Musical instruments and transducers are quite different things, so I don't believe the articles for plasmaphone and ionophone should be merged, any more than we would want to merge the article for microphone with the article for aerophone. Although a microphone can be used to record sound from an aerophone, and in fact a microphone is the optimal pickup for an aerophone, just as an ionophone can be used as a pickup to electrically amplify the sound from a plasmaphone, the use of the same state-of-matter (air or plasma) does not alone make sufficient grounds for merging the articles.Glogger (talk) 23:04, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
- Are they that different, though? This article says that an ionophone is most commonly used for generating sound, not recording it - this matches the description at plasmaphone. Zetawoof(ζ) 05:32, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
An ionophone is a type of loudspeaker. So if we merge ionophone and plasmaphone, would we also merge loudspeaker and aerophone? A loudspeaker is an air-based transducer that produces sound in air, and an aerophone is an air-based musical instrument that produces sound by way of air. Likewise an ionophone is a speaker, but a plasmaphone is an acoustic musical instrument. The two are quite distinct, and thus, I believe, ought to be covered in separate articles so that these two very different concepts are not confused or conflated. If we merged loudspeaker, microphone, and aerophone, it would produce a similar confusion99.231.69.8 (talk) 02:05, 29 December 2007 (UTC)