DIY Plasma Arc Speaker

[@power-max]

A singing arc, designed correctly, can actually achieve remarkable audio quality. Flyback transformers are probably not ideal, certainly not ones with built-in capacitors. If you can get one that operates best at around 44.1KHz and use a microcontroller instead with a PCM or I2S digital audio feed directly, or an ADC with analog input, then you will get superior audio quality. With a higher voltage and longer arc, you can get better low frequency response, although I found that longer arcs are less stable with turbulent air. I am also messing with one based on a cd4046 PLL using a half bridge with a tuned LC circuit and FM modulation. At 50KHz it produces "ZVS driver" results plus audio modulation.

[@davidrubio9352]

From 22hkz and up sounds good i use an Arduino pwm pin at 64khz and it work fine

[@lorim7487]

Indeed, in the 60s Fane developed the Ionofane tweeter which was apparently quite good. It used a 27MHz RF carrier if I remember correctly.

[@FantaBH]

Just wanted to write something similar when I seen this post, so my would be just another copy written on similar way.

[@500chimera]

Yes, that produces a circular field at the end of a metal horn so it 'loaded' the air better. The main problem with that and any other designs are the terminals. These are eroded so eventually the arc does not strike. The ionophane had a removable metal electode surrounded by a glass cylinder with an air gap between. The glass protected the outer electrode from being damaged but it was damaged and neded to be replaced along with the central elecrode. The ionofane produced ozone which was noticeable if you smelt near to the tweeter! The tweeter was used very succesfully by Bowers and Wilkinson in the P2H IIRC but could be bought as an independent tweeter

[@NeutronStudios1]

I use a NE555 timer at around 40KHz with an LM358 and mosfet driver and it sounds awseome!!! and it has BASS

[@julius6239]

Make a RGB Version of your ”GREAT SCOTT” intro

[@amitkumarsoni1065]

Try

[@nicholaslee722]

How about an electric arc version?

[@Zephyr-mist]

Yeee

[@JamieBainbridge]

The less I understand of your videos, the more relaxing your voice gets. This was the most relaxing video yet. Can you just talk about complex electronic theory for like 45 minutes? That would be like the Sleep To Strange podcast but even better. Please do.

[@tctrainconstruct2592]

10:33 You can improve the audio quality by setting the carrier frequency higher than 20 kHz.

[@giorgitsintsadze9919]

That's what I wanted to say. If anyone is wondering why luckily answer is simple. You can hear 10khz signal pretty easily. even when the PWM in not modulated (and has 50% duty cycle) you will hear it. But you will be having difficulties hearing a 20khz square wave!

[@robertcoulthard7461]

I love that you went through the whole thing in detailed and then tore it all apart at the end

[@kanadnemade]

#STOP Transformer Abuse!!!!

[@__mk_km__]

Make this into a hashtag

[@Yonatan24]

#Steellaminatedtransformersthatcontaincopperwireslivesmatter

[@wesss9353]

Found the abused transformer comment

[@InssiAjaton]

we played music on some of our welding power supplies. The first time I noticed the possibility was with a Swiss made Microplasma supply that could run with internal pulse frequency up to 1 kHz near square wave and rich harmonics. With external pulse command it operated up to about 2.5 kHz. Later on we built our own welders (Microplasma and TIG) that provided even higher pulse rates. In fact, one special version was used at a university weld lab up to 20 kHz. The benefit of the welder is in the plasma speaker situation that the welding arc is much “fatter” and thereby the “speaker cone” has a much larger surface. This is partly achieved due to use of argon gas instead of air. You can imagine that with higher current, the plasma column expands and with lower current it contracts. The expansion and contraction pushes the surrounding air, just like the speaker cone. However, I must state that the acoustic impedance at the argon/air interface is such that the peak response corresponds to about 1 millisecond rise times. Using argon plasma gas and helium around it as shielding gas shows somewhat different behavior, just like the “Mickey Mouse sound” you produce after breathing helium. Anyway, the sound volume is normally related to the pulse current, but as the plasma size also depends on the arc length, you get louder sound with longer arc. A Canadian company produced arc length controllers for TIG welding that modulated the current at 1 kHz and measured the sound with a microphone. It worked fine, but the welders hated the continuous 1 kHz noise. That made the sales not too “hot” success.

[@plasmatic7081]

You can also wind your own coil around the core of the flyback, and with that method you can achieve higher voltages on the secondary.

[@mateja176]

Legend says that Scott is so good that even if he didn't have "great" in his name people would call him "Great Scott".

[@Jl4zio]

I made one of these a few years ago with a TL494 Half bridge with a Line Output Transformer from a TV, wound a custom high voltage coil since current is more important than arc length for these. TL494 can PWM its output from an audio input. Pretty good chip for only costing 80 cents when I bought it. The mosfets were the expensive part.

