Cool But Dangerous DIY Gadget: Plasma Speaker

I've been interested in Electronic since I worked in a small company developing a home automation designer software. I don't want to tell much about that company since I've already left the company and now working in another small company doing another automation stuff. I learned a lot that programing and electronic can be combined to create more hi-tech appliances.

Electronic and programming is fun and fascinating. Take a look at this cool DIY gadget called Plasma Speaker or Plasma Tweeter. But be careful because this cool things is dangerous too.

There are various versions of this FM modulated plasma arc speakers. Even thou Plasma Speaker is not new in any way because they’ve been around since the late 1950’s. It is a cool thing for me. It sounds just like regular speakers, but plasma speakers work by creating compression waves in the air. Enjoy this show...



and another cool homebrew PVC pipe Plasma Speaker...



Looks cool huh? I gotta build and try this if I have time. Here's more info on this Plasma Speaker.

Plasma speakers (sometimes called flame speakers if the source of the plasma is combustion rather than gas ionization) are a form of loudspeaker which vary the intensity of a plasma, rather than using a magnetic field to push or pull a conventional driver, to create compression waves in air (which a listener perceives as sound).

In a normal loudspeaker design, the inertia of the driver will resist an instantaneous change in its position as the magnetic field varies with the input. This decreases the fidelity of the speaker, as the input is distorted due to the physical limitations of the device, particularly for strong high frequencies. (This limitation is one of the reasons why tweeters are so much smaller than woofers.) In a plasma speaker, this limitation effectively does not exist, as the air itself is driven directly by expansion of the plasma as the current through it varies. (Ionization of a gas causes its electrical resistance to drop significantly; see for example the "Jacob's ladder" for an explanation.)

Plasmatronics produced a commercial plasma speaker that used a helium tank to provide the ionization gas; other designs (some of which date to the 1950s) use combustion of natural gas or even candles[citation needed] to produce a plasma, through which current is then passed as in the gas plasma designs (though combustion designs do not require the initial high-voltage to create the plasma).

The plasma speaker design is a member of the family of so-called massless speakers.

--:Quoted from Wikipedia

So, If you are thinking about building this cool gadget too, you can get more info on how they build this cool gadget at Ulrich Haumann's DIY PLASMA TWEETER. Please note that this is not for beginners...