Tech That Flopped!


Every few months someone releases technology that seems to be revolutionary, but goes nowhere a couple of years later. Some tech gets acceptance and even imitation. Some goes wildly successful.

Ideas that are a huge success:
  • Acoustic suspension
  • Bass Reflex
  • Soft dome tweeters
Some ideas, well, it's not so clear:
  • Perfectly time aligned speakers ilke Thiel/Vandersteen
  • ESL
  • Line Arrays
  • Plasma tweeters
  • Transmission line
What tech have you seen come and go, was it worthwhile?

Best,

E
erik_squires
Ditto the original Intelligent Chip. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. 🐭

I just read the bit you wrote on it's function, etc (IIRC I've read it before). A bit complex for most, but I'm looking at it and see that is probably the most simple explanation that can be mustered.

I see zero wrong with the science of it (not that I'm an authority), but I'm not allowed to say that on an open forum lest I get ridiculed by ...  ...  ...
In related news, in science, as of today:

"Quantum theory has many strange features compared to classical theory," Richens told Phys.org. "Traditionally we study how the classical world emerges from the quantum, but we set out to reverse this reasoning to see how the classical world shapes the quantum. In doing so we show that one of its strangest features, entanglement, is totally unsurprising. This hints that much of the apparent strangeness of quantum theory is an inevitable consequence of going beyond classical theory, or perhaps even a consequence of our inability to leave classical theory behind."

Although the full proof is very detailed, the main idea behind it is simply that any theory that describes reality must behave like classical theory in some limit. This requirement seems pretty obvious, but as the physicists show, it imparts strong constraints on the structure of any non-classical theory.

Quantum theory fulfills this requirement of having a classical limit through the process of decoherence. When a quantum system interacts with the outside environment, the system loses its quantum coherence and everything that makes it quantum. So the system becomes classical and behaves as expected by classical theory.

Here, the physicists show that any non-classical theory that recovers classical theory must contain entangled states. To prove this, they assume the opposite: that such a theory does not have entanglement. Then they show that, without entanglement, any theory that recovers classical theory must be classical theory itself—a contradiction of the original hypothesis that the theory in question is non-classical. This result implies that the assumption that such a theory does not have entanglement is false, which means that any theory of this kind must have entanglement.



Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-entanglement-inevitable-feature-reality.html#jCp

The take-away is that all possible statements, theories and seeming rules of all objective scientific analysis all contain quantum entanglement. That entanglement is unavoidable and is in everything and all potential everything(s) to come. Which, as dominoes of logic fall and regarding falling in this line of thinking... means that objectivity is a fail.

That objectivity is not universal but in a localized bubble and outside of that, is, well, a pipe dream a forced projection, a non thing, in the overall analysis. A cute experiment and it can't and does not exist. Subjectivity is illustrated by the same dominoes falling, to rule the roost in all facets.

Tough to take for some, but that's now she rolls.
Intelligent Chip inside joke: at one time I halfway considered offering a recharging service for the Original Intelligent Chip, for which I was Principal Shill. My recharging service would have been $25. One of the perplexities of the Intelligent Chip was why it ran out of hits. It appeared to behave like a battery. The basic chip gave 10 hits then could be thrown away. The Original Intelligent Chip sold for $16. Anyone who doesn't see the joke raise your hand.

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Good suggestion on the Transmission Line.

Some of the best bass one will encounter, though not in the way most would expect and incredibly difficult to put into words.  But actually far more important on the midrange, and also far simpler to get right.

Speaking of technology Bud Fried espoused, series crossovers.  More important and impactful than transmission line.  Imparts a coherence / seamlessness and naturalness that the parallel network 99+% of crossovers never can.  Yet obviously, a technology that flopped...