This was an attempt to investigate the high-fidelity possibilities of a radically new and different transducer technology.

NXT is a fairly young but rather large company based in Huntingdon, England. They are responsible for the development of the Distributed Mode Loudspeaker (DML), which is a flat-panel transducer that can assume innumerable different shapes and forms, both opaque and transparent, and is not based on the piston concept but on bending-wave physics. A DML panel vibrates in a large number of modes instead of moving back and forth as a rigid piston-like unit. I have never seen a formal mathematical analysis of the basic design, but there are literally hundreds of products out there, large and small, using the NXT patents, from “talking” TV screens to cheap little surround-sound satellites. Everything except high-end audio—and I wondered why. (Actually, I witnessed a CES demo of a high-endish prototype a few years ago, but it never flew.) (more…)