The Inside Scoop (Score 5, Informative)

I'm the guy who originally dug up the Eminent over at http://www.sonicflare.com/ before I wrote the companion article on ohgizmo.com (which looks dead from a quick and painless /. death...). I'm a blogger, not an engineer, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about (par for course, right) but I did talk to the creator Bruce Thigpen a few days ago about his crazy invention: Yes, it's real. Yes, you can "hear" it below 20hz. No, it doesn't blow women's clothes off...yet. The way the TRW 17 (Thigpen Rotary Woofer model #17) works is the fan spins at a constant speed but the fins themselves rotate back and forth to change the frequency. Also, you don't just set this up in your living room and crank up the volume. It has to be installed in an adjacent space like your attic or basement which then becomes the actual subwoofer enclosure, firing through a chainsawed hole into your main listening room. The TRW was demoed at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest a couple weeks ago and the reviewers from established audio publications were actually frightened as the walls started to pulse in and out at about 10Hz. Wimps. But the surprising discovery was the sound wasn't booming or nasty, just frighteningly "there." The TRW 17 is advertised with +/- 4dB of distortion which is awesome for any subwoofer, let alone one that covers 1Hz to 30Hz. And here's the good news: Bruce told me there's a cheaper version in the works. Not cheap like free beer, but not 13 grand. Also, there is a car version in the works that, no doubt, has Luda all hot and bothered. A "normal" version is also planned -- normal like a subwoofer the size of a refrigerator but still better than converting the den into a boom machine. So you know, no actual music was played at the RM audio fest. It was purely a proof of concept, though it's claimed to work perfectly for music and HT. I haven't talked to Bruce in a few days (no doubt rappers are all up in his biz after I posted it on Monday) but I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of the TRW 17 soon. Pictures of installations and live reports: http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/eminent-tech-tr w-17-part-2.php Josh