Serge Auckland wrote:
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.

Cool-ish. I just about remember these on some programme like
"Tomorrow's World" when I was very young.

I wouldn't want one (or two) in my living room, though; ozone
smells *horrible*. I remember when I was a teenager, my mate and
I would salvage transformers from old valve 'scopes, and wire them
in reverse, putting 10V or more into a 6.3V winding, and making
fat, furry, orange noisy sparks at the EHT outputs, and then stretching
the sparks. Fun, but it *mang*. So do some laser printers.


Martin