Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made

Re:Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made by dsr_ on Monday July 25, 2016 @04:28PM (#12161385)

There are a lot of speaker designs. To begin with: how much power do you have available? If you need to depend on the power from the phone line, you need a very efficient speaker -- a horn design, most likely. If you have an external power source, you get a better amplifier, and you can use a less efficient dynamic speaker. What do you put it in? You can leave it unsealed; you can port it carefully; you can seal it in a box -- but what size box?

Turns out that the characteristics of the speaker and the size of the box together determine the performance of the speaker.

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Re:Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made by thelazydogsback on Monday July 25, 2016 @05:00PM (#12161587)

And, if they did hang out at Radio Shack, they would have come across the venerable Minimus-7 - one of the first examples ever of a high-performing micro speaker with a sealed-enclosure design, that still stands up to the test of time.

http://www.retrothing.com/2011/06/minimus-speaker.html

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Re:Polycom’s co-founder on the best investment he ever made by thelazydogsback on Monday July 25, 2016 @04:52PM (#12161535)

They weren't using the POTS line for power (though I remember holding the leads when a ring signal came in - quite a shock! - seemed like the NYC local-loops must have had a RI# of about 20 at the time...) -- and they weren't just building a speaker - they were building a speaker in the same enclosure as microphones, so physical isolation seems like it would be top on the list. (Though even that would have only helped with freqs <= a few hundred Hz, so their active cancellation would still be key...) No big deal - it just "seems" obvious, but I wasn't there...

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