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Gee Vlad, what does it take to please you!? This sounds just like an unnecessary kick in the shins aimed at AKP using more technobabble than illumination. Are you hoping to buy cheaper again?I have to concur with BobLoblaw.
Sound is a progression of waves of compression/rarefaction of the medium through which the sound travels: in this case air. The air moves effectively towards and away from the hearer coming from an oscillating source. The faster the oscillation the shorter the wavelength and the higher the frequency. A loudspeaker has a membrane that moves in and out towards the hearer. The membrane moves the air as it itself moves. Low frequency sounds (base) mean long slow movements of the membrane - and this is not possible with small speakers. Thats why they sound tinny. DSR works differently from this kind of membrane based device. The DSR process reconstructs human-audible sound from individual actuations of the MEMS pistons operating at ultrasonic "clock-tick" speeds. The production of human-audible sound is a product of the coordinated choreography of the pixels at different times to combine these pulses of ultrasonic sound so that they "add up" to shape a sound wavefront that emerges from the MEMS device surface. The pixels actuations essentially move like an expanding Mexican wave across the surface of the MEMS. This reconstructed wavefront creates the same sounds as a membrane speaker and this is the sound we hear.
You don't comprehensively assess a sound system initially by playing a piece of movement. If AP can generate sine waves at a whole spectral range of frequencies that is of course what they will use to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the device's performance over its whole usable range. The new MEMS delivers both high frequencies and low frequencies, and massively out performs any other speaker of comparable size! Given that it can be ganged to deliver the equivalent of everything from a tweeter to a sub woofer it is effectively a universal speaker system. This is fantastic news!
The fact that a regular speaker can deliver music, which is made up from many simultaneous frequencies of sound, all from movements of a single membrane has always intrigued me. The fact that I find it difficult to mentally picture how this happens does not stop a speaker from playing music. Nor will it stop a MEMS DSR device from doing the same thing. If the MEMS can play pure tones then it can play complex sounds such as music.
The company's announcements make it clear that their algorithms work fine and can already play complex sounds using a more complex driving requirement. Adjusting them to work with a simpler device is not being described as difficult. To paraphrase what the announcement says I think it would be fair to assume they are saying something like: "this is not hard for us now that we know what we are doing and we have a physical device that will actually do what we need it to do."
"... The third major breakthrough pertains to the advancement in reproducing sound. Resolving operational stability of the devices enabled the company to take detailed acoustic measurements and make great strides furthering the playing capabilities of our devices. The primary activity involves adjustment of the driving schemes and development of new functional algorithms to take advantage of the physical realities of the simplified structures. The new algorithms were first designed to play sine-waves (at any desired frequency). As every acoustic professional will attest, production of sine waves cements the fundamental building blocks for playing any sound.
Early testing indicates unrivalled acoustic output – the devices have been tested to reproduce frequencies below 100Hz (by comparison the very best similar sized analog speakers have a lower limit of roughly 800Hz or 3 octaves above ours).
While development is not yet complete, we believe these breakthroughs indicate significant progress the company has made toward delivering our breakthrough technology to the market. ..."