| Nixie |
| If you have a project you don't feel like DIYing yourself, I may do it. I'll offer a good price since I'm mainly in this for fun. I've experience with both tubes and solid state, headphone amp, power amp, DAC, etc. Prefer discrete, but willing to work on chip amp projects. |
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| cotdt |
| How about you build me a plasma tweeter? I don't have much money, but I can get the materials for the project. As reward, you get to keep it for two months. I want one that doesn't generate poisonous gases. With your design, I think I can build the other one myself for stereo. |
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| Nixie |
| That's a long term project. I want to do more work on the prototype before I have a finalized design so that maybe some sort of group order for parts can be done. Otherwise with the sapphire and platinum-platings it gets expensive. Machining the electrodes is very labor intensive. If we had five people in it, that would be 50 sapphire and 100 platinum-plated tungsten pieces for the MHCD, which is much better for outsourcing. Also, I think some people will not be happy here to use forced-air cooled power ceramic tubes and power supply filter capacitors that store 8 times the energy of a defibrillator. This is really a project for the crazed audiophile/mad scientist. Also, I need to find simulator to design the housing for minimal diffraction, as that will dominate distortion effects. The distortion from the plasma can be made almost arbitrarily small by running the idle plasma power higher and higher compared to the swing. Plus, where you gonna find speakers for the bottom end, under the 500 or 400 Hz crossover, that will match the low distortion of the plasma? I didn't figure that one out yet. |
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| cotdt |
I'll definately be interested in the group order when the time comes. I've been interested in this project for a long time but don't have the skills for it. In the meantime, I have been building amps for fun. Got more amps that I know what to do with! So I will stop after finishing about only 7 more.
So how much do you estimate it will cost to build one? My budget is only $10000. But I'm crazed about it.
For the woofer, they seem to be improving in terms of distortion. One can run an infinite wall array of them to lower distortion. Well maybe not "infinite", I'm thinking a line array would work also. Wall reflections and room interaction seem to be the biggest issue here, though. |
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| Nixie |
It seems to me if you have an array where each driver is not much smaller than the smallest wavelength to be reproduced, there will be serious interference problems.
Perhaps wall-sized electrostatic panels would make good bass drivers for this. However, the plasma has a very different sound dispersion pattern (spherical cone), compared to the narrow one of the ESLs.
As for your budget, the $10k you posted is plenty. I was thinking more along the lines of $3k for a pair, as a kit including the PSU and HV amp as well. No danger of trying to make profit here since the basic technology is patented by Dr Hill; my extension is largely practical (to support helium-less air operation, and larger discharges for lower crossover).
I have of yet not thought of any solution to the UV problem. A horn would do it, but I would hate to add horn coloration. Maybe just have to avoid staring at the discharge :) The power inefficiency is unavoidable, and for equivalent SPL, at least twice as bad as that of a regular combo of a class A amp with medium efficiency speaker. |
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| cotdt |
| You forgot UV sunglasses =). |
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| Nixie |
Well I was thinking, if I do very low SPL I can use the plasma as full range driver, so imagine I put the plasma chambers on the sides of my head as if they were headphones. However, I would have to put sunscreen lotion on my ears to prevent tanning...
Actually, I would surely have to try this experiment when I get around to making a second one ^_^ |
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