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Singing Tesla Coil
Hello Msysta ,
I think if you go to the website listed below it should answer all your questions.
http://www.roger-russell.com/ionovac/ionovac.htm
This type of loudspeaker became available in the mid 1955's
Regards ron -
Go over to 4hv.org - the main site for serious Tesla & HV type nutters (its my main haunt!)
Plasma speakers are a subset of what goes on there, but every few weeks someone builds a new one. They work by having a very small, and thus extremely high frequency tesla coil (or similar HF & HV generator) - typically running at several MHz - which is then interrupted at whatever audio frequency you want to carry to the user - the TC has to run at HF so that any background hiss is minimised. Getting good quality is hard as straight PWM is not generally enough, and amplitude modulation of TCs is generally very hard too. Note that these are obviously solid-state TCs - either SSTCs or DRSSTCs, some are class E coils such as in the video above - as traditional spark-gap TCs have a very low beat rate and can't operate in CW mode (which is what you must have for a plasma speaker). My small TCs run at about 200kHz so don't do good audio...
Note this guy's TC runs at 1MHz which is quite low for this application - the audio quality is pretty poor and the background hiss is very apparent. Most good plasma speaks I've seen run at about 5MHz...
Nice project plasma speaker based on a flyback transformer driver:
Plasma speaker done right (Original project thread)
Me in the background and my son getting zapped!
My current uDRSSTC project
Have a look round 4HV - there are loads of plasma speakers and audio modulated TCs. ISTR that diyaudio.com also had a few.
Cheers
NickComment
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