[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.