ACOUstic SPAce DElimiter – Directional Sound System
The Acouspade Classic™ hyper directional sound system enables you to direct an audio beam to a specific point in the environment, thus making your content audible only at that specific location. While conventional sound systems will fill the whole area with its audio content, Acouspade™ puts you in control of where the audio can be heard, making it possible to address the public precisely where you intended to.
The Acouspade Classic™ speaker radiates sound in one direction only – as opposed to conventional speakers, which spread the sound into all directions. Acouspade™ acts like an audio spotlight and allows you to create your personal audio zone or enable different audio zones to co-exist in the same physical space, while preventing the different acoustic contents from mixing and interfering. The directional sound beam created by Acouspade can cut through noisy environments and deliver a headphone-like experience for the listener.
Applications
- Retail
- Digital signage
- Museum and gallery installations
- Fairs and trade shows
- Info-points
- Libraries
- Automotive applications
- Slot machines
- Mobile applications
- Hearing aid
Acouspade classic demo – acoustic music
Acouspade enables the use of acoustic advertising space by providing a solution to separating acoustic spaces of different audio sources in close proximity. It enables the creation of separated audio zones – filled with different acoustic contents – sharing the same physical space.
Acouspade Classic – mounting options
Spotlight mode
In case the Acouspade directional speaker is mounted on the same wall – on top or bellow the digital sign, it needs to point diagonally downwards or upwards respectively, in order for the directional audio beam to reach all possible heights of users. In this mode the sound can not always be heard at the exact same spot, since the listening spot will depend on the users height. In case of a digital-signage situation this should not be a problem since the listening spot will always be in front of the digital screen, but the distance of the sweet-spot from the screen will be determined by the person’s height and will vary within 1 to 2 meters. This mounting mode will also create more audible artifacts around the room, since the first surface (floor or ceiling) will be hit in a specific angle, which will reflect the sound to the next surface, and so on.
Sound shower mode
Ideally, the Acouspade directional speaker should be mounted on the ceiling, facing the floor. This creates a typical “sound-shower” situation, making the sound audible only at one spot in the room, while enabling it to be heard by people – of all heights – at the same spot. The sound-shower mode is also the best solution to minimize reflections of the sound and its audibility at different locations around the room. The sound starts to travel from the ceiling, bounces off the floor and is reflected back to the same spot at the ceiling, and so on.
Virtual speaker mode
A very interesting mounting situation is the “Virtual speaker mode”, where the speaker is not pointing directly towards the user. Instead, the speaker is pointing towards the digital sign, (or any other object that you want to draw attention to, by using directional sound) from which the sound beam bounces and arrives at the user indirectly. This situation makes it appear as if the sound originates from the object that it is being reflected from. The actual sound source remains hidden and is not noticed by the user.
Features
The Acouspade™ speaker offers highly directional distribution of sound, which is reproduced clearly – without distortion – even at high volumes. The sound is of high-quality, with low noise and great frequency response, which includes authentic reproduction of bass notes and frequencies as low as 150 Hz.
System
The new Acouspade Classic is a fully integrated system. The emitter already contains the amplifier and the signal processing system. It is a simple plug&play solution. Just connect your audio source device (such as portable music player, laptop, DVD-player etc.) to the speaker audio inputs and you are ready to go.
Colours
Acouspade is available in two different colours: black and white
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Acouspade Classic™ vs. Audio Spotlight®
A comparative research study on directivity characteristics of directional speakers, was conducted by JOANNEUM RESEARCH DIGITAL – Institute for Information and Communication Technologies in 2014. The results clearly show that the Acouspade directional speaker outperforms the Audio Spotlights by Holosonics in terms of directionality. Of all three tested speaker models, Acouspade creates the most narrow beam of sound. A paper about the results was published at the 40th Annual meeting of the German society for Acoustics. Download