CES 2008: Instant Speakers, Just Add Flat Surface (and NXT)

I attended an early morning meeting with NXT to learn about “flat speakers” and, frankly, I wasn’t expecting much but I was pleasantly shocked. These ain’t your grandpa’s planar speakers. NXT’s flat-speaker technology employs drivers (essentially a packaged speaker solenoid minus the speaker cone) that you attach to a flat surface. Any flat surface. You can make a speaker out of the front panel of an LCD monitor, as did Gateway, using a pair of stereo drivers and a woofer driver in its stunningly beautiful PC called the Gateway One. The clear sound seems to emanate from nowhere in particular.

You can attach a driver to the cardboard back of a greeting card and let Darth Vader provide the recipient with a Star Wars-style greeting. I’ve heard tinny piezo speakers in greeting cards before. The performance of the NXT-enhanced greeting card is in a whole ‘nother galaxy (far, far away).

The diversity in NXT’s list of products that incorporate its flat-speaker technology is actually kinda’ impressive, ranging from Toyota’s FJ Cruiser to Quicksilver backpacks with built-in speakers.

Considering all the care and enthusiasm that goes into speaker-cone materials technology, I’m stunned that you can get any reasonable sort of sound at all from common, everyday planar surfaces. Speaker cones act like acoustic pistons and I’ve seen them made from paper, plastic, birch bark, and Kevlar. NXT has a kit with several drivers that you merely stick to the back of some suitable surface and, voila, you’ve got a speaker.

Ah, but is it a good speaker? Well, there are two answers to that. The first answer is that all of NXT’s demo products from flat-panel TVs, to bookshelf speakers that look like hardback novels, to that Star Wars greeting card sounded pretty darn good to me. I wasn’t expecting much but the range of sound was truly impressive. The second answer is that these speakers hardly have a flat response curve. Depending on the driven surface, they may lack bass (hence the additional woofer driver in the Gateway One) and they’re likely to have a resonance peak or dip somewhere in the audio spectrum. So what? How many consumers pay attention to audio flatness curves when they buy flat-screen TVs, iPod docks, or speaker-augmented backpacks? None. If it sounds good, they buy it. Especially if it thumps good.

So if you’ve got an audio problem crying out for invisible speakers or speakers with crazy form factors, check out NXT.