The technology required to reproduce music through a set of speakers has come a long way in the past 80 years, and in recent years it has shrunk down to the point that you can get very decent sound out of a music player the size of a credit card. However, there’s one aspect of audible sound that has never been able to adapt to the needs of the portable generation of music players: bass sound. The subwoofer has always been a big unwieldy thing, and it has always been essential to truly high-quality sound reproduction. But a new breakthrough promises to change all that, offering true bass resonance in a tiny tube.