LG Electronics (LG) has been once again recognized for the technological and design excellence of its latest solutions, earning more than two dozen CES 2023 Innovation Awards, including three coveted Best of Innovation Awards for LG OLED in the computer peripherals, gaming and video display categories. Among other winning products are the LG UltraGear OLED gaming monitor and the LG XBOOM 360 Bluetooth speaker system. The full list of CES 2023 Innovation Award recipients will be announced at CES 2023 (Jan. 5-8, 2023).
Of the 28 honors LG will receive at CES 2023, 12 – including two Best of Innovation Awards – went to LG OLED TVs, marking the 11th consecutive year that the company’s self-lit TVs have received CES Innovation Awards. LG OLED TVs, known to offer a variety of viewing experiences to consumers with its diverse innovative form factors, are prized by consumers worldwide for their exceptional picture quality, which delivers vibrant, accurate colors, deep blacks and infinite contrast.
The Korean company, a leading innovator of display technologies, has long research thin actuators for under-monitor applications. Until recently, when the company was still designing its own range of mobile phones, LG offered an innovative range of screen speakers with improved audio features in its LG ThinQ models.
LG typically has explored this approach for flat TVs and smartphones.
At MWC 2019, LG showcased its Crystal Sound OLED (CSO) panel, an innovative technology that utilizes the phone’s OLED display as a speaker. Developed in-house, the LG CSO technology repurposes the OLED display as a diaphragm, vibrating the entire surface to produce sound with impressive volume. And because the technology takes advantage of the entire display, CSO also improves clarity, making voices easier to discern and subtle musical notes more noticeable.
LG remains a key component supplier of displays and related technologies for leading smartphone brands (including Apple) and for many other industries including automotive. As electric vehicles (EVs) brought a completely different set of requirements and challenges in result of the vehicle cabin being a completely new environment in terms of noise levels, and due to the requirements for these very silent vehicles to generate all sorts of sounds to alert both driver/passengers and surrounding pedestrians, companies such as LG as responding with innovative solutions that also meet the priority requirements of reducing weight and power consumption.
While conventional speakers are large and heavy due to components such as the voice coil, cone, and magnet, the Thin Actuator Sound Solution is extremely thin and lightweight thanks to LG Display’s film-type exciter technology. The company’s actuator technology allows the device to vibrate off display panels and various materials inside the car body to enable a sound generation that can be converted into an immersive experience when combined with multiple units positioned in the cabin - controlled by a central processing unit.
The LG Thin Actuator Sound Solution comes in a passport-like size (150mm x 90mm) with a thickness of 2.5mm, equivalent to that of two coins stacked together, and a weight of just 40g, making it just 30 percent of the weight and 10 percent of the thickness of a conventional car speaker.
According to LG, the actuators' compact size and innovative form factor allow it to be installed in various parts inside the car such as the dashboard, headliner, pillar, and headrests, while eliminating the deviation in audio quality for passengers inside. The device’s built-in nature not only allows the removal of speaker grills, but also enhances space efficiency by freeing up the space normally occupied by in-car speakers without compromising sound quality.
In addition, LG Display has excluded the use of rare earth elements such as neodymium (Nd) normally used in conventional speakers, boosting the speaker’s eco-friendly factor. Yet, no specifications have been revealed regarding power handling or any key metrics as a transducer, and we will need to wait until the Thin Actuator will be demonstrated at CES 2023 to receive more details.
For now, the LG Thin Actuator Sound Solution has received the CES 2023 Innovation Award (‘In-Vehicle Entertainment & Safety’ category) from the Consumer Technology Association in recognition of its space efficiency, design innovation, sound experience innovation, and eco-friendliness. This CES 2023, LG Display is set to showcase the Thin Actuator Sound Solution, which was jointly developed with a global audio company - also not named at this stage.
"We have transformed the conventionally heavy and bulky speaker into a high-quality ‘invisible’ sound solution by using our cutting-edge technology to elevate space, design, and eco-friendly factors and provide a next-level sound experience like none before," says Yeo Chun-ho, Vice President and Head of the Business Development Division at LG Display.
These Thin Actuator panels have large potential for direct driver interactions/assistance (e.g. in headrests or dashboard) and generically for car acoustics, combining noise reduction in a controlled acoustical environment (active acoustics), and generation of the vehicle sounds for driver motivation and alertness.
www.lg.com
