Plasma Speaker

This is a plasma speaker built for 6.101, "analog death lab" at MIT. Ok, now, a few clarifications. The sound quality is fairly shitty, especially compared with other plasma speakers on youtube. The reason for this is that we designed the circuitry completely from scratch. We were also afraid to ramp the volume up too high for fear of accidentally destroying the H bridge [again]. Thus we were fairly conservative. The most complex IC is actually a simple op-amp. We used the project as a learning experience and as such, there are certain issues such as our oscillator having frequency drift that mess up the actual sound quality. We do, however, have solutions for these but plan on rebuilding the control circuitry now that the class is over with somewhat more commercial and complex parts that do the signal processing better than my circuitry (it takes people years to design ICs to do this sort of thing accurately - I built the entire PWM controller in a week an a half). Expect to see a video of a kick-ass plasma speaker in about two months.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• plasma
• tweater
• speaker
• tesla
• coil

[Skryabin]

Ok, so I suppose I could see the Halleluja Chorus, but Beethoven 5???

[Jlincs92]

Hahaha, how come you chose the 1st movement from Poulenc's wind sextet over the Halleluja Chorus, or the 5th movement from Beethoven 5?