Test 1: musings

I won't call the test a failure, I learned far too much for it to be a failure. Following extensive testing I've concluded that my equipment has severe limits. It seems that even at the same power levels and with the cones removed, the speaker movement different between high frequencies and lower frequencies is huge. Movement at high information output rates was infinitesimal. Lowering the movement speeds helped but there are other problems too.

There's a lot of shake in the setup I'm using (one pictured in the posts below) and I think I need to really bolt things to a solid frame to get rid of the vibrations. At the moment it's so bad I'm getting vertical distortion on the horizontal mirror. That'll be the first order of business when I have an afternoon free next. Another problem is that my mirrors have far too much scatter in them. I'll have to look at some in shops and see if I can find something that'll suit my needs. A pinpoint laser spot is what is needed.

My transducers work well, but they don't move much compared to the speakers (almost microscopic in fact). This is perfectly fine with me because they should have almost 0 distortion, so I just need mirrors and other equipment good enough to make that small movement count. To make it count, I've been wondering about an edge projection strategy. The laser projector is attached to the edge of the surface at a slight angle, and the angle means all the movements are magnified greatly. An extension of this idea would be specially shaped, stepped mirrors made at just the right angles such that shining a slightly moved laser beam onto them will cause pixels to be reflected into the appriopriate places. This idea needs some work, but it might allow a far superior projector with far less power....