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Electrostatic speaker design diy

The electrostatic panels described here are not available, and it is not expected that this will change. The set of articles has been retained for interest only, so please do not ask questions or ask about prices or availability - there is no point because the panels are not available. The material shown is maintained for 'historical' reasons only, as it may be of interest to some people. ESLs Electrostatic Loudspeakers have a definite aura about them, and it has nothing to do with the high voltage used to polarise the panels. A minimum system would use two panels per side, but 4 panels will give better results - as always, your listening environment and preferred level will dictate the limits of what is achievable. As with all ESLs, these panels are bipolar i.

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Electrostatic speaker design diy

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WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Do It Yourself - Building of Electrostatic Loudspeakers

The Eros Clone DIY Electrostatic Speaker


If you have an interest in audio there are plenty of opportunities for home construction of hi-fi equipment. You can make yourself an amplifier which will be as good as any available commercially, and plenty of the sources you might plug into it can also come into being on your bench.

There will always be some pieces of hi-fi equipment which while not impossible to make will be very difficult for you to replicate yourself. Either their complexity will render construction too difficult as might be the case with for example a CD player, or as with a moving-coil loudspeaker the quality you could reasonably achieve would struggle match that of the commercial equivalent.

It never ceases to astound us what our community of hackers and makers can achieve, but the resources, economies of scale, and engineering expertise available to a large hi-fi manufacturer load the dice in their favour in those cases. The subject of this article is a piece of extreme high-end esoteric hi-fi that you can replicate yourself, indeed you start on a level playing field with the manufacturers because the engineering challenges involved are the same for them as they are for you.

Harnessing this force in a speaker would require a charge that varies at audio frequency creating the force on a sufficient surface area to create sound waves, by proximity with a conductive electrode maintained at a constant opposite charge. A practical electrostatic loudspeaker. A practical electrostatic speaker uses a flexible film that is as thin and light as possible as its moving component. A partially conductive coating is applied to it — just conductive enough to allow it to accumulate charge, but not enough to allow that charge to flow away freely.

Two acoustically transparent conductive electrodes are suspended next to the film, one on either side. These electrodes can be wire mesh, an array of parallel wires, or a perforated metal sheet.

The film is held at a very high constant static charge by the application of a multi-kilovolt DC supply, while the electrodes on either side of it are supplied with very high voltage audio frequency in an antiphase push-pull configuration. This push-pull feed on either side of the film ensures that the forces on it are the same when it moves to either side of its center position.

If there was a single electrode on one side of the film it would introduce distortion because the half of the cycle when the film was furthest from the electrode would receive less force than the closest.

In the majority of electrostatic speaker designs, the high voltage audio is created using a step-up transformer from a conventional audio amplifier designed for moving-coil speakers. It is possible to create an audio amplifier with an output in the multi-kilovolts, but the designers of such amplifiers face challenges from the high voltage itself and from the availability of suitable devices capable of delivering low-distortion audio at those voltages.

A Martin Logan electrostatic speaker on the left next to a moving-coil speaker. You might think that with low distortion and amazingly flat frequency response there would be no stopping the electrostatic speaker.

But as with so many things there are weaknesses to these devices. They work in both directions, for a start. Electrostatic speakers are very directional, so while you can set them up for a perfect stereo image in one spot, a relatively small movement can take you out of it. Various attempts have been made to broaden their spread with differing degrees of success, some manufacturers produce curved panels while others attempt to supply the grid of electrodes from a series of delay lines to create the effect.

Finally in the litany of electrostatic speaker woes, these speakers are not so good when it comes to bass reproduction. Electrostatic speakers will therefore often come with a moving-coil bass unit as a companion to the electrostatic panels, and will usually incorporate a separate bass amplifier and active crossover.

Because the radiative patterns of cone speakers and the electrostatics are different, the bass-to-treble balance will vary as you move around the room, further accentuating the sweet-spot issues. Of course, general information about electrostatic speakers is all very well, but this is a site for hardware hackers. You want to see real examples, and maybe have a go yourself. The materials required for home electrostatic speaker construction are fairly straightforward, with maybe one exception: the plastic film that forms the moving part.

The world of high-end hi-fi works to different economic rules it seems, so sourcing the same components from suppliers in other industries is the way to go.

The transformer is an example with plenty of scope for stretching your budget. Audio transformers are expensive at the best of times.

Happily there is a cheap alternative; most home builders use standard mains transformers connected in reverse. It has to be said though, as soon as you put a transformer in an audio circuit its performance is only as good as that of the transformer, so there may be some compromises in this component.

