Graphene's future in Microphones?

[Antony Newman]

Stumbled on this article on using Graphene as a test material in microphones:

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-graphene-microphone-outperforms-traditional-nickel.html

With 15dB greater sensitivity - this bodes well for the future.

I guess scratch mikes could well 'inch up in quality, or that a smaller microphone could be created to meet the SNR of existing mikes.

AJ

 

[Christoffer Glans]

The cost of those mics will be astronomical. Graphene is a revolutionary material, but it costs so much to produce that anything great you use it for will cost a small fortune. And big things with it will cost exponentially on top of that.

 

[PatrickFaith]

Hmm .... interesting. This I think would be perfect in the $1 to $5k market, prices are all ready down to about $300 per disk for large condenser sizes. Where this could be huge though, is right now a high quality surround sound mic is around $12k and needs to be placed near what you want to mic; But this could be huge in almost creating a "hologram" to mic an entire space (i.e. with that type of sensitivity you could do phase arrays of mics to spatially get an entire room and then focus on a specific spot in post) which could drastically reduce the need for ADR. Even something like a school play, you could mic from the audience and then "focus" on the stage, and get a reasonable recording.

 

[Elsie N]

Hmm .... interesting. This I think would be perfect in the $1 to $5k market, prices are all ready down to about $300 per disk for large condenser sizes. Where this could be huge though, is right now a high quality surround sound mic is around $12k and needs to be placed near what you want to mic; But this could be huge in almost creating a "hologram" to mic an entire space (i.e. with that type of sensitivity you could do phase arrays of mics to spatially get an entire room and then focus on a specific spot in post) which could drastically reduce the need for ADR. Even something like a school play, you could mic from the audience and then "focus" on the stage, and get a reasonable recording.

This would be huge! Yet as the cost now stands I think such a mic would have to be a rental for most.

But having one mic to setup with multiple placing options... audio would be easy.

Thinking out loud... I wonder if they could make a less expensive lavaliere mic... and would it take something super-sensitive to record the sound.

 

[Antony Newman]

If you had asked my if Quantum computers would be created in my lifetime ... I would have probably lost my money betting against it (governments are currently shoring up the involvement to get a piece of the action).

Graphene on the other hand is being created - the race is on to minimise the wholesale manufacturing costs.

There is another 'exciting' material with even 'crazier' properties than Graphene .. and that is Q-Carbon. It manufacturing allows a substrate (lets say a sphere) coated with amorphous carbon ... zapped with a Laser, rapidly cooled .. and hay presto, you now have a sub-micron coating of a single-crystalline material that is harder than Diamond.

I mention this .. as I would expect the resonance to Also be considerably higher than existing microphone materials .. but where this 'shines' (it does do that btw ... ) is that it is also ferromagnetic.

This material might also find its way into drive unit material which the exposed surface (ie bass radiator) is part of the active motor...

AJ

Edit: Ref: http://www.researchgate.net/publica..._at_ambient_pressures_and_temperatures_in_air

 

[PatrickFaith]

This would be huge! Yet as the cost now stands I think such a mic would have to be a rental for most.
But having one mic to setup with multiple placing options... audio would be easy.
Thinking out loud... I wonder if they could make a less expensive lavaliere mic... and would it take something super-sensitive to record the sound.

Well, if a 30khz ping went out every 24th of a second, you'd have a convolution reverb map of the room (have a nice 3d image every 24th of a second). I was thinking initially that the mic had to be fixed, but if you had a 3d map of the mic with the room, you'd be able to move the mic and refocus based on the convolution calculation.

If you had asked my if Quantum computers would be created in my lifetime ... I would have probably lost my money betting against it (governments are currently shoring up the involvement to get a piece of the action).

Graphene on the other hand is being created - the race is on to minimise the wholesale manufacturing costs.

There is another 'exciting' material with even 'crazier' properties than Graphene .. and that is Q-Carbon. It manufacturing allows a substrate (lets say a sphere) coated with amorphous carbon ... zapped with a Laser, rapidly cooled .. and hay presto, you now have a sub-micron coating of a single-crystalline material that is harder than Diamond.

I mention this .. as I would expect the resonance to Also be considerably higher than existing microphone materials .. but where this 'shines' (it does do that btw ... ) is that it is also ferromagnetic.

There's already millions of tons of quantum computing going on so that's done in your lifetime (i.e. they have learned that photosynthesis photonic pumping is occurring through a quantum mirror type system that is figuring out best way to pump [aka traveling sales problem] the photonics lenses to the central photon accumulator which does the ATP conversion . This btw really cracked me up, in that all these guys where researching some "new breakthrough" which has been fully going for over a billion years.

On the ferromagnetic front, kind of reminds me of the old ribbon mics but with a strain gauge on a material (rather then the ribbon hanging free). Those concepts are around 100 years old, so just trading up to this new material could happen quicker then we'd think.

 

[Med D]

The article is not clear but I think they are only talking about sensitivity, not signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). System SNR may be the more important issue here unless you are specifically focused on the higher frequencies they are discussing.

 

[Joel Voelker]

Well, if a 30khz ping went out every 24th of a second, you'd have a convolution reverb map of the room (have a nice 3d image every 24th of a second). I was thinking initially that the mic had to be fixed, but if you had a 3d map of the mic with the room, you'd be able to move the mic and refocus based on the convolution calculation.

There's already millions of tons of quantum computing going on so that's done in your lifetime (i.e. they have learned that photosynthesis photonic pumping is occurring through a quantum mirror type system that is figuring out best way to pump [aka traveling sales problem] the photonics lenses to the central photon accumulator which does the ATP conversion . This btw really cracked me up, in that all these guys where researching some "new breakthrough" which has been fully going for over a billion years.

On the ferromagnetic front, kind of reminds me of the old ribbon mics but with a strain gauge on a material (rather then the ribbon hanging free). Those concepts are around 100 years old, so just trading up to this new material could happen quicker then we'd think.

I don't know what any of this means but it sounds exciting!