Thursday, March 14, 2013

Graphene Headphones are a Reality

A lovely pair of innovative researchers from Berkeley just made those $500 headphones you bought from Dr. Dre obsolete with some Graphene.

Conventional headphones needs an oscillator that has to be damped down to produce a constant sound between 20Hz and 20kHz. Graphene, on the other hand, can be manufactured in its raw state to do the same job without any augmentation and power draining over-engineering.

Qin Zhou and Alex Zettl found their setup to be so good that they compared it to a pair of Sennheisers. In fact, in its raw state, a single sheet of graphene—with no special tweaks or tuning of its properties provided a frequency response comparable to a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones. That's pretty damn impressive.

The graphene diaphragm, made by the researchers, is 7 millimeters across but just 30 nanometers thick: insanely thin and light.

[note*: a single gram of graphene could cover an entire football field.] That thin sheet was sandwiched between two silicon dioxide electrodes, which allowed it to be driven and to produce sound.

This is just an introduction into the idea so there is no pricetag. Keep dreaming music lovers. Just plan on settling with a custom pair when they hit shelves because Graphene headphones will never ever break. Ever.

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