Feature Story:
Luxury cars that lack traditional speakers may be heading to market in 3 years.
As we reported a year ago, technology from German auto supply Continental eliminates the need for traditional speakers by vibrating actual parts of the car instead.
Transducers can vibrate the windshield or A pillar, or door panels, for instance.
In a report from the New York Times last week, Continental says that technology could appear in cars in 2021. No car maker was named as committing to the technology, but Continental supplies Mercedes, BMW and Audi.
Continental’s technology uses transducers, small magnets wrapped in copper coils, which can conduct an electrical signal causing a car panel to vibrate. This is similar to the way a violin creates sound as the vibration of the strings resonates through the body of the violin.
In this case, the windshield and rear window are rigid and heavy so they can produce bass while A-pillars can produce treble.
Under Continental’s system called Ac2ated Sound, the A pillars become tweeters, and the rear window becomes a subwoofer. The windshield, floor, dashboard and seat frames create midrange audio. Continental says it can generate premium audio quality sound from these car parts. It said the audio sounds natural.
Where other high end systems are using 10, 20 or more speakers that can add more than 20 pounds of weight to the car, Continental’s system uses only 5 small transducers for a basic system and up to 10 for a premium system.
Source: The New York Times
Photo: Continental
The technology sounds impressive, the jury is still waiting on sound quality …
All this means is some people won’t like how these systems sound, and becuse they use ac voltages like speakers now do you’ll be seeing speaker system from the aftermarket to bolt into place to use insted of transducers, transducers have been around sence wwII when the navey used them on ships I’m not certain of the history but I think its on those lines. What ever became of the resonating crystal speakers they were working on 25 years ago?
97db @ 1 stop light or tractor trailer.
All of this seems impressive but ive delt with transducers wile they produce bass pretty good they dont resonate highter frequancys as well.
However tweeters dont weight a lot and a hybrid system could be devloped to do both
5k and up to 22 or 26k even though the avg drivers hearing stops at 15k the hormonics from 22k down influance the sound you hear.
Hey man– What’s the sensitivity of that door panel?
And vibrations from driving down various road conditions won’t change audio? If I rest my arm on the door panel, that won’t change audio? Sounds expensive and pitfall-heavy, for nearly no advantages.