Back to the Ion age

摘要

One of the most enduring Utopian concepts in high-quality sound reproduction is that of the diaphragm-less loudspeaker, particularly the diaphragm-less tweeter. Diaphragms have mass and thus inertia, and are never perfectly rigid and so prone to structural resonances, even if these occur above the audible frequency range. As a consequence, drive units with diaphragms never exactly reproduce transient waveforms such as a toneburst - historically perhaps the favourite test signal for demonstrating this shortfall. A diaphragm-less driver, by contrast, suggests freedom from both inertia and resonance, and hence an uncompromised ability to reproduce tonebursts [see Fig 1] or any other 'difficult' signal we may devise -especially transient-rich music.