3D Sound

We all know about sound; we hear it every day. But, hearing an orchestra play Nutcracker is different from hearing it on your iPod. You can hear the soloist's position in an orchestra, but not on your speakers...or can you.

When audio playback was first invented in the late 19^th century, we used mono speakers. Mono speakers use only one speaker for the sound. Then, about 50 years ago, stereo sound was invented. Stereo sound uses two speakers instead of one, and gives a difference between left and right. It is limited to only "this happened on the left (or right) side." You wouldn't be able to pinpoint exactly where the sound occurred. Then surround sound came, but it only extended the feeling to front-left, front-right, back-left, and back-right. You still couldn't pinpoint sound.

Edgar Choueiri is a NASA funded rocket scientist who meddles with sound in his spare time. He developed a 3D sound system that can use any two speakers. Basically, a traditional stereo speaker would play a left ear track and a right ear track, but the effect is ruined with crosstalk, where the left ear can hear the right ear track and vice versa. To counter this, negative composite pressure waves are used to create a wall between the two speakers.

Why? When you locate where a sound is coming from, there are two cues. If a soloist is standing to your right, what he plays will come to your right ear slightly before your left ear. What hits your right ear will be louder than what hits your left ear. These two cues are enough for your brain to determine where the sound is coming from.

For those of you with a 3D TV, you know the picture is great with depth. The problem is the lousy sound quality which is, at best, only surround sound. Just imagine 3D movies paired with 3D sound. You don't even need expensive speakers. All you need are standard stereo speakers.

This is the future of stereo speakers. This breakthrough is not even expensive for consumers. This can even work for headphones. Try out these two tracks.

3D for Speakers

3D for Headphones

Watch Professor Choueiri

Here is the link to the website

The Chromebook

Google has announced that it will release a new type of laptop, the Chromebook. The chromebook looks like a netbook, but is different. On a traditional laptop, you will find a hard drive built in to the laptop. On the chromebook, though, there is no hard drive. All of its storage is on the web. It has unlimited cloud space. Since the chromebook has no hard drive, it can boot up in 8 seconds. It has 6 or 8 hours of battery life (depending on the model) and it has built in wifi and 3G support. Since everything is stored on the internet, if you lose one chromebook, you can log in to your account through another chromebook. The chromebook can be considered as a gateway. You don’t need to back up your chromebook for this reason. If you want to share something with your family or friends, they can just log in to your account. Unlike other laptops, the chromebook updates itself automatically, and it gets better over time. It needs no antivirus software, because it has built-in levels of security.

I, personally, have mixed feelings about this. The way I look at it, why do we need a chromebook if we have a laptop? A chromebook and a laptop use different means to achieve the same goal. The chromebook does store everything on the web, but you need wifi to access that. Without wifi or 3G connections your chromebook is nothing but a dummy. The major hitch of the chromebook is that you only have 100 mb or so of free storage space. You have to pay for more. I’m not saying Google has a bad idea; it’s brilliant! It’s just that Google is using it in the wrong way. If you ask me, Google should offer the cloud storage to any laptop. It should be more of a software. At the end of the day, I probably still wouldn’t prefer a chromebook over a laptop…yet.

http://www.google.com/chromebook/#features

Watch the video to find out more.