Welcome
to my LaFolia Magnetostatic Planar Loudspeakers site, I
include material on how to build a pair of loudspeakers
developed in Denmark by Ole Thofte (he has written a few
mails to me in the past, all positive, luckily). It truly
is a great project. But be warned you might just get the
bug too and have at least 100 hours of your time sucked into
developing your own planar ribbon loudspeaker model, if you
do get the La Folia sickness, don't tell me I didn't warn
you! :-)
What are these things?
Many will be asking, "What the hell are Magnetostatic Planar Loudspeakers?" Take a look at the photo and you'll get a minimal idea of what I am talking about, check out the rest of the site and you'll know what I am talking about.
I can, first of all, immediately tell you
that it's the real down to earth short cut to Hi-Fi Heaven.
What makes this project so attractive is it's low cost,
extremely high end quality sound, a quality of sound that
would normally require at least 10 times more investment,
plus with the warm feeling that home-made dream speakers
bring to your ears, though as with all things in life you'll
have to live with the loudspeaker's low sensitivity and high
power requirements.
Secondly, on a more earthly level, I can
tell you it involves the same principles of normal run-of-the-mill
loudspeakers, only that instead of using a cone shaped diaphragm,
you use a flat stretched out membrane
on a MDF fibreboard frame;
instead of having a copper coil it uses a long flat thin aluminium
foil cut out in a specific design,
all within a homogenous magnetic field generated by normal
flat magnets, these magnets are upon a perforated
iron plate.
Thirdly, anybody can build these planar loudspeakers,
with no special skills other than patience, a few tools and
aprox. 500 US$, hard work and some common sense.
Fourthly, it's a proved principle, used by
many different High End Loudspeakers, including the famous
brands like Apogee, Magnepan, DALI, Carver, among others.
Can I build Magnetostatic Loudspeakers?
This is more than a mere experiment, it's
a proven DIY project with a great amount of knowledge behind
it, I personally learnt about this loudspeaker project
in Denmark, where this originated. I will quote many articles
from Danish magazines, where the planar loudspeakers were
dubbed "La
Folia". I can in no way claim authorship of this project,
I was just the first person to put this online, it will
hopefully help propagate this community project around
the world, and give us a bigger wealth of experience to
build upon.
I include detailed
information on the building of my
own La Folia Planar Loudspeaker model, which I
enjoyed everyday when I lived in Chile. I added
quite a innovations, which I feel are to a certain
extent original and different to the Danish projects
that I include. I have been out of Denmark since 1990,
so I have not had access to Danish innovations, I expect
some danes will contact me with more info. |
