THE JAPANESE company Canon is planning to establish an audio company
in Britain to produce a new high-fidelity sound system. The product is called
鈥榳ide-imaging stereo鈥�, although its originality may be in doubt.
Canon鈥檚 new project is the brainchild of Hirokazu Negishi, an audio
enthusiast who believes his ideas are new. He has filed a European patent
application (320 270).
Conventional stereo systems require the listener to sit in a relatively
small area of the room if they are to hear good stereo sound. Like others
before him, Negishi wants to enlarge this so-called 鈥榮weet area鈥�, although
previous attempts have simply diluted the stereo effect wherever the listener
is sitting.
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The crux of Negishi鈥檚 idea is a pair of loudspeakers which, instead
of firing sound horizontally at the listener, fire vertically upwards onto
audio mirrors shaped like cones, which turn the sound through a right angle.
Canon claims that it has come up with a new idea in giving the conical
sound mirrors dimensions that juggle sound to widen the area of stereo effect.
But the company may find it difficult to patent the idea.
Gilbert Briggs, a British audio pioneer who founded the Wharfedale loudspeaker
company, published a series of books in the early 1960s which described,
among other things, how to build a loudspeaker from a sewer pipe. All the
designs by Briggs relied on a loudspeaker firing upwards onto a conical
mirror.
