A reduction in the number of pixels will affect power and dispersion. At a single chip level the main effect I would be concerned with would be acoustic lobbing resulting from super-positioning effects where the pixels aren't actuating when they should. A multi-chip application will suffer more as this would have a compounding effect.
Depending on the ASIC capabilities there may be detection to identify which pixels have failed and adjust the radiation pattern that the chip would need produce to maintain some performance. This is not unreasonable and could be implemented.
I guess if the chips have a consistent % and specific area where the pixels fail, this should be able to be fixed with the fabrication process improvements; if however the dead pixels are random and it then becomes a "sorting" process of worst to best with categories of good, very good and excellent, then perhaps AP may target different applications depending on grade of the chip. Scenario two would be quite unfortunate, and I would question the durability test that surpassed 1 trillion cycles - AP would need to validate the reliability is the same after so many process improvements over the years. That is why I am certain that any specifications that are released will have further caveats.
Once again we have now gone from "third week of May specifications" to AP is now doing "real world test" sometime in the near future. IMO the real world test is potentially a repeat of the durability test playing single simple tones or music pieces at various levels over a set period, measuring the performance over time and inspecting the product at the end to see how many (if any) pixels/chips have failed. That's a real world test, not a "listening test" with a glass of cognac/beer/wine/spirit/fanta and enjoying the fruits of their labor - although I wish that's where we all should be at this point.
AKP Price at posting:
$17.25 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