[@zolatanaffa87]

Crazy way to hear music but interesting all the "howto" and the explanation. Thanks!

[@TDG2654]

I knew this was going to be good

[@krass76]

Very cool project! To get a better sound you'd need a faster PWM source. Like 44.1kHz territory or preferrably (much) higher. Because like this, the 10kHz are too loud to hear most of the signal, plus due to distortions from disregarding Nyquist, you outout a very mangled signal that only goes up to 5khz. Plasma spakers are best for high frequencies (starting at 4-6kHz maybe?) due to the low "air" volume that is actually moved. Magnat once made a speaker with plasma tweeters. But even they couldn't get rid of all of the smell of Ozone, the human nose is very perceptive there. They heated the air around the plasma tweeter to "cook away the Ozone", or most of it. Oh, and also you have a comparatively high noise floor compared to a regular tweeter.

[@bennyboi0115]

As soon as I saw the notification my face lit up with joy!! Love your videos dude

[@greatscottlab]

Thank you

[@bennyboi0115]

GreatScott! No thank you, for creating awesome content!

[@EDISONSCIENCECORNER]

Me too

[@Dr.Cosmar]

4:20 we went from applied electrical sciences to advanced fundamental physics in the blink of an eye. Things start looking like Egyptian when your this high, and people drop the knowledge that hard. I enjoy your content, thanks for making it.

[@iffracem]

Automotive ignition coils are actually two discreet windings, the primary (low impedance) is a relatively few windings of thick copper, the secondary (high impedance and big fat spark) is a lot of windings of relatively fine copper. The circuit is pretty much the same as you've drawn there.

[@hellishgrin4604]

I love these things, there used to be hundreds of these videos years ago.

[@N-hunter]

I may have no idea what you're talking about but I watch all your videos anyway. :-)

[@Stefano91ste]

Beautiful video, I'm going to make a music tesla coil in future;)

[@JoshuaRando]

Use Steve Ward's mini sstc schematic. It is really easy!

[@Stefano91ste]

I did not know him, thank you very much:)

[@sherifmohsen341]

@@Stefano91ste ElectroBOOM made it before

[@Tubaii25]

In case you can't find the proper pins of the flyback, you can always wind up a primary coil around the ferrite core on the outside

[@DanielsGameVault]

Make a CNC engraver :D X/Y control using whatever micro you like

[@kvlpnd]

Lukily I had a flyback transformer laying around …. :d Only you can have such luck. Again thanks for letting us dive into this world of electronics again.

[@raghuramanrajendran405]

very big fan of ur handwriting

[@koohoo4500]

Nyqvist freq is 40khz. And you should use square wave for testing. It exaggerates nonlinearities of your design. But as a proof of concept video is awesome as usual.

[@rvltn92]

Great job man! Always with new material, Greetings from Buenos Aires Argentina!

[@randomelectronicsanddispla1765]

A good practice with very high voltage transformers is to have a fix spark gap in parallel with the output to avoid internal sparking, when, in this particular case, the two wires are too far apart for an arc to form.

[@QuantumFluxable]

Cool video, but you should have added to be very careful with the CRT TV as obviously it uses high voltage too, so if it had been plugged in in the last year or so (pretty unlikely, I know) there might have still been some residual charge somewhere.

[@woldemunster9244]

Yeah, that is the only thing to "know" about when working with CRT:s, that DEADLY shock is the only reason that so many CRT:s are laying around. NOBODY want`s to touch them voluntarily.

[@fabiofoltran4361]

That's true but let's face it...even the older crts have bleeding resistors on the main caps. So if you haven't plugged it in before taking it apart XD you should be safe

[@fabiofoltran4361]

D2RG6 well...you should have checked the caps with a multimeter before desoldering or touching anything XD

[@chocolateman327]

i get the feeling this guy is a very productive stoner and (the word for when someone is very intrested in something and wants to understand everything about it). im not alone with this thought right? lemme know Scotty ol' pal! :doublefumbs up:

[@camilomason4560]

Thank you so much for doing a tutorial on the TL494!! I've had it for a while but couldn't figure out how to use it.

[@greatscottlab]

You're welcome

[@JohnLee-bf2ux]

Any video that has high Voltage is exciting to learn about

[@stephendavies923]

I love your ideas and videos but I have to let you know that in the UK at least, they were known as Line Output Transformers with regard to televisions. My credentials for saying this is as a television engineer for over 6 years in the industry in the 80's. I do sometimes wander how the younger generation, learning electronics, can manage to get what we called a little tickle these days considering most devices are low voltage and power :-) We had much fun!

[@eramsorgr]

Love how at the outro you used the Plasma speaker for the background music ;) Clever!

