Sound Tech Taps Helicopter-Silencing Effort

Jan. 10, 2008 -- A failed effort to soften the noise from British military helicopters led to a breakthrough enabling surfaces from mobile telephone screens to car roof liners to be turned into stereo speakers.

The technology was sold to Cambridge-based NXT, which christened it "SurfaceSound" and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more.

"The UK ministry of defense was experimenting with a way to dampen the sound in helicopters and developed a honeycombed material that did the opposite -- conducted sound," James Bullen of NXT told AFP.

A prototype of a folding flat-panel speaker about the size of a pocket journal and 14 millimeters thick was among creations NXT showed off at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Bullen flipped open a Butterfly speaker made by Iqua Ltd. and plugged in an iPod Nano. An instant later, Frank Sinatra's voice belted out richly in NXT's suite in the Las Vegas Hilton.

Between the Butterfly and a view of snow-capped mountains outside the desert city was a Gateway all-in-one computer with a transparent "SoundVu" screen that doubles as a speaker for music or online conversations.

The screen aims music directly at computer users while not interfering with what they are seeing on the screen.

The screen can be divided into as many as six different speaker zones, meaning someone could have online chats with a half dozen people at once.

Toyota has SurfaceSound in the head liners of four of its car models and the material is used in screens of some mobile telephones available in Japan, according to NXT, which licenses the technology to electronics makers.