it's the weirdest thing Elijah can you hear this speaker yeah I can hear
it somehow my microphone picks up
nothing right next to it but Elijah can hear it from down the road now sound
waves are always directional to a degree but this
thing is on a whole other level perhaps
magic spoiler no the oddly model B uses
Ultra rasonic Audio Waves which you normally can't hear and add some special
sauce to create a directional speaker that's designed to create a private
listening Zone giving the user a headphon like
experience is that something people are asking for and what are we giving up in
return also are there any fun creative ways we could use this technology not
sure a few things and yes but before I
tell you about them Elijah needs to tell you about our sponsor hey there you are
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lonus to help you guys experience how cool this thing is we've set it up on a
lazy Susan in an open area of our warehouse then all you got to do is pop
on a pair of headphones and you'll be able to hear exactly what we hear with
the help of our friend Steve Elijah hit
it that is so weird it sounds like it's
in the one ear and then it sounds like it's inside my skull and then the other
ear and then it's gone and then because we've got flat
surfaces here in the warehouse it actually bounces off of some of them and
sounds like it's coming from completely different places now alongside the
greatest song of all time you might have heard a slight buzzing or interference
or Dropout sound that's because the microphones are picking up some of those
ultrasonic frequencies that I mentioned earlier but to most human ears it sounds
as clear as any other speaker you'd find at the local Best Buy how does this work
and what makes it different from a traditional speaker in a traditional
speaker two things contribute to the audio that you hear
the amplitude or how hard the speaker pushes against the air around it
determines how loud it is and the frequency which is how many of these
Cycles it completes per second contributes to the pitch Sound Energy
travels in waves just like ripples in a body of water meaning that when you make
sound anybody nearby can hear baby no money forget that Melody now we can
focus or aim it to a degree
but because the wavelengths of audible sound are so long the waves can travel
through solid objects and even bend around corners that's why I can hear
this speaker pretty well from behind it that's why these speakers use ultrasonic
transducers instead and I can practically hear you guys shouting lus
humans can't hear ultrasonic frequencies that's what makes them ultrasonic and
you're right we can't but thanks to some math that I don't understand now and
probably never will we can alter the amplitude and can modulate our
ultrasonic transducer array to encode
audible sound within ultrasonic sound
now it took decades and the development of sophisticated computer simulations to
go from the original Theory to this point but now that we're here it
flipping works and because ultrasonic
waves have much shorter wavelengths they spread out far less creating a
relatively focused cone of audible
sound it's still about 15° meaning that
at a great enough distance multiple people can hear it but the effect in
person is really trippy not to mention a
lot of fun I'm in position where it should be hard for anyone in the lab to
see me and I'm going to start up a WAN Show I thought someone was talking I
thought then I'm going to beam it around the warehouse and see what
happens next Target
Logistics I don't even know what this plastic is here for it's clearly to
prevent peep Bad actors like you Elijah's bringing a knife so we can
control Logistics now we're going to point it through the plastic but first
we got to troll
Elijah so confused I can see Jamie okay we're going to go for Jamie we're going
to go for Jamie
okay where the how they all find us immediately
dang it how'd you guys find us so fast I
heard through it earlier oh dang it well
you win some you lose some still a lot of fun if we were smart and we really
wanted to throw people off though we would use the effect where it bounces
off of flat surfaces creating a really weird effect where it sounds like it's
coming from the Reflection Point rather than from the location of the speaker
let me show you what I mean okay Elijah I'm straight at you yep I hear it there
right there okay what if I bounce it more times I hear it right about
there yeah and it it's super trippy if I
did not see you I would think it's coming from the wall pretty wild right I
mean you'd think after a bounce or two it would sound a lot farther away but
ultrasonic waves don't attenuate nearly the way that audible waves do so whether
I'm 10 ft away or 100 ft away bouncing
once or four times it sounds really similar the question
now is how far can we go well based on
what they saw in the intro you're going to have to go a lot further than that buddy all righty poor Elijah he's
getting his steps in today boys most exercise I've done all year how about
now yeah I can still hear it how about
now no I don't hear it oh okay how about if I aim it at
you I it sounds the exact
same I hear it totally fine okay keep
going oh oh my goodness it's crazy to me
how it's been sounding almost the exact same volume the whole way how about now
I can still hear it that is wild we'll
keep going a little bit more very faintly but I can still hear
it that is very cool we're almost at the end of our parking
lot yeah you can still hear it I can still hear it yeah and Andy can hear it
from back there still oh
yeah going
there's a car in the way but we are from end to end on the parking lot here's the
Google Maps image to show you how far we are uh let's see if I can still hear it
do you hear it Andy I hear the truck you might as well
come back oh my God this is freaking hilarious they're standing in that
corner with all those cars around them and I'm kind of moving it around a little bit it's got to sound like it's
coming from like freaking everywhere there was a split moment where all the
way at the end of the parking lot I heard like one or two notes at that
distance the issue you're running into is lining it up not even that you can
hear it anymore that is super cool but
ultrasonic waves do have a downside they get blocked very easily you can see I'm
sitting here chilling listening to music all I got to do is put this piece of
paper in front of it and
H and there's more remember that sound
Jammer that we bought on AliExpress
in theory it can be deployed stealthily but in practice we found that people
with sensitive hearing sorry sorry sorry can pick up those high frequencies and
because those ultrasonic frequencies need to be very high amplitude for the
encoding to work meaning they're very loud it can create an uncomfortable
feeling for some people and especially some animals with all that cool how does
it work stuff out of the way what are these even for I mean I guess as a gamer
having a personal private listening cone without needing to wear anything on my
head would be kind of liberating but at this price yeah it's more for commercial
installations you know showrooms museums
and the like so you can step in front of an interesting piece learn more about it
available now at LTT Store.com and when you're done you walk away and the audio
is gone with a cleverly designed Gallery including soft surfaces to minimize
Reflections you can offer a pretty engaging experience for your customers
or patrons oddly the makers of this particular speaker focus on digital
signage and advertising but they also highlight some pretty creative uses like
this one integration in a playground haunted house pretty spooky what's
really cool is oddly is working on cutting the costs but if you don't want
to wait there's actually tons of videos online showing people building these
speakers for themselves including this one guy who actually made it look like a
little gun to point at a Target I don't know it's kind of cute just like this
cute segue to our sponsor thanks to Corsair for sponsoring this episode
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it right to you learn more at the link in the video description if you guys did
enjoy this video go check out the recording Jammer video that one was super cool as well and helped cover up
some hot takes that lonus had