[@Xenro66]

If you do try this again, I would suggest increasing the carrier frequency beyond 20kHz. There's a clear sinewave at around 13kHz that you can hear and it's not very pleasant to listen to. Fun project though!

[@FriedEgg101]

This is cool, great vid. I didn't even know it was possible tbh, although I understand why it is.

[@marigotso]

I touched it, the bass feel was great.

[@theschnilser7962]

That's the project I've been waiting for 😳

[@aidanwansbrough7495]

That looks awesome!

[@surajdey5993]

Love your electronics projects..It helps me a lot to learn something new as always..And additionaly your english is very desirable..

[@Crisdapari]

Another cool speaker using high voltage are those electrostatic speakers. And some people use it on hi-fi stuff. Maybe those had better performance and less shock risk

[@derSkedda]

The arc definitely has a crisp high end.

[@Fat_Paws]

I did not understand any of the technical info. But it looked like a fun project for people who do.

[@MIHAIALBERTVLĂDESCU]

he has the best friend ever

[@UpcycleElectronics]

You should try making a Magnetometer to measure the flux properties of a transformer core. There are a couple of example projects about them about halfway down my "Fundamentals Power Supply" publicly listed playlist. If I recall correctly, the 3 videos from Eric Goodchild have an example where he used a linear hall effect sensor to create a magnetometer for measuring a transformer like this. Thanks for the upload ;) -Jake

[@aswinnb1012]

About time for a new intro.Great video anyways

[@FirechipAcademy]

Hay I LOVE *flyback transformers* good video

[@markmark2961]

That coil drawing

[@AbhishekThakur-wl1pl]

I'm watching your videos since when you were at 220k subs. Love to see you pass 1M anytime soon. 👍Awesome projects btw keep going.

[@whysoclever]

Thanks for the sponsor I needed that

[@lenoillionel2342]

I enjoyed every minute of it.. you are awesome on electronics

[@stevetobias4890]

Would be cool to have a visual speaker that had the volume and safety to be around kids. Similar to those plasma balls that you can touch.

[@PierAisa]

If you want still use the ignition coil as transformer you should choose the resonance frequency with appropriate caps and then you should transfer enough energy also at higher frequencies. Regards

[@zlatkovnik]

Great Scott amazing video once again, keep them coming. Can we get a DIY Arduboy next video?

[@julioda5914]

I would make the frequency higher to eliminate the 10 kHz annoying noise, like 25 kHz where the human can't hear.And by the way I admire you XD

[@kissingfrogs]

That was fun. Thanks for making.

[@benjaminbrown3874]

You're a great schematic drawer!

[@johndoe528]

I was able to make one very simply by winding wire (12 ga, ~10 turns) around the exposed portion of the flyback core, connecting this to the output of an off the shelf audio power amplifier, and then driving that with a 20khz tone and whatever audio wanted to play on the same channel.

[@speedsterh]

Super interesting video ! My favourite in a long time

[@wiredsotu19]

Cool man!!! Waiting for next video.

[@danieltena5098]

Nice work. If you let me, I'll suggest to you a DIY or BUY video from heating plate for reptiles or aquarium.

[@jonashabicht310]

Wer IFA fährt, fährt nie verkehrt!💪

[@MCsCreations]

Awesome, dude! I bet that would be amazing if the high voltage wires were put inside a light bulb...

[@MrRishik123]

Eyy fellow grandad is an old man viewer

[@nxtfun]

Could you make ultrasonic directional speaker someday? Amazing videos!

[@nosafetyswitch9378]

Nice video. Just a small confusing bit thought. You refer to the Toff period of the switch as dead-time which can be confusing as I have always encountered dead-time as the time interval between the switching of synchronous switches when none of them is turned on.

[@zaidhussain5206]

Thank you for sharing this project

[@benreeves1908]

Why didn't you use a PWM control frequency above 20kHz so it wouldn't be audible?

[@greatscottlab]

Because the CRT TV flyback transformer was not happy to work with such high frequencies.

[@benreeves1908]

@@greatscottlab whoops I just got to that part of the video!

[@ПрохорМакей]

GreatScott! I connect transformer to 30 and more khz. In TV they work on 17-40khz. 2000нм or other working not bad in this fre

[@b10s]

I was thinking that too :D Ideally he would use a frequency of 40kHz or more (because carrier frequency must be at least double of the signal frequency) which would properly carry the whole human audible range up to 20kHz

[@ПрохорМакей]

B10S warning! Bad English:3 people, who age more 30 ears don't audible frequency more 15-20khz.(only for men). But if you use Ionophone in shcool, children says:"Dear dude please off this wundervaffle)))". Я из России. Balalayka, Vodka, Medved xD

[@prathameshdighe1485]

Plasmas always badass and awesome

[@alphajuice]

Wow finally! Great video..!

