This month, in Industry News & Developments Vance Dickason highlights the new Epique woofer range from Dayton Audio, and a new German OEM driver company, BlieSMa, founded by Stas Malikov, a name associated with Accuton for the last 8 years.In this edition, Mike Klasco and Nora Wong have compiled an updated directory of Microspeaker vendors. In this listing of key suppliers for mobile electronics, there are several new names — mostly MEMS microspeaker manufacturers. As Wong writes, "We are now facing the first generation of MEMS microspeakers in development. Implications for manufacturing are huge as fabrication of a billion MEMS microspeakers per year would only require a few dozen workers in a semiconductor fab rather than thousands of workers using production lines. Audio Pixels, GraphAudio, and USound are a few of the research teams focusing on MEMS microspeakers, yet each of them have very different approaches to sound reproduction. All of these topologies are relevant for earphones."
Next up, in a Voice Coil Spotlight, David Mathew and Joe Begin from Audio Precision explain all you need to know about the basics of testing headphones and earbuds. As the authors write, "...unlike loudspeakers, headphones and earbuds are designed to be coupled to the ear, and this complicates the issue. The measurement microphone must be placed in a structure that acoustically models the human ear, and the driver under test (DUT) must be mounted in a way that represents actual use." The article goes on to detail types of headphones and earphones, and the variety of acoustic test fixtures (ATF) available for these measurements.
For this month's Voice Coil Test Bench, Vance Dickason characterizes the new Ellipticor drivers from Scan-Speak, specifically the Ellipticor D3404/552000 tweeter and the 18WE/4542T00 7” diameter midbass driver. As Dickason writes in the introduction, "I have been anxiously awaiting these new oval voice coil drivers ever since the first press release on the Scan-Speak Ellipticor drivers was featured on the cover of the July 2017 issue of Voice Coil. Using an oval (elliptical) voice coil shape to defeat cone and dome standing wave modes is compelling concept." The detailed measurements' report demonstrates why these two new elliptical voice coil drivers are so special and why they deliver such a solid performance.
Finally, in Industry Watch, Voice Coil pays tribute to the life and achievements of loudspeaker pioneer Ejvind Skaaning who passed away on February 8, 2018. Skaaning, born on April 17, 1929, in the small town of Vejen, Denmark, was instrumental on the success of David Hafler's extremely popular Dynaco A-25 speaker, and founded or co-founded multiple speaker companies, including Lydig (purchased by Harman), Scan-Speak, Dynaudio, and RMS (Richter, Mordechai and Skaaning), the foundation for Morel. In 1990, Ejvind Skaaning started Audio Technology with his son, Per Skaaning, where he worked until his passing this year.If you already subscribe, go to - www.gotomyvcoil.com - to download this issue.
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