A very simple model is as good as a high-quality headset

Mar 13, 2013 15:43 GMT  ·  By

High-end speaker systems and headsets use very special sound optimizing technologies, but it looks like today's best efforts will seem overkill soon enough.

Graphene has been used to make a speaker without any sort of specialized design, and yet it “performs comparably to a high quality commercial headset,” according to Qin Zhou and Alex Zettl, both at the University of California, Berkeley.

It generates a constant sound pressure level of 20 Hz to 20 KHz (has a flat frequency response) and is made of a graphene diaphragm sandwiched between a couple of electrodes that create an electrical field. That's it.

It turns out that graphene solves one of the key issues with existing audio products: diaphragm thickness.

Also, “it is electrically conducting, has extremely small mass density, and can be configured to have very small effective spring constant,” say Zhou and Zettl.

Being very strong physically is just a side-benefit. More coverage here.