[@GuiRib1707]

WOW, great job, i love it so much

[@parameshpavin2708]

Another successful video👍

[@walterbunn280]

Ehhh.... I can actually agree that arc speakers are less than ideal, but... I don't know if an inductive speaker setup is the best way to do this. You can do something similar to this using a Cockcroft-Walton generator circuit. There's both a full wave and a the half wave version. Full wave have higher capacitance, but require slightly more components. If you go with a CW generator, the whole plasma discharge can be switched on and off with a high voltage mosfet, which would prevent the annoying high pitched whine that's common with plasma speakers. Finally, just kind of a thing to note: This is similar to making a microwave emitter. to make one of those, you need a high voltage discharge (it doesn't matter if it's ac or dc), and an inductive element capable of holding electrical power and quickly discharging it. Oxygen does kinda quench microwave emission, but you can still get some microwaves coming off of a high enough voltage discharge. Especially if there's enough sustained discharge to have a significant amperage.

[@mechanic3318]

Beautiful video.... Great scott...

[@rimbacahyo8362]

Amazing, you are always work hard for every project n good documented

[@publicmail2]

In US NTSC the flyback operated at 15.75Khz and about 32Kv, very interesting experiment although the freq. response of an arc is poor.

[@ceneblock]

Combine this with The Arc Loghter and then you got something really cool!

[@ATLaboratory]

Great!! Please controll your schematic carefully, since you are using a flyback transformer the connection of the freewheeling diode is wrong;) also you can see that it is a flyback transformer from the internal schatic of the high frequency transformer that you show at minutes 9:34 in the video, there is already a flyback diode inside the secondary side of the transformer

[@electron-1979]

The turns ratio of a step-up transformer will be slightly less than the resistance ratio, as the secondary windings will be thinner

[@R3MIXMODZ]

Once again, great Vid! However, im still a noob and dont understand anything you say because its too advanced but I enjoy the content still!

[@sergiojacome]

Great project as always... Now just build the electrostatic speaker and the d-c multiplier and make another great video...

[@ArdaAslan3172]

Great video as usual!

[@Krabat693]

My suggestion to escelade that, is to modify an arc lighter with an singing plasma arc.

[@Darktimerq]

Thanks for the video thought you forgot about this after i suggestsd it on fb

[@JuNKiEtekke]

als ob du simme fährst geil mach weiter so nices vid

[@umarasghar8454]

Love your videos

[@brainfornothing]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing !

[@digitalelectronics9017]

Sir, the video is super.....

[@WildfoxFabrication]

9:30 I like how you say “googling”

[@sarojpatel6485]

That is something i haven't expected ! Keep it up ! I was wondering if you could do a video on how to make a MP3 player with a display . I be thankful to you if you do that

[@phanthanhson728]

The ignition coil part is neary as the same as taser of ElectroBoom video!

[@greatscottlab]

True

[@wychowanek90]

I'm wondering how many people watch both

[@pranshupant1413]

ElecroBoom and Great Scott! Collab would be awesome

[@MrLucidity]

I would willing to bet a lot of us watch both... Great Scott shows us what to do, and Electroboom shows us how not to do it =)

[@stoatrepublic]

Can you imagine this here in the UK if the Fuzz's Tasers Played the theme tune of the BBC series "The Bill" every time they used it on the streets.

[@MysteryofScience]

we can also generate this high voltage using EHT used in cro tvs

[@sidyajv]

Nice project

[@olegyakovlev7319]

Hey Scott, You can fix this smashed dome on your speaker with vacuum cleaner.

[@plasmatic7081]

Hell yeah! high voltage!

[@roanyrocker]

Very good Scottt ;)

[@nursultanisrailov3713]

Ssstay creative and I will ssseee youuu next time 👍

[@GRBtutorials]

0:15 I see you couldn't resist the temptation of pushing down the speaker's cone...

[@MIW_Renegade]

Everyone pushes in a dust cap at some point

[@AidenJooMV]

7:44 Quite Perfect sawtooth wave

[@electronic7979]

Excellent

[@joaoolavoleite]

I think the reason it didn't work is the core material for the transformer. The core material in this case is probably silicon steel, which isn't recommended for higher frequency applications. In this case a transformer made of ferrite would perform much better.

[@AabhasLall]

There is also a nice way to identify the correct pins for the primary of the flyback using the classic bug-fucker... sorry, bug-zapper circuit. Once hooked up with the electronic ballast for tube lights, it can give pretty sweet arcs on the secondary. Be aware tho, I touched that and it is not good.

[@kanepoisson4548]

I for my 8th birthday got a plasma ball that could listen to music and play it with its ark