Loudspeakers

If you don't have room in your home for huge floorstanding speakers, or just don't like the look of such monoliths, France's Focal has launched some home cinema speakers you can mount to the walls to surround your big-screen TV with sound.

Danish luxury audiovisual brand Bang & Olufsen has launched its most advanced connected speakers to date. The Beolab 28 towers can serve as floor standers, or be mounted on a wall, and feature covers that draw open like curtains at power on.

Bugatti is a name associated with very fast cars and multi-million-dollar price tags, not home audio. But now luxury automotive design and premium audio components combine for the launch of the Royale loudspeakers from Bugatti and Tidal Audio.

A company spun off from the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems is looking commercialize a micro loudspeaker made from 100 percent silicon. After successful seed funding, Arioso Systems GmbH is now ready to take the technology to market.

Not everyone has room for or wants their hi-fi system to have a commanding presence in the living room, which is where the Spinbase comes in – a powered speaker system that sits underneath your turntable.

Billed as the world's first premium eco speakers, the modular Zero range makes use of recycled paper for its housing, with any waste returned to the paper mill for re-use.

​Sweden's Teenage Engineering is arguably best known for its mini synthesizers called Pocket Operators, but has been pushing design envelopes in other areas too. A collaboration with RISE researchers has yielded a loudspeaker encased in a kind of white wood that stays white as it ages.​

​Late last year, high-end audio brand McIntosh revealed a new flagship loudspeaker, the XRT2.1.K, priced at US$130,000. Now the company has announced a slightly less powerful version that's also less than half the price.​

McIntosh says that it's tapped into over 45 years of loudspeaker manufacture know-how to create a pair of 7 ft high audiophile pleasers. The XRT2.1K full-range speakers feature a total of 81 drivers for the promise of "spacious sound reproduction with an unusually deep sound stage."

​Speaker cabinets are usually made from wood or, for penny pinching, plastic – though we have seen speakers made using other materials like glass and concrete. Michele Gastaldello and Giacomo Munari mix Italian design with good old-fashioned stone masonry for their Stones Speakers line.​

Many of the tech enhancements from B&W's top-of-the-line 800 Diamond Series have been handed down to a new, cheaper generation of speakers. But even the least expensive 700 series speaker will still set you back $1,200 a pair.​

Messages announced over train station loudspeakers are notorious for being unintelligible. Germany's Fraunhofer Institute is trying to do something about it, however. It's developed new audio-enhancement software, which might even find use in smartphones.