I remember reading an article about 10 years ago about the hi-fi stereo equipment market. We’re talking about people who spend upwards of 100,000 dollars on buying and installing esoteric electronics and cables.
I seem to remember the article spoke about a set of speakers which would be suspended mid-air using who-knows-what (magnetic induction?), appearing to be levitating. I guess the idea was that there would be no distortion from the enclosure (don’t speakers need an enclosure anyways?).
Did I really read this or does this sound like bullsh*?
Possibly it was an electrostatic speaker, which can be very thin and lightweight, and doesn’t normally have an enclosure (technically a more traditional speaker doesn’t need an enclosure to work either). Don’t know how they would levitate it; maybe using magic crystals.
Right. These days, if you’re not into absurd, completely over the top cloudcukooery, you don’t really have any right to call yourself a high-end audiophile.
Might also have been an ionic or plasma driver. Google up “singing arc” and you’ll find some YouTube clips of people reproducing music in high-voltage arcs.
The technology certainly works - it was first noticed about 100 years ago in a carbon-arc lamp - but it’s dangerous on several levels. The obvious one is that you can get a heck of a shock from it. The other is that it produces a lot of ozone. As a result, nobody’s making any serious attempts to market it.
Might you be thinking of “hypersonic” speakers that use acoustic heterodyning? I don’t know if anything ever came of it, but there was a lot of talk about them in the late 90s. Here’s one article from 1997:
