Invisible Speakers

We understood the importance of the architect and design professional, who were often involved in a project months before the audio/video guys were brought in. I will never forget having my first company meetings with our designers expressing concerns about the aesthetics of the components and speakers that our audio consultants were proposing to our joint clients.

At the time, there were various architectural speakers that could be installed in the ceiling, in the wall, or on the wall. But when the designers were specifying chandeliers that were the center piece of a room, they would not compromise on the fact that we also needed to install speakers with visible grills in the same ceiling. Needless to say, the cost of the chandelier and the impact of that piece often took precedence over a pair of speakers on the project. There were more times than not that we had to compromise a client’s music needs with that of their design needs. Rooms that should have had sound, such as parlors, dining rooms and kitchens where people gather often had the speakers removed from the design project. That’s when I started looking into invisible speakers and found that there were products out there, but most of them didn’t perform well except for low-volume background music.

Fast forward 15 years later, and now I’m working at Harman Luxury Audio with some of the greatest engineers in the world who have access to the greatest resources in the industry. In short, we now have the ability to make invisible speakers sound great. And that’s how the JBL Conceal series was born.

JIM: People were using invisible speakers, but the sound quality was really compromised, and that’s part of the reason that the category wasn’t gaining a lot of traction. We knew if we could take the aesthetic benefit of invisible speakers, which eliminates what we call the “wall acne” of grilles all over the wall and the ceiling, and combine that with great sound, we’d have a product that would be very appealing to the design community and their clients.

DAVE: We didn’t want to settle by just launching another in¬visible speaker into the market— we weren’t going to change the design world with that. Our goal was to approach and even match the performance of conventional box speak¬ers, because we want end users to have high-performance sound wherever they want it. Let’s face it, no matter how cool we in the A/V business think speakers look, a lot of people still think they’re just big ugly boxes. And when you have big ugly boxes or any box in the room, your mind sort of con¬centrates on listening to the box. But when you listen to JBL Conceal speakers, you’re listening to the music, not the box.

JIM: By nature of the design, the speakers radiate sound in ev¬ery direction. We recently did a demo in a room where we had two Conceal speakers installed. When you sat in the middle of the room you could hear things coming around to the sides of you — it was this uncanny holographic presentation. No matter where you walk in the space, there’s consistent volume and consistent sound quality all throughout it.

DAVE: Design professionals are not bound by installing these products just behind drywall. You can cover them with almost any material as long as it doesn’t exceed 1/16th of an inch. For example, you can install them behind wallpaper, wood veneers and leather — we’ve even seen them installed behind fiberglass in a yacht installation.

JIM: By nature, since they’re covered, our invisible speakers are also weatherized, so they’re perfect for bathrooms and other humid environments.

DAVE: We’ve actually installed them in showers and you don’t see anything in the ceiling except perhaps the rain shower fixture. Those lucky homeowners just experience this three-dimensional, holographic sound as Jim described it, and wonder where it’s coming from. That’s why we often are quoted saying, “Music should be heard and not seen.”

We are introducing a new range of invisible speakers to the marketplace which we started shipping in December. For the very first time, there’s no sonic or acoustic compromise to incorporate an invisible solution into your project. In fact, these are some of the best sounding architectural loudspeakers in the Sonance lineup, believe it or not.

There are a few advancements that our Chief Speaker Engineer, Todd Ryan, was able to understand as he did a ton of research in this space. And he constructed elements from speakers that exist today and was able to figure out how to marry those with basically the cloak of invisibility. So you don’t have to see them anymore. And the end result is a speaker that is, from a fidelity standpoint, from a performance standpoint, as good, if not better than anything at the equivalent price point from any manufacturer. We feel really, really bold saying that, but it’s proven out in the demos that we’ve done.

What that gives the consumer the ability to do is to say, look, the design of my house is really important. I make design-oriented decisions every day — I choose the fridge, I choose the range, I choose the countertops, the furniture, the furnishings, all of those things are design-centric solutions, but they’re easy to make because you can make a value-based judgment with your eyes. Audio is often this kind of obscure thing where you go to an expert and ask, “Okay, what are you recommending for me?” And I think that the best dealers say, well, let me understand what’s going on in your house and how important different things are to you. And when you look at a space, it’s really obvious and easiest to see, wow, I just can’t see a speaker grille in this space — an invisible product is ultimately going to be superior, but before, you always had that sonic compromise. Obviously that all goes away now.

KEITH: We take a different approach than other manufacturers by focusing only on Spread Source Technology, which allows a loudspeaker cone to be replaced by a planar sound board. This creates a series of surface vibrations that generate acoustic energy — much the same way an acoustic musical instrument works. This technology was born out of R&D by Mission Speakers and the Royal Air Force back in the 1980s to create more realistic flight simulators. Our founder, Richard Newlove, was part of Mission’s team.

Richard left Mission with a dream to make a loudspeaker that could fill a room from corner to corner, just like an instrument. In the late 1990s, he created a picture frame speaker comprised of a rigid panel with a set of exciters (loudspeaker components that function by vibrating a rigid surface to create sound). In 1999 he got a request from a German designer to create one that they could put in a wall, something they could plaster over. That’s how we started to develop the first plaster-over AIW speaker, and Amina Technologies was born.

Today, we create all our own drivers in our own lab. It’s not using conventional speaker technology and adapting it to do something it was not designed for. It is purpose developed from the ground up, and patented. And I think that that is probably one of the most important aspects of this technology — it gives the architect, the interior designer and the sound designer the ability to bring high quality sound into the rooms in such a manner that even in highly reverberant spaces, the intelligibility is much improved over cone speakers, throughout the room. The technology award winning Mobius is certainly a testament to our advancement in sound quality and performance.

SETH: The same way that an architect or designer incorporates function in their designs, that’s how Amina approaches introducing sound into a room. The Amina technology is engineered from the ground up to be an invisible solution, rather than taking a traditional speaker and figuring out how to make it invisible. Amina specializes in invisible speakers and are made in Britain. So if you want to distribute audio in a room where people are typically moving around and not stationary in one spot, the perfect way to introduce sound like Keith mentioned is to have an even sound field from corner to corner, without any hotspots or dead spots as you move about that space. That’s one of the big advantages of our Vibrational Panel Technology, making our panel a spread source and not a point source. Amina products introduce sound into a room similar to an acoustic musical instrument.

“Amina delivers high performance, detailed, immersive sound with no visual impact.”Seth Kaplan, LK Stockroom