To many audiophiles, plasma speakers are becoming the holy grail of audio components, and there have been many attempts at making it practical. One of the more famous incidents involved legendary audio designer Nelson Pass, whose prototype full range plasma speaker led to ozone poisoning and a trip to the hospital. However, Pass was later quoted as saying,
It was the perfect high end audio product: Exotic, inefficient, expensive, unavailable, and toxic.
Now we have Richard from England who has a new version of a plasma loudspeaker. Richard incorporated tungsten tipped electrodes and 60,000 volts to make it work, but it supposedly delivers the goods. The available video shows it in operation, but don’t expect the YouTube video to capture the nuances of the audio delivery.
Richard claims that his version of the Plasma Speaker creates no ozone at all. If this is true it could spell good things for future plasma speaker marketability. If they do come on the market, I would strongly suggest that you keep the speaker intact, since the plasma voltage could kill (not unlike a flyback transformer on an older style TV set, but they were certainly a marketable product). Personally I would love to give such a speaker a listen in person, and judge for myself – I am curious if dust, moisture, and electrical activity from a pending storm could affect the sound.
Of course, you could always open up the case and have the coolest sounding bug zapper ever created. And perhaps the most expensive.
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