[jakemoshenko]

While that's certainly one way to synthesize directional audio, the far more common way is to actually have the audio come from the direction it's supposed to and let your ear do its normal thing to sort it out. Imagine you had an entire room wallpapered in individually addressable tiny speakers, you could actually project sound from any angle. The added benefit being that it would work for more than one person in the room. we've gone from 2.1 audio -> 5.1 -> 7.2 -> atmos 11.2. Why wouldn't we want to go to 50000.2 audio as the next extension?

[nick__m]

Atmos is not 11.2! Home theater Atmos is 12 statically positioned streams, usually 7.1.4 (horizontally_emitting.low_freq.vertically_emitting) and up to 20 dynamically located streams. The audio is then rendered for the speakers configurations. Highest-end decoder can theorically support 24.1.10 but I never saw a decoder support more than 32 channels.

My receiver has 13 outputs (11 amplified, 2 sub at line level) but I use a 5.1.2 configuration, in a relatively small listening room, and I don't know where I could add more speakers without rebuilding the walls and the ceiling.

[tragictrash]

That would require a lot of wire and a lot of amplifiers. I bet we'll see an installation or two of the proposed design for proving it can be done.

Still, I bet most spatial audio systems will use software and fewer drivers ( potentially these drivers) to create the intended effect.

It just costs too much to wire all them up.

[amlib]

But at thousands of speakers you don't need as much amplification for each wire and considering how these flat speakers are produced, it's not too unlikely that we could eventually be able to embed chips/controllers into then just like we do with current display tech.

With that setup you could encode hundreds of channels in a single wire and each embedded controller would be responsible do decode it's addressed channel(s) to send to it's respective "speaker(s)". If the signal produced isn't high enough, you may also add in some small amplification stage in the embedded chip.

[tragictrash]

Very interesting. While I disagree with the implementation details, you do bring up a great point I completely missed. Embedding electronics into these would be trivial, thus enabling some form of smart communication removing the need for discreet amps and removing most of the labor involved in installation. Man I love HN.

[dTal]

Angular resolution is all very well, but what about spatial resolution? Even from the same compass bearing, a noise coming from a mile away sounds very different than someone whispering in your ear.

[klyrs]

Playing with phase, I imagine that gangs of speakers could be used to produce bass as well. Don't need to stop at x.2...