Home Forums Technical discussion The airDRIVE Paradox Reply To: The airDRIVE Paradox

#15447
Ted Fletcher
Keymaster

Late last year I was talking to the sound man at the Albert Hall during a Mark Knopfler concert. He had finally given up the pretence of trying to get left and right images; the big (and extremely powerful) system was totally mono and he had concentrated on achieving good coverage and fine time alignment from the system. The Albert Hall used to be the most disappointing place to listen to bands, but his system sounded sweet and clean.

In the early days of airSOUND development we carried out many experiments with live shows and the results were spectacularly good; the arrangement works particularly well with quiet acoustic type bands, this is not unexpected as one of the features of airSOUND is that the spatial information is actually quite low in level and can get drowned out by too much reflection of the main signal from walls.

So the answer is yes, it’s an area that requires more research and probably a lot more time, but eventually most sound systems will work the airSOUND way, or at least the designers will understand the physics and be able to overcome the awful inadequacies of 2-speaker systems. 8-)

All that was about airSOUND and not about airDRIVE. The amplifier system airDRIVE could become a dead-end 😥 The reason is that it makes sense to continue improving efficiency of power amplifiers, and there is no denying that analogue amplifiers are horribly inefficient. The very latest digital amplifiers are both inexpensive and offer superb performance…. and are unsuitable for modification to ‘current drive’. I have spent some time trying, but with limited success….. in addition to that, the physical design of loudspeaker driver that is suitable for current drive is a different beast….. but that’s another story.