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BLESSED WITH THE
bone-crunching handshake of a used-car salesman, the R-rated vocabulary of
a drill sergeant and the potential innovative genius of a Thomas Edison
(Norris’s previous claim to fame was creating a forerunner to the
sonogram), Norris has an enthusiasm for his latest contraption that’s
infectious. He’s standing in a corner of
his cluttered San Diego office, holding a gizmo that looks something like
a retro-futuristic waffle iron with a portable CD player Velcroed to its
back. “Are you ready?” he asks, then points his invention directly at the
head of someone who’s just entered the room 10 feet away. “Now, can you
hear it? Can you hear it? Isn’t that unbelievable?” What the person across
the room hears is, well, unbelievable: all of a sudden, the sound of a
waterfall has materialized in his head. And, it turns out, no one else in
the room can hear it but him. It’s as if the sound is coming out of thin
air. As Keanu Reeves said in “The Matrix”:
whoa. |
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After more than
a decade of trial and error and about $30 million in R&D, the
63-year-old Norris may be on the verge of changing the world as we hear
it—and making some major money to boot. The Hyper-Sonic Sound System
(HSS), as he calls it, can take an audio signal from virtually any
source—home stereo, TV, computer, microphone, etc.—and convert it to an
ultrasonic frequency that can be directed like a beam of light toward a
target up to 100 yards away. Picture a car where parents can listen to the
Eagles while their kids wild out to Eminem in the back seat. This is big
audio dynamite—possibly the biggest breakthrough since modern speakers
were conceived 77 years ago—and Norris knows it. “It’s rare when you have
a Thomas Edison who actually gets fame and success in his own lifetime,”
he says with customary modesty. “This is a big, honkin’ hit.”
What’s the secret? In the range that human beings can
hear, sound scatters in all directions, like the light from an open flame.
Traditional speakers work by moving air; they rapidly vibrate the flexible
cones in your speakers to form sound waves. But no single speaker can
accurately reproduce the —full range of audible sound (approximately 20Hz
to 20,000Hz), so loudspeakers rely on separate units—large woofers for low
frequencies, small tweeters for high frequencies and midrange speakers for
the middle of the audio spectrum—to re-create the whole range of sound.
That works fairly well, but it also has some drawbacks, most notably
distortion from the multiple sound fields that become increasingly
apparent as you pump up the volume. Instead
of using a vibrating membrane like traditional speakers, the HSS
technology electronically converts audible tones into a pair of ultrasonic
waves at frequencies far beyond human hearing. But when the ultrasonic
waves interact after being processed by Norris’s creation, they reproduce
the original audible frequency. Even better, since the audible frequency
is being carried by those ultrasonic signals, it’s highly directional.
That means you can effectively “shine” a spot of sound wherever you want
it. What Norris has done over 10 years is to figure out a relatively
inexpensive way to combine the two ultrasonic signals to produce the
desired sound. Two weeks ago ATC start- ed limited production, and the
company’s small lab is already strewn with the devices. Prices are
expected to range from $600 to $900 per unit, depending on size.
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It’s easy to see how HSS could make
some magic. Imagine a home theater system optimized not for your entire
living room but for the club chair that you kick back in. Or a giant
nightclub with several different music areas on the dance floor, none of
them overlapping. But Norris has $30 million in costs to recoup, and HSS
isn’t yet perfected for the lower tones prevalent in music. So some of the
cooler stuff will have to wait while he hooks up with retailers and the
U.S. military for “Minority Report”-style applications: vending machines
that call out to you as you walk by; sonic “guns” that can incapacitate
the enemy with 150 decibels of sound without deafening the good guys. One
person who came away impressed is U.S. Marine Capt. Todd Gillingham, after
a recent demonstration for more than 40 military and law-enforcement
representatives. “For instance, it can send the tape-recorded sound of a
tank or explosion to another area to throw the enemy off,” he says. “I
don’t know about us acquiring this technology in any large quantities at
this point, but I do think it has great potential.” |
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Elwood (Woody) Norris may be
on the verge of changing the world as we hear it
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That’s music to the longtime inventor’s ears. After Norris
sold his first patent for $330,000 in the early ’60s, he quit college and
never looked back. His subsequent efforts range from an all-in-one
earpiece-microphone for hands-free mobile-phone use (sold to another
company for $1.5 million), the world’s smallest AM-FM radio (a modest
success) and a personal aviation device (a James Bond-like mini-helicopter
that has gotten off the ground, but has yet to truly take off). All this
and more can be perused at woodynorris.com, his hilariously
self-promotional Web site, where every article ever written about him or
his products—from publications like Popular Mechanics and BusinessWeek to
Playboy and Gallery—has been carefully scanned and posted. And Norris’s
outsize dreams extend to Hollywood; he likes to show off his sci-fi
screenplay about—surprise—the world’s greatest physicist. |
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Not everyone is a believer in the San
Diego inventor. A local newspaper characterized him as “a dream spinner
who regularly disappointed Wall Street with glowing predictions for
various electronic products that subsequently flopped.” Floyd Toole, vice
president of acoustical engineering at the high-fidelity audio company
Harman International, met with Norris several years ago and remains
skeptical. “It’s a party trick,” says Toole about HSS. “We don’t believe
it represents a paradigm shift in mass-market audio.” Perhaps Norris’s
harshest critic is former MIT Media Lab researcher Joseph Pompei, who’s
developed a rival product under the name Audio Spotlight (automaker
DaimlerChrysler is evaluating it in some concept cars) and accuses Norris
of everything from taking credit for the work of others to dubious
business practices, all of which Norris denies. “For over a decade,
[Norris has] promoted impressive-sounding technology of which he has very
little evidence of real understanding,” says Pompei. Norris shoots back:
“His unit is where we were five years ago.”
“You know Panasonic’s slogan ‘Just slightly ahead of our time’?” Norris
asks. “Everything I’ve ever invented has been about 10 years ahead of its
time. I know the reputation I have in San Diego: that I take too long on
these things, that nothing I’ve invented has ever made money. Well, this
will be my vindication.” The world will be watching—and
listening.
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