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Introduction 
If
you've ever sat alone on some isolated rural hillside and soaked up the silence
you've probably also come to appreciate jut how noisy our everyday lives are.
Revving car engines, beeps from mobile phone keypads and those blood curdling,
teeth grinding ring tones. Annoying they may be, but sounds of all kinds have
become such an integral part of our lives we probably couldn't live without them
even if we tried. Smoke alarms may save our lives, public service announcements
may save our time and relaxing music may save our sanity, and if we've got to
base our lives so heavily on sound we may as well try to make the experience as
pleasurable as possible. Even the most stirring of classical
music performed by the world's greatest orchestra can sound like a cat being strangled
if you do it the disservice of piping it though cheap, poorly made speakers. Unfortunately,
high quality speakers, particularly those able to do justice to low frequency
sound, are inherently large. This may not be a problem for your home Hi-fi or
desktop computer but for portable devices like CD or MP3 players and laptop computers
large speakers are not really an option. So what's the alternative? Well, if it's
for private listening quality can be almost assured by using earphones but for
anything else the unfortunate fact is that you're probably going to have to settle
for tinny, lackluster sound cranked out by tiny speakers with little or no range. The
product I'm looking at today aims to change all that. Based on NXT's flat panel
speaker technology, audio industry gurus TDK have introduced a range of combined
speakers and CD wallets that aim to tackle the problems of portability, functionality
and sound quality head on. Here's the numbers: 
What
is NXT Technology? New Transducers Ltd. (NXT), is a wholly
owned subsidiary of Verity Group Plc and their SurfaceSound flat panel loudspeaker
technology has been licensed to hundreds of companies to be used in a variety
of devices from mobile phones to large speaker panels. Since
the traditional loudspeaker was invented over 80 years ago the technology has
remained virtually unchanged with a piston driven diaphragm being responsible
for setting up the pressure waves that we hear as sound. Where SurfaceSound  differs
is that it uses specially designed exciters to create ripples in the surface of
the material being used by targeting its resonant characteristics. The advantages
to this kind of speaker technology is that they tend to be much less directional
and also show a lessened fall-off in sound pressure with distance. But
can a sound wave created in this way really rival a genuine, piston based speaker?
Past experience suggests not but maybe this is as much about acceptable compromises
as it is about setting new standards in sound fidelity. | 
