Reinventing speakers: replacing 100 year old tech with MEMS chips

I have to disagree that the coil and magnet speaker is has been the only source of sound. Since I was born. In 1965. I have been listening to an electro static speaker that my father bought it runs on capacitance. There is no coil, no magnet.

The 100-year-old speaker design you've described is a dynamic driver, which has gone through more than iterative upgrades in a century. You're not describing planar drivers, using embedded magnets or electrostatic and balanced armature designs. This guy is talking about cutting-edge sound tech while rocking Apple AirPods. Let's see him produce something so can listen, measure and test these hyperbolic claims. In audio, talk is cheap. I'm sure these unreleased drivers are faster than your AirPods but how much faster are they than a STAX electrostatic headphone? How much faster are they than a HiFiMan Susvara? When you know, feel free to share. I'm not hearing any technical information. It's all sales talk. I love how this guy talks about a phase shift in a 500Hz to 2kHz region, which is not exactly surgical precision. That's a huge frequency sweep. It's like footage of Rumsfeld telling us he knows where the WMDs are. "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." For every headphone that has been tested, I can tell you where the problems lie. The Sennheiser HD800 would blow your AirPods out of the water and yet it had a 6kHz spike that forced Sennheiser to upgrade to the HD800S. Nobody said the headphone had issues from 500Hz to 2kHz. That would have been the most undefined conversation ever, the sound equivalent of abstract art.

Einstein said it best, if you can't explain it simply, you don't know it well enough.

It's not a question of whether it can upend the audio driver paradigm, but more a question of how far it can go in replacing the current drivers across the whole spectrum of use cases. Even just replacing in + on ear headphone drivers and those used for smartphones/tablets would be a huge market for MEMS, but replacing the drivers used for home cinema would be a big step beyond that, and another step again to replace larger event systems such as used in commercial cinema screens and stadiums. The rise of MEMS speakers could be best contrasted not to flat screen displays, but actually to the metalens - a new paradigm in optics which is on the cusp of replacing technology older still by centuries than the foundation of modern speaker technology. The next 10-20 years are going to bring about huge changes for these markets if their promise can be fully delivered on.

Wheels are 5000 year old technology, but we still use it on all our cars, bikes, skateboards... To get good bass in a room, you need to move a big volume of air. How do you do it with a small chip? Semiconductor technology does not scale that way. It scales down very well (more transistors on the same size chip), but scales up very badly. The price increases at least with the square of the chip size (yields...). I never had a problem with amplitude balance or phasing in a headphone, that's nonsense. The chip will survive a washing cycle? A microprocessor, quite probably. But a MEMS chip, open to the air? Would like to see that!

I've first heard of MEMs speaker tech whne trying out the Creative Labs Aurvana Ace 2, which uses a full-range MEMs speaker + Dynamic driver subwoofer. Is sounds amazing, the clarity, detail, separation is one of the best I've heard and with no distortions of any sort. The CreativeLabs sales person said that the MEMs speaker can't move enough air for deeper bass regions, thus the subwoofer. I'm really excited for MEMs speaker tech to spread but I'm sure bass regions will be an issue for a bit. Unfortunately, the guy in the video did not explain their plan to to tackle this issue well. He kept using the same confusing words without actually simplifying and explaining the concept :(

Fascinating

What about BA drivers?

Very interesting. Been looking forward to those for years since first hearing about them. How loud can they get compared to regular speakers/earphones?

I have the Aventura ace 2 ....ive heard nothing close to them...for 150 US dollars absolute steal