Source: CUSTOM HOME Magazine
Publication date: January 1, 2008
By Rebecca Day
The flat-panel TV revolution has a very long reach. Homeowners' desire for stylized electronics has never been more pronounced, and it's carrying over into every related area of the home, from furniture and structural design to the ever-present loudspeaker.
The mad success of plasma and LCD TVs has electronics designers scrambling to complement the look of downsized electronics, and the traditional loudspeaker may turn out to be as much a casualty of the flat-panel age as the tube TV. Consumers have turned their backs on boxy electronics, and that's creating a challenge for high-quality sound. While flat TVs compete admirably with their tube counterparts, it's a lot more challenging to pull off full-range sound from a tiny speaker.
A combination of home fashion and physics is putting pressure on the loudspeaker to update its image. On the audio side, TV makers continue to squeeze the size of the bezel around the flat-panel TV screen. The latest designs measure 1 inch thick, which doesn't leave a lot of room for sound output. So when homeowners settle in for a movie or their favorite TV series, the resulting sound is typically thin to go along with the thin TV.
The quandary is that speakers traditionally need a lot of space to move the air required for full-range sound. But since homeowners are shunning boxy speakers, today's speaker designers are using new tricks.
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