Subscribe to WIRED Magazine
Gadget Lab

Klang Ultrasonic Speakers for Your Ears Only

These beautiful speakers can focus their beam of sound so tight that only you can hear it. In fact, you can tune each speaker to send sound to just one of your ears, giving true binaural stereo. It’s like wearing headphones, only without the headphones.

The Klang Ultrasonic Speakers are designed and built by Minnesota-based industrial designer Adam Moller. As you may have guessed from the name, they use ultrasound to do their magic, using a well known trick to direct the sound.

The tiny wavelength of ultrasound lets you send a very tightly focused beam out through the air. Of course, being ultrasound, the only person that will hear it is your dog. When the sound waves interact with the air, though, they cause that air to vibrate at audible frequencies and sound appears out of thin air, as it were.

Moller’s Klang speakers use a small, snail-ear-shaped proboscis to produce the sound, which is ten reflected by the hand-machined brass dish behind it. By changing the distance between the two, the beam can be tightly focused for your ears only, or allowed to spread and fill the room. Thus you can enjoy an ear-splitting action movie without your neighbors ever knowing.

The Klangs are a class project, and won’t be seen in stores. Sad, because these things look awesome, and the lack of paper cones means that I could put them in the bathroom for my morning shower sing-a-long. I would hear the original music but the Lady would be left to “enjoy” nothing but the pure sound of my voice echoing throughout the apartment. The lucky girl.

Klang Ultrasonic Speakers [Adam Moller]

See Also: