They keep saying "high quality" but the article does not justify that in any way.
It's an MIT press release. The major flaw of the article is that it does not link to an actual paper.
It's an MIT press release. The major flaw of the article is that it does not link to an actual paper.
In a way, they did. They said that the 1kHz tone was "high quality", which most likely means it reproduced the waveform they sent fairly accurately. Of course, it's not a complete answer, and I too would appreciate the actual paper.
"When 25 volts of electricity were passed through the device at 1 kilohertz (a rate of 1,000 cycles per second), the speaker produced high-quality sound at conversational levels of 66 decibels."
Not sure if it matters, but the fact that it's producing ~10x (2^3.333) the sound pressure (which is around 4x louder by human perception) at 10kHz vs 1kHz is vaguely concerning. It would require a fair bit of additional resistance to try and get a "flat" loudness across the spectrum, especially since human hearing is more sensitive at higher frequencies.
Absolutely doable, but it means the speaker film can't just be used out of the box.
No reason you couldn't put it ON a big ol' flat panel woofer (or whatever suitable shape is best). Then it becomes a coaxial, and maybe there are big wins along that path. If it's light, just sit it ON the bass driver and that does your excursion. The surface layer adds all the mids and highs.