About 10 years ago, we took on the task of creating the first invisible speaker of which our industry could be proud. Several competitors had 'science fair' solutions that might have earned them a passing grade in high school physics, but certainly didn't belong in a home.

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Back in the 1990's, a sophisticated engineering firm developed an audio puck, that when attached to a substrate, would produce sound. Quite good sound, actually. I was running product development for Boston Acoustics back then, and the engineering firm approached us offering exclusivity for their puck in residential applications. We poked and prodded at it, and while recognizing its cleverness, we ultimately passed on the opportunity because the technology had unavoidable limitations: it couldn't play loud enough, and it couldn't reproduce bass. The engineering firm retreated to the world of commercial audio -- specifically PA systems -- where low and loud wasn't critical. Why am I telling you this? Because this engineering company had a patent on their technology. A broad patent that essentially precluded any serious speaker company from developing a high quality invisible solution.

 

So the invisible products we saw in the market 7 years ago (which still exist today, BTW) were desperate workarounds of this patent. The typical invisible speaker available today is an engineer's embarrassment, with off-the-shelf tweeters, midranges, and bass units glued behind a stiff panel, and forced to play really loud in order to cut through the panel itself. It's like taking a perfectly good bookshelf speaker, sealing it in a plastic box, and playing it loud. Obviously, high frequencies are crushed. But the midrange gets all wonky, and bass notes just seem tubby. Which is why so many clients who had these invisible speakers installed complained vociferously to have them ripped out of their walls.

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And now, LiveWall. We took a different approach. Instead of trying to engineer around the puck patent, we attacked the problem head on.

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The holy grail of speaker design is the flat panel. But a flat panel has inherent problems -- it sounds like a drum head, with nonlinear performance. That means some notes are obnoxiously loud and other notes are barely heard. We chose to find ways (and we found several) to tame the flat panel, tuning out the offending frequencies, and creating a system that outperforms -- yes, I said it -- outperforms traditional in-wall speakers.

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Our constrained layer damping patents are beautiful, elegant, and -- wouldn't you know it -- so musical that many LiveWall integrators have moved from traditional in-wall and in-ceiling speakers to the impact, bass response, and musicality of LiveWalls. I won't wade into the technical here, but will say, unequivocally, that you will not experience a more lifelike and magical performance from any other invisible speaker. Guaranteed.

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