Why graphene speakers could become the audio industry’s new gold standard

We’ve heard a lot about graphene being a “wonder material” that could be used for smartphone casings and antennas, but now it seems that some engineers have found a way to incorporate it into audio speakers and headphones as well. Technology Review reports that University of California Berkeley researchers Qin Zhou and Alex Zettl have found that graphene is the perfect material for constructing speaker diaphragms, which typically work best when made from a thin material that reduces the need to conduct expensive and energy-consuming “damping engineering.”

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But given that most thin materials are also fragile, crafting a perfectly balanced speaker diaphragm can become challenging. This is where graphene comes in: It’s a two-dimensional material that measures just one atom thick and has been described by Nokia (NOK) as the “strongest material ever tested, having a breaking strength 300 times greater than steel.” In other words, it’s dream come true for audio engineers who are trying to construct the world’s best speakers and headsets.

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“The graphene speaker, with almost no specialized acoustic design, performs comparably to a high quality commercial headset,” Zhou and Zettl tell Technology Review. “Even without optimization, the speaker is able to produce excellent frequency response across the whole audible region (20 Hz~20 KHz), comparable or superior to performance of conventional-design commercial counterparts.”

This article was originally published on BGR.com