Exotic New Silicon-Based Speakers Are Coming to Next-Generation Earbuds
The way humans reproduce recorded sound could change more in the next decade than it has in the past century.
What’s coming are solid-state speakers, etched from wafers of ultrapure silicon—like microchips. That means they operate like nothing available today—and also that they have capabilities that no existing sound-reproduction system can match. ...
One recipient of prototype in-ear monitors—the kind of high-fidelity earbuds professionals use when mastering musical tracks—is Brian Lucey. A mastering engineer of nine Grammy award winners, Lucey told me that the solid-state speakers in the in-ear monitors he’s using have become indispensable. ...
The engineers at xMEMS take things a step further—their entire speaker, including its vibrating membrane, is fashioned on a wafer of ultrapure silicon—the same kind that are used to make all the microchips that are the “brains” of nearly every computing device in the world. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/exotic-new-silicon-based-speakers-are-coming-to-next-generation-earbuds-ee99b76b#
