10FEATURE A Society with Health and Longevityazunori Sato’s invention was a product of fortuity. Just as he was thinking about doing something for the elderly, including his own father, who are hard of hearing, he had a eureka moment when he learned from an acquaintance that older people can hear better from old-style phonographs with their flared-horn speakers than they can from normal audio speakers. Focusing on the “bend” in the horn of the phonograph, Sato developed a “barrier-free sound,” The “Mirai Speaker” developed by SoundFun Corporation, a venture in Tokyo, has captured attention for being easy to hear, even for seniorsthrough trial and error with an engineer, that differs from the concept of conventional speakers to make it more audible to hearing-impaired people. In 2015, the Mirai Speaker was released. “It sounds completely different” says Akemi Kumagai, a woman with a serious hearing impairment, who collaborated in the development of the speaker and who herself uses it connected to a TV. “Even without raising the volume, the speech sounds impressively clearer, as if it were spoken with emphasis.” The Mirai Speaker of SoundFun is characterized by the fact that it reproduces speech much more clearly than conventional speakers. Moreover, as the sound attenuation over distance is very small, there is no risk of people’s words being drowned out by surrounding noise even over a wide area. The secret lies in the curved diaphragm. “Compared with conventional speakers, which use a conical diaphragm that emits sound from a single sound source, the sound, coming out of a curved Unconventional Speakers Deliver More Than WordsK
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