IMAX everywhere?
4:48 PM 08/15/04
I don't quite remember which one hit store shelves first, but both flat panel speakers and flat panel screens are very welcome inventions that may well save us from buying larger homes for bigger home theater systems. Given their current price tags, it may be well worth considering a larger home, but I'm sure that'll change in a very short time. However, they're great from a portability perspective and the corners they cut on quality are getting smaller. I've got my eye on color LCDs, partly because of the low heat footprint, and partly because I figure transparent LCDs have been around for a long while now and it won't be too long before they figure out how to make transparent LCD color screens - and those will ROCK! Plasma's got the consumer vote for now, though - and I would agree. With contrast ratios almost touching a thousand, I think plasma's a great way to HDTV, or to watch progressive-scan superbit DVDs. Its also a real nice way to watch regular TV and regular DVDs, but only if you've got a plasma screen mounted on a telescoping mount that responds to a remote and gently glides out from behind a chest of drawers in the bedroom.
Yeah, I got a tad carried away there...
If IMAX is the veritable apex of the audio-video experience, then methinks we're getting closer to getting there without hauling ourselves off the couch and to a theater with a 20-foot screen. When the SoundBug came out about a year ago, it had me wondering. The ability to make a speaker out of almost any surface had interesting home theater possibilities. Entire walls, or the sort, could be made speakers, thereby creating an additional surround effect. The SoundBug had limitations in its then-available avatar that centered mainly around the material / texture of the surface that could be used, and the quality of the sound output. But, a step in the right direction. Here's how:
Recent high-end home theater projection setups have begun emulating the speaker-behind-screen configuration used in IMAX theaters. If the screen has the right kind of "acoustic porosity" to let the sound through without too much trouble, then its known to offer a significant improvement to the overall sound experience. Projection screens like these aren't cheap, and projection setups aren't exactly portable, or easy to set up. There's a load of lights-lens-distance stuff that goes into the mix, and one would still need a pretty large room to do a projection setup justice.
However, if the screen itself were to be the "speaker", a lot falls into place. Here's where I envisioned the SoundBug coming in. Placed strategically someplace on the screen, it could make the screen itself one of the sources of sound in the home theater setup, thereby cloning the speaker-behind-screen configuration used in the IMAX.
A product that I saw recently had me think about this even more. Marketed as a "AcoustiClear Desktop CD system", the product page spoke of transparent, flat panel speakers in a compact tabletop configuration. Pretty cool, huh? Methinks, in theory, over the next three years, "they" will couple that with transparent color LCD screen technology to have a single transparent screen that will be both the audio output and the video output.
Smells like the screens in the Minority Report, doesn't it? I think so, too. I don't expect those to sell in Wal-Mart anytime soon, but it'll be real cool whenever they show up!