True WAF speakers

[trondareo]

A student came by my office today with an interesting question.
I teach industrial design by the way. He wanted to build a 2-3000$ speaker set for high WAF. The project was about crossing gender borders in product design.
I googled a lot of designer speakers with my Good Wife this evening, she´s an interior designer and knows these things. She found a lot of cool high-design speakers she liked but most of them look like they have really crappy sound.

So the question I put to you all is how do we design a really good sounding speaker that is not a rectangular wooden box. Something that looks as cool as it sounds? For a Woman?

All proposals have to be validated by the women in our lives.
Anyone up for the challenge?

[trondareo]

Here are a few approaches that might work:

1: integrating subs in furniture (an old one)
2: Hanging lamps/speakers omnipolars or gallo style spheres might work.
3: bookshelf speakers where the shelf is the speaker. line scource, horns, transmissionline f. instance
4: in wall infinite baffle of course
5...

[aardvarkash10]

Bose style sattelites that look "cute" and heavy electronics to manage the sound...

[s3tup]

Line arrays, hidden under acoustical cloth with a color of interior, masked as some "columns" or whatever. They shouldn't look like speakers, that's the point.

In the other hand there are Focal's Grand Utopias - hell of a speaker And, somehow, it manages to look fine at the photos from the Focal's web site.

[c2cthomas]

Here is a bit of a concept that I was tossing about a couple of years ago - never did get around to it. Go figure - a DIY type having a few ideas that they never seem to get around to playing with?

The left side of the enclosure shows a "fold out" OB type speaker with a separate woofer enclosure. The right side shows a line array design with a "tapped horn" woofer hidden behind the bookcase.

Obviously you would want to match up the speakers when building one - unless you have rather odd taste in mixing and matching speaker types.

SHMBO desired speakers that would only be 42 inches tall (107 cm) – so back to the drawing board. After that I lost interest in any father pursuit of the project.

[s3tup]

Another option is to... build them for the interior style.

Let's take the Sonus Faber, and mix it with Grundig from 60s.

Grundig HiFi Raumklang-Box IVa
http://www.sumikoaudio.net/sonus/ima...amati_pair.jpg

Or just the Grundig with SF drivers...

[jrenkin]

I recommend choosing the speakers you like and then finding a women to go with them....

[trondareo]

Dieter Rams L01 speaker , the one on the lamp foot, would be along the line of blending in I guess.

Speakers are more available than women, that's the problem

[chris661]

A trick I recently used...

Set a small portion of the budget aside. With the small bit, build something very large. Then, when you build something smaller, it'll be such a relief that she'll love them (well, it worked on Mum, as I'm only 16...).

Another way I've seen to work... Build something too small for the room, so they struggle to fill it. Use those for a while, then build some bigger ones, capable of filling the space. She'll want to keep the bigger ones for the sound - even to inexperienced ears, distortion is objectionable.

Chris

[trondareo]

Here is a guy who has made a decent Open Baffle speaker that should meet WAF
Flat - Re Federico DIPOLE SPEAKERS on the Behance Network