A new technology developed in the ISU Research Park allows music listeners to use almost any hard surface as a speaker — with a unit the size of a tea cup.

Shell Shocked Sound, a division of ETREMA Products Inc., recently introduced its XDrive and DDrive products as a new design for commercial speakers.

When the units are set on a table, the surface seems to sing out music or any other sound input. Moreover, the volume is seemingly consistent at every location on and around the table.

“Our technology is solid-state, meaning there are no moving parts in it,” said Steve Saint-Vincent, president of Shell Shocked.

The large speakers found in modern sound systems are fundamentally different from Shell Shocked’s products, Saint-Vincent said.

“A conventional speaker has what’s called a moving coil attached to the base of the speaker cone,” he said. “This is what makes us completely unique.”

Saint-Vincent said the magic for the small, low-power speaker technology is in a material developed by the U.S. Navy in the 1970s called Terfenol-D. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Lab and Iowa State, however, are responsible for much of the research on the material in the last 25 years, he said.

“Ames Lab figured out the metallurgical process on how to make this material,” he said. “The governing physics behind it — a lot of that work is done at ISU.”

Saint-Vincent said Terfenol-D is a magnetostrictive material, meaning it can be physically manipulated by a magnetic field, a process that takes place inside the XDrive and DDrive speakers.

Rick Kellogg, graduate student in aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, said that property is what makes Terfenol-D and other similar smart materials intriguing for a variety of applications.

Saint-Vincent said ETREMA was formed in 1988 to work on ways to bring ISU and Ames Lab research on Terfenol-D and other materials to the commercial market.

Saint-Vincent demonstrated a mock-up living room with speakers on the walls, floor and ceiling to create a “surround-sound” effect.

“The technology is very forgiving,” he said. “It turns out the things that work well are things like drywall.”

The XDrive and DDrive systems are used as in tandem, Saint-Vincent said, because each is designed to project a certain frequency of sound.

The DDrive, he said, is a high-frequency device that produces a sound “like a tweeter,” while the XDrive provides sounds at lower frequencies.

Shell Shocked Sound is retailing each product for $199, Saint-Vincent said.

The research and marketing at Shell Shocked Sound is just one of many ways Terfenol-D can and is being used, however.

Saint-Vincent said technological advances like XDrive and DDrive are the result of the many years of research at Iowa State and elsewhere since the Navy’s initial discovery.

“The time from innovation to commercial application is decades,” he said.