[Skywise]

wrote in :

Which leaves building something like a solid state video camera for
audio.

One could build a 32X32 pixel audio imager with 1,024 cheap microphones
like these for $0.27 in quanties of 1,000:

http://www.mouser.com/catalog/specsheets/KT-400332.pdf

Follow those with a little amplification/buffering, a switch matrix, and
dump the output into a PC sound card with appropriate software.

And voila, you have an audio imager.

With this design you'd need an audio input for every microphone.
A typical sound card only has 2 inputs (stereo) so you'd need
512 audio cards. And then processing all those signals? Yikes!

Rather, have a microcontroller scan your 1024 inputs and send
the values to the PC via USB, where software then assembles the
input into an image.

OH, very important point. Each pixel would be generating a value
based on sound volume. Frequency would have to be discarded, so
this would be a 'monochrome camera'. You could expand to three
inputs for each pixel with each of a different bandwidth, then
that could give you 'color' when represented as RGB.

Brian
--
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