Welcome
to my LaFolia Magnetostatic Loudspeaker site, I include material
on how to build a loudspeaker design 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 model, if you do get the La Folia sickness, don't tell
me I didn't warn you! :-)
Many will be asking, "What the hell is a Magnetostatic
Planar Loudspeaker?" 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
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 them, 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.
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 stereo speaker project
in Denmark, where this originated. I will quote many articles
from Danish magazines, where the project was 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 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.
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