, staggering detail, fast and energetic reproduction with emotional depth beyond the reach of mere mortal speaker drivers. With the membrane-diaphragm barrier between artist and listener removed, you experience pure fidelity. It’s like hearing your music for the first time.

acousticWing®
advantages beyond pure-fidelity

No ‘floppy’ diaphragm surround

As conventional cone and dome drivers move linearly, their diaphragms require a ‘floppy’ rubber diaphragm surround and, in the case of most cone drivers, a floppy “spider” component to centre the motor coil. This leads to perhaps the primary compromise a designer has to make, which is between diaphragm excursion capability (needs wider area of rubber), low frequency bandwidth (requires softer rubber) and resonance distortion, since wider and softer rubber increases resonance distortion.

acousticWing® bypasses this design compromise through its rotational “wing” diaphragm action, which eliminates these floppy components. Advantages over conventional drivers include:

  • Increased low-frequency extension
  • Increased diaphragm excursion, particularly in headphone applications where volume excursion capability is phenomenal.
  • No floppy components compromising resonance performance

Integrated driver decoupling

acousticWing® has an integrated and highly effective driver decoupling system.

A resonance-free driver, especially, should not be rigidly attached to a larger resonance-prone enclosure, otherwise performance gains are undone.

Effective and robust driver decoupling can be implemented inexpensively due to acousticWing’s rotational diaphragm action, which gives rise to a node axis of the driver base.
This proprietary driver decoupling of a rotational diaphragm driver provides advantages including:

  • Exceptional resonance management not just from the driver but also from the enclosure.
  • Excellent audio reproduction even from suboptimal (resonance-prone) enclosures, such as inexpensive home, automotive and electric piano systems, since excitation is addressed at source.

Sound dispersion

In our “Zero” speakers, acousticWing’s wide operating bandwidth facilitates a low crossover frequency, in this case is 570Hz. Operating a relatively small diaphragm to such low frequencies substantially reduces aspects of sound beaming associated with transducer directionality. And off-axis cancellation that you usually see, resulting from phase cancellation between low and high frequency drivers, is eliminated, since a 570Hz low crossover frequency corresponds to a wavelength that is significantly larger than the separation between the two transducers.

Moving to very high frequencies, features of acousticWing that can be utilised to maximise sound dispersion include: The “wing” action leads to zero phase cancellation across all directions perpendicular to the axis of rotation, actually across all frequencies (assuming the diaphragm remains rigid) ; The narrower radiating zone of a “wing” action diaphragm facilitates unusually wide dispersion across the same directions (perpendicular to the axis of rotation ; The flatness and relatively compact dimensions of the diaphragm may also facilitate good sound dispersion, depending on the application.

Reviews and other critical reception to our Zero speakers particularly highlight exceptional “soundstaging” and “imaging” capabilities, and this may be due in part to excellent sound dispersion characteristics, however the primary reason is likely to be the low levels of resonance distortion inherent in the rigid acousticWing transducer system, which facilitates accurate reproduction of sometimes subtle spatial sound field information captured in the original recording venue.

Scalable:

acousticWing® scales easily, both smaller, such as for earphones, and also larger, as demonstrated by various earlier bass and bass-mid driver prototypes.

In the cases of larger drivers resonance distortion is shifted outside of the operating bandwidth.

There is an inherent and tantalising implication that, with future speakers based on multiple different sizes of acousticWing® drivers, there is potential for significant improvement in sound quality even over and above what is achieved by the Wing’s Zero speakers.