The crudest component of a sound system is its loudspeaker. The most flawless recording, perfectly digitized, recovered and ultra-linearly amplified, must still be heard via a clumsy cone of plastic or paper flapping about in time with it. Daedalus now has a better idea. His new ‘Paraspeaker’ has no moving parts at all.

The Paraspeaker exploits the fact that the oxygen of the air is paramagnetic. So it is attracted into, and compressed by, a magnetic field. Vary that field at an audio frequency, and the pressure must vary in sympathy. This, says Daedalus, is why many transformers produce a steady hum, though they have no moving parts. The air around the transformer is alternately compressed and released by its stray magnetic field, and speaks up at its line frequency. Well — twice that frequency, actually. For, annoyingly, the induced pressure varies not with the field, but the square of the field. This gross nonlinearity doubles fundamental frequencies, and adds other frightful distortions as well.

Daedalus is undismayed. Electronic signal-processing is so fast and precise these days that this and other problems can be sorted out electronically in real time. The Paraspeaker will simply be a large coil of wire set in a hole in a baffle-board; but the electronics driving it will be subtle and complex. The audio signal will go through a square-rooter and programmable signal conditioner while it is still digital. After analog conversion, a dedicated amplifier will feed it to the Paraspeaker.

The Paraspeaker will be a ferociously inductive load; even the best analog amplifier may falter in driving it. The signal conditioner has the job of tweaking the digital signal so as to cancel the aberrations that it will meet downstream. Once programmed to counter the flaws of the following amplifier, it will ensure that a perfect signal reaches the Paraspeaker. So perfect sound will emerge. Its vacant central hole will be an open window on transparent, flawless sound.

The hi-fi community will be entranced. Yet the major benefactors will be the boom-box community, and its victims. For the boom box has but one advantage over a system using headphones: it avoids their discomfort and blanking out of ambient sound. But Paraspeaker earphones, being simply hollow coils, do not obstruct the ears. They can be worn 24 hours a day. The music addict will be able to enjoy his narcotic endlessly, without deafening the rest of us with his damnable loudspeakers.