"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
om...
Hi, many years ago I remember being impressed by some speakers that looked
a bit like footballs. The ones I saw were made by Toshiba as I recall, but
were out of my price range. They had literally speakers mounted in a multi
sided solid a bit like a dodecahedron, and covered up with some kind of
foam. You could hang them from the ceiling or on a stand. Very heavy for
their size. The mounting was die cast.
With a bass bin they actually sounded very nice.
You do not see this sort of thing any more,, so I'd imagine they had a
strange impedance. It was interesting as they seemed to not have any
tweeters or anything and one would have thought the reflected sound would
have mucked up the stereo, but at least in the couple of demos I attended
this was not true.

Another strange speaker I recall from long ago was just a gimmick I think,
as it had a definite smell and a crackling kind of sound. It was a plasma
modulated with audio. Weird. Completely impractical of course.
As I'm talking about silly gimmicks, I used to have one of those VW
minibus record players. You stood it on the lp and it played it as it
followed the groove. Very bad audio and it could not get more than about a
third of the way to the middle before it got confused.
Talk about wow and flutter...

Brian

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Lorentz developed for German Radio an omni-directional loudspeaker that was
triangular in plan, with a woofer on each wall, and surmounted by a ball
with a number of tweeters (16 I think) so that it provided close to
omni-directional coverage. In the days before stereo, it was supposed to be
excellent.

As to the plasma driver, this was no gimmick. Fane made a product called
the Ionofane, which was an excellent tweeter with a full 2.5k - 30kHz
bandwidth, tiny amounts of distortion, and a good output level. It worked by
modulating a 27MHz plasma, and coupling this to a horn. Unfortunately, it
released a fair amount of ozone, but audio-wise it was superb albeit at a
very high price. It was over £29 in 1970 when a conventional tweeter, like
the KEF T27, was £5.

S.
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