These speakers seem to work like this:<p>There is a rubber layer, coated with conducting material to serve as electrodes. The signal is applied in form of a high voltage which makes the electrodes attract each other and contract the rubber in between perpendicular to the surface (i.e. the rubber layer gets thinner). Since the rubber material is relatively incompressible though (volume of the material doesn't change), the surface area of the membrane has to increase in return. To generate sound from that, the membrane is stretched over a cavity that is under higher than ambient pressure which helps expand the 'balloon' when its surface area increases. This displaces surrounding air which means the contraption is emitting soundwaves.<p>(I could only find a thumbnail of the first page of a paper from that professor and extracted this from it)<p><a href="https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=21108" rel="nofollow">https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=21108</a>
> Current loudspeakers use a magnet coupled with the movement of a copper coil to vibrate a membrane.
In the future these heavy, bulky, and expensive components could be replaced by a dielectric elastomer membrane.<p>They mention efficiency, but not power. I don't like how this is framed as the general future of all speakers when it's really just the future of midrange drivers.
I find it a bit strange that this article doesn’t mention electrostatic speakers, as the two appear similar.<p>It would also be worth mentioning if this new tech suffers from the same limitation as electrostatics, namely that the membrane’s range of motion is so small that you need several square meters of membrane to reproduce low frequencies at high volume.
My screen readers reads that site in a verry strange way. It says that there is soft hyfens in a lot of the words so it reads the words like reproduce as"repro duce"
The article mentions the fragility, but seems extremely optimistic on the ability to solve this, but I'm not sure way. It just says "once this is overcome" but the things it seems to be talking about are major barriers to a commercial product.
It was just the other day I was thinking how big, comparatively speaking the speaker components are in MacBook and iPhone. And if we could somehow make it even smaller without any compromise on quality and longevity.
If you want an affordable, good sounding speaker that you can build yourself, you might wanna take a look at Tech Ingredients:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k</a>