Now Hear This

One of the most amazing things I saw at Vail was little more than a throw-away by one of the participants. It was a hobby project and it simply blew me away. The other attendees expressed similar awe.

The gentleman was a plasma physicist. He had immigrated to the US as a child with his parents from Lebanon. Currently he was working on plasma propulsion systems seeking to find a practical means of extended space travel that was not dependent upon carrying billions of gallons of chemicals for conventional rocket motors. A dream was a system that might someday defend the earth from an errant asteroid without Bruce Willis and his Space Rangers. It would land on the asteroid and then employ the existing ice formations to source the propulsive power for the plasma engine to divert the impending doom. Or it could take us to Mars and beyond.

Certainly impressive enough, but it was his spare time gadget that was revolutionary. He had built a simple program which he was running on his iPhone as an app and demonstrating with a $20 Radio Shack hand-held portable speaker roughly 2" x 6".

He theorized that creating a true 3D sound experience that was far superior to stereo or 5.1 surround systems was simply a matter of removing extraneous sounds from the reproduction, not synthesizing or modulating or adding anything to the sounds.

Using simple MP3 files on his iMac, he ran the filter on the phone and played it wirelessly through the speakers. Off, the sounds were flat and tinny with just two inches of separation between the tiny speakers. On, the sound enveloped you magically coming from behind you or to your side or moving around your head as he played a fly buzzing over you.

A forest became real, a waterfall almost splashed you, Pink Floyd's "Money" rang up the cash register nearby and you could hear the ambience of the sound on the store counter. A cathedral choir echoed melodically and everyone who experienced it was stunned.

This is a billion dollar creation for this man. It is small, cheap, simple and incredible. It can be incorporated in virtually every audio delivery system in our world and it will open up new experiences in music and theater reproduction. I hope to see this commercially within a very short period. You will be impressed!