INNOVATIVE TECH
The Cloak of Invisibility
Heard but Not Seen, These Invisible Architectural Speakers Offer Beautiful Sounds
Without the Ugly Sights
By Darryl Wilkinson
One of the amazing things about loudspeakers
is the incredible variety of sizes, shapes, colors,
and finishes. For the audiophile or merely the
person who has an interest in the technology
itself, this a beautiful thing. There are other
folks, though, for whom speakers are a necessary
nuisance – at best considered an annoying piece
of furniture that inevitably mucks up the
ergonomics or décor-onomics (not a real word,
but it gets the point across) of any room they’re
located in. And that’s before accounting for the
speaker cables and/or power cords running
across the floor.
One solution is to use architectural speakers
that are installed either in-wall or in-ceiling.
This type of speaker not only offers the
advantages of eliminating unwieldy or
inconvenient boxes from the room, but it also
gets rid of those ugly cables and wires that are so
easy to trip over. It does not, however, eliminate
the visual presence of speakers in the room, as
nearly all architectural speakers utilize round,
48 Residential Tech Today | Jan/Feb 2020
square, or rectangular perforated grilles. Sure,
such grilles can usually be painted to match the
color of the wall, but they remain a visible
distraction from what might otherwise be a
beautifully designed décor. Furthermore, if the
room’s layout or wall/ceiling construction
prevents installing the speakers in a symmetrical
or similar eye-pleasing pattern, one or more of
those grilles will stick out like a painted sore
thumb.
The problