FleXpeakers for some seriously flat-out sounds

Juniper Foo | Oct 12, 2009

Taiwan's innovatively lightweight, paper-thin and bendable loudspeaker. (Credit: ITRI)

We've all heard about the coming of flexi screens and superslim displays, yada yada, for years. But what about speakers that are just as paper-thin and bendable? Now, that's a technology to get your inner geek pumped up, so to speak. Developed by Taiwan's Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and announced in April, it's worth an encore here as we await its coming. The lightweight fleXpeaker manages to stay razor-thin by packing arrays of tiny speakers together to produce high-fidelity speaker systems of almost any size. The good: This consumes so little power, it's a change from all those power-hungry gizmos out there. The bad: The frequency response is said to reach at least 20KHz, but won't go below 500Hz, which means you'll still need a blocky subwoofer.

There's an early prototype floating around (see video demo) which will, hopefully, make it to market faster than its wispy display counterparts. Now, if only somebody could pack an entire home theater system into a super-flat origami kit that requires minimal setup, subwoofer included.