The great concert
halls built in the eighteenth century used water-based models to determine ideal
patterns for sound travel. Sound tends to travel like water waves and the Point
Source Planar Speaker was conceived and developed with this idea. Imagine a
stone thrown into the center of a still pond. The waves start in the middle,
getting larger as they travel outward. This is the principle of the speakers
originally developed by Highwood Audio and refined by Museatex. As you can imagine,
the speaker gurus were skeptical and maintained that this "ideal"
principle would never work in practice. Perseverance paid off. After three years
of intensive research, the first commercially viable point source speaker was
produced.
A specially
designed voice coil is attached to the acoustic center of a mylar diaphragm
which has been stretched across a frame. By stimulating the voice coil with
music signals, the diaphragm vibrates and starts a ripple which expands as it
moves toward the periphery. The audio signal drives only the point in the diaphragm
where the drive is attached to the mylar. The rest of the diaphragm is not driven,
but flows on naturally from the wave pattern created at the central section.
Because of the
natural time delay involved in spreading the energy across the diaphragm, the
wave front, traveling through the air away form the speaker, gets a head-start
at the center of the diaphragm and lags toward the edges. This produces a near
perfect time alignment between all frequencies. Sounds simple? It is, although
the actual implementation required careful research into damping, motor and
voice coil design, acoustical shape for the mylar surface, etc.
The Point Source Planar Speaker is revolutionary and protected by patents worldwide.
Unlike electrostatic speakers, there are no transformers or other signal polluting
devices in the signal path. Unlike magnetic, ribbon or conventional box speakers,
they have no crossovers.
The absence of crossovers ensures that the music signal is reproduced in its purest form without any filtering or electronic hash. The Point Source Principle achieves unprecedented soundstaging and depth with the most accurate rendition of the music signals possible, so far.