Made out of Plastic Waste, Ecopixel’s Ghetto Blaster Speaker Impresses with Sound
While plastic pollution has become a huge obstacle in environmental preservation, many people are recycling plastic and giving it a new lease of life. Jan Puylaert has designed Ghetto Blaster, a vented Bluetooth stereo, for Italian company Ecopixel, which develops recycled plastic materials for use in architecture and design.
Image: Ecopixel
Made out of recycled plastic, Ecopixel’s Ghetto Blaster offers top-quality sound in a stylish, portable design. Comprising a 240 watt (120-watt AES/RMS) 5,5” coaxial speaker, it also utilizes a new sound-absorbing material that is made from recycled plastic as well.
Through their continuous research into waste plastic, Ecopixel has recently created a new variety of materials based on a ‘multiple layer’ concept. The approach makes it possible to produce a single material that builds up in different layers.
Several layers with diverse concentrations or even with different basic qualities can be united. This adaptation provides numerous prospects, one of which involves a sound-absorbing material.
Image: Ecopixel
A softer, roughly shaped inner layer and a higher density, or stiffer outer layer helped to create a new material with high sound-absorbing capacity. Named ‘audio’, this material has proven perfect for loudspeaker enclosures especially since Ecopixel can be formed into any design.
Collaborated with sound engineer Joseph Szall, an Italo-Hungarian specialist, the research and testing of Ecopixel’s new material guided to a spherical-shaped stereo. For its first edition, Ecopixel incorporated a simple Bluetooth receiver in order to provide high-quality music without instructions.
To achieve the final product, the latest Italian-made coaxial speaker units, featuring neodymium 1,5” treated silk dome-tweeters and 5,5” rubber surround double asymmetric damped cone woofer (DAR), a frequency response from 70hz to well over 20khz were used.
Image: Ecopixel
The amazingly clean bass response was attained through the ‘audio’ material enclosure, which with very little extra sound absorbing material translates the electrical input into a warm but firm and clean bass sound.
The design includes divided calculated vented pipes for DX and SX channel point in both directions, as well as DX and SX speakers, point to opposite directions creating special stereo effects playing with various wall-reflection possibilities.
The particularly developed 6/12 dB crossover filter separates woofer from tweeter at 3.500 Hz. The cylindrical-enclosure integrates a handle for easy portability.