Any thin flexible plastic film can make a noise in an electrostatic speaker, but for best performance the thinner your film, the better. Once you have your film, it needs a slightly conductive coating. Some electrostatic speakers will take a few minutes to reach their maximum volume for this reason, as the charge moves very slowly to fill the panel.

Older designs used graphite powder rubbed onto the surface of the film, while more recently they use spray-on coatings intended for static protection in the electronics business.

The fixed electrodes can be made from a variety of materials. A well known commercial design uses a very large perforated printed circuit board with the electrodes etched in a carefully designed pattern to try to broaden the angle of the finished speaker.

The high voltage bias supply is usually generated with a voltage multiplier chain from an AC transformer, though more recent designs may use solid state inverters.

Normally about 4 to 6 KV DC is required for this task. Once these components have been sourced, there only remains any woodwork necessary to make the frames that hold it together, and copper tape and wiring to ensure all contacts are made. Building the speaker is then a fairly straightforward workshop task, with one tricky moment: stretching the film over its wooden frame. It needs to be under slight tension, as any slackness or wrinkles will cause distortion. The technique used by most home builders is to stretch it over a frame with a bicycle inner tube around its edge, and then to inflate the tube which draws the film taut.

If you have got this far in an electrostatic speaker build, you should have something fairly special: there is very little engineering that the commercial manufacturers can do to make it much better. Listening to an electrostatic speaker can be something of a startling experience, but beware of superlatives. The hi-fi industry has a special kind of mumbo-jumbo with a whole vocabulary of pseudoscience to make its adherents feel good about eye-watering price tags, and electrostatic speakers are something they have placed on a special pedestal all of their own.

I owned a pair of these types back in the Seventies, they worked well enough, but eventually failed due to internal shorting which seemed to be a common fate with these. Yes true enough, a really sad fate occurring usually by way of violent discharge from one stator electrode to the other, passing right through the diaphragm en route, burning a hole in said diaphragm, as a result of excessive input signal voltage applied which was not that hard to do to many units back in the seventies ,.

Played at low levels though, they were really sonic bliss; at least to my ears, anyway. How focused can you get these beams? Is this the tech responsible for those highly directional speakers? Is this the same stuff found in ultrasonic ranging boards Ping? I used to have a pair of magnepans that have a flat driver and they were a one person ride. I have a pir of magnepan 1.

The sweet spot is VERY narrow. Move your head just 10cm and they sound very different. The sound in that sweet spot can be quite nice though. Maggie 1. I understand the sweet spot issue, but they sound pretty darn good anywhere.

Just find the spot and stay there while you listen. Besides, more directed sound should give less reflections from side walls… I will try to match them to a homemade ripole subwoofer someday as I find the bass a bit thin. Those work by ultrasound interference. Where they hit an object the mutual interference pulls the sound down to audible frequencies, basically making any surface into a loudspeaker.

To hear the beat frequency you need some none-linearity, like a demodulation diode or detector. Otherwise it would just be amplitude modulated ultrasound. I think at least part of the non-linearity in this case is in the human ear itself, probably the ultrasound level is quite high. So no non-linear element needed, like you would if there was only one, modulated, beam.

Correct, you need a nonlinearity. The boundary between air and any object in the way provides that, not your ear.

The Harry Potter traveling exhibit has a Voldemort display, when you stand in just the right spot, you are standing under one of these ultrasonic sound beamers. You hear it from any object placed in the beam. I could step back and place my hand in the beam, and hear the voice coming from my hand. With my hat off, my head and shoulders were now the source of the sound. At that point, it sounds like someone talking into your ear from no definable direction.

These days, cheap ultrasonic ranging boards usually use piezos. However, old cameras of this type used an electrostatic ranger the gold disc :. I looked it up and was fascinated. They really are electrostatic on that model! Reverse lookup the image, some company bought the old patents. Thanks for the answer. I think that this article is a bit deceiving about the directionality of ESLs. I have built them myself. I had never heard of Martin Logan until I read this article.

You needed a big enough room so that they could to be sited to prevent reflections of walls behind and to the sides. The also needed to spaced about 10 feet. They were driven by a custom pre-amp and a Quad , with a fixed shelf equalizer designed by a friend, which managed to overcome most of the lack of bass. The sound could only be described as transparent. Thank you for a most interesting article Jenny. You spurred me to do some Googling and I found that Quad still manufacture in Germany, but some of the prices are approaching the eye-watering level.

A refurbished pair of ELS 57s are 1. In any case I doubt that my hearing would be able to appreciate them. Not hifi, but it conveys the concept of electrostatic speakers.

Wireless World once had an article about constructing electrostatic headphones. I can assure you that it just flat out works. Electrically segmented ESLs can easily have a superior polar response to just about anything else.

Mine are flat to 60 Degrees off-axis.


DIY HiFi; build yourself electrostatic speakers and show them off

Adhesive glue The glue I recommend. Aluminium conductor foil The foil material I reccomend. Aluminium L-profiles An important element in my construction design. Construction materials A list of materials needed linked to the corresponding pages.

An electrostatic loudspeaker is a loudspeaker design in which sound is generated Electrostatic speakers enjoy some popularity among do-it-yourself (DIY).

Building a DIY electrostatic speaker system


The beam-splitter design may be a bridge too far for some but the stat-panels and power supplies are simple and inexpensive and can be used in any hybrid design for magical ESL sound and imaging. Most components were sourced in the US but I imported the transformers from England. Goddam that's impressive! That is some serious DIY skill there - well done mate! Unfortunately, I'm better at the woodwork than with electronics. Fortunately, the electronics interface to drive an ESL is so simple that even an electronics dummy like me can do it. Wow, that is really ambitious. And they look superb. Great woodwork, making them possibly the most elegant and domestically acceptable stats I've seen. Can I ask how you decided on the crossover frequency of Hz?

Electrostatic loudspeaker

electrostatic speaker design diy

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Symmetrically segmented wire-stator ESL's.

How to Make an Electrostatic Loudspeaker


In this posting, I address a range of electrostatic attributes. Naturally, in the process, I keep in mind our version of the first practical design -- the one that started it all in -- namely the original JansZen Wide Range Tweeter. This was developed by my father, Arthur A. Janszen, a few years before several others began working on their own embodiments. TLDR : Every company making electrostatics has its own approach, so each design in this category is a mixed bag of attributes -- mostly positive, some negative, and rarely indifferent.

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If you have an interest in audio there are plenty of opportunities for home construction of hi-fi equipment. You can make yourself an amplifier which will be as good as any available commercially, and plenty of the sources you might plug into it can also come into being on your bench. There will always be some pieces of hi-fi equipment which while not impossible to make will be very difficult for you to replicate yourself. Either their complexity will render construction too difficult as might be the case with for example a CD player, or as with a moving-coil loudspeaker the quality you could reasonably achieve would struggle match that of the commercial equivalent. It never ceases to astound us what our community of hackers and makers can achieve, but the resources, economies of scale, and engineering expertise available to a large hi-fi manufacturer load the dice in their favour in those cases. The subject of this article is a piece of extreme high-end esoteric hi-fi that you can replicate yourself, indeed you start on a level playing field with the manufacturers because the engineering challenges involved are the same for them as they are for you.

There are two basic routes available for DIY constructors. One of the best is Roger Sanders 'Electrostatic Loudspeaker Design Cookbook' (Refer to Links).

Electrostatic Loudspeakers: High End HiFi You Can Build Yourself

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Build an Electrostatic Loudspeaker

RELATED VIDEO: Homemade DIY ESL Speaker Electrostatic Test 1 Hifi

If you are a music enthusiast, finding a good speaker is certainly a must in order for you to appreciate the music better. One of the many choices people prefer these days are electrostatic loudspeakers or ESL. ESLs do not use electromagnet to emit sound efficiently. Electrostatic loudspeakers use high voltage electric field to emit statically charged membrane, therefore providing more linear and lower-distortion motion. An electrostatic loudspeaker has a huge, thin and conductive diaphragm panel, with positive and negative charged ends, enclosed between two conductive plates. When attached to an electrical current from a wall outlet, it creates an electrical field.

An electrostatic loudspeaker ESL is a loudspeaker design in which sound is generated by the force exerted on a membrane suspended in an electrostatic field. The speakers use a thin flat diaphragm usually consisting of a plastic sheet coated with a conductive material such as graphite sandwiched between two electrically conductive grids, with a small air gap between the diaphragm and grids.

Click link below to go to DIY Loudspeakers. This is meant to be a DIY project for the music loving hobbyist. Project Time 8 20 Hours. The crossover design can make or break any multi way loudspeaker. Speicher, John L.

As many of you know, I've been repairing Quad ESL's and other electrostatic speakers for nearly a decade now. I've always been wanting to build a set of ESL's from scratch that embody everything I want in a speaker system. I've built a number of prototype panels and such, and I've finally gotten enough critical mass together to finally put together a system that is really working well. Find More Posts by stokessd.




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