Less Filling! Sounds Great!
) or my voicemail. And then I snap back to reality with bizarrely overpriced flat-screen displays and no flexible solutions to low-profile high-performance speakers in sight. Well, maybe one.
NXT is a company whose business is "the invention, patenting, licensing and marketing of enabling technologies in sound and touch." For the purposes of this article, I'll focus in on the "sound" part, but I must say I am quite interested in learning a bit more about the "touch". The company has a wide variety of technologies in their patent and technology portfolio, but for now we're going to focus in on their SoundVu offering. Here is the company's official description of SoundVu:SoundVu application is a further development of NXT's SurfaceSound technology which enables the design and construction of completely transparent, ultra-thin loudspeakers that bring sound and vision together.
Sounds... neat. But what the heck does it mean to you? Well, it means any display on any device can also perform as a high-quality speaker. Every cell phone could have a built-in speakerphone. The PSP2 could be even smaller without the side speakers. And laptops could come without tinny little speakers that distort every squeak they try to emit.
NXT supplied LIVEdigitally with a NEC LaVie S laptop which does exactly that. I unpacked the laptop from its packaging, and booted up into a Japanese version of Windows XP. Fortunately, the universality of the Windows UI elements had me listening to my music through the screen in no time. That's no typo, the laptop has no visible speakers anywhere, and as soon as audio playback started, it was quite clear it was coming straight out of the screen. And it sounded even better than it looked (more on this later).
I decided the best way to compare the audio output was to play the exact same content from multiple devices, and hear what sounded best. I used three laptops and a pair of powered speakers. The laptops included a Toshiba Tecra 8000 (an old unit with top-facing speakers), my Dell Latitude D800 (quite new, with front-facing speakers), the LaVie S with the NXT SoundVu technology, and my favorite Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 2.0's. For content I used a combination of various music genres, including some Brubeck, Maroon 5, Barenaked Ladies, and Dvorak (click here for the best-ever performance of his New World symphony. Trust me on this one.), and listened to the same set of tracks over and over again.
Instead of a detailed review of each disc, and how each device performed, I can condense the formal analysis into the following: The Klipsch speakers still kick it (still only $99 on Amazon). The LaVie S laptop sounded great. The other laptops were un-listenable. In fact, after listening to the SoundVu-powered screen for a week or so, I found myself having trouble with a "normal" laptop now. Lucky I have my Shure E2C headphones around, otherwise I might have had to learn Japanese. I watched a couple of DVDs on the LaVie S. Sounded great too.
As for the NEC LaVie S laptop I think we all end up a little better off if I avoid writing too much about the unit itself. While it has nothing to do with the NXT technology, the laptop is so unbelievably large and ungainly it is like driving next to a Hummer while in, well, any other car (if you're the guy in the Hummer, have you taken a good look in the mirror recently? Go find that missing self-esteem somewhere else than on the roads). My D800 is a pretty big laptop on its own, but it looks like a hobbit compared to the LaVie S. Also, the laptop has a "3-D mode", which for me was an experience somewhat like turning on "migraine mode". 
Attention product marketing managers from HP and Dell who are reading this right now. Call up NXT, license SoundVu. Don't "pull a Toshiba" and include a subwoofer in your laptops (anyone remember that monstrosity?). Do it.
Attention consumers. Think about the increasing quantity of media consumption you are doing at your PC. You are willing to pay oodles of cash for nice-looking screens to treat your eyes. Why starve your ears along the way?
As far as my future home goes, it looks like the only thing I'm really waiting for is my super-dynamic virtual screen technology. With SoundVu from NXT inside, the speakers are ready to go whenever the displays are in. Read more about the LaVie S.
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