I first met Nelson Pass in 1980 (I was mistaken in the video when I said 1981) when he told me about his experimental Ion Cloud speaker. It was a diaphragm-less electrostatic design that used ionized gas instead of a diaphragm. Very high voltages were applied to tungsten filaments to ionize the air. Massively insensitive, the Ion Cloud needed kilowatts of power to get any sound out of it, it was said to be the most sonically transparent loudspeaker ever, but I never heard it. The biggest design hurdle was that it produced ozone gas, so much of it over the course of five days that it put Nelson in the hospital when he demonstrated the Ion Cloud at the 1981 winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Back then Nelson Pass was the President and Founder of Threshold, and was primarily an amplifier designer, so he used his Threshold 800A amp that could deliver up to 1,000 watts, and even with that much power the Ion Clouds didn’t get very loud.
Read about T Townsend Brown’s Ionic Wind, en.wikipedia.o...
Nowadays Nelson is head honcho for Pass Labs and First Watt.
www.passlabs.com/
www.firstwatt.com/
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10 сен 2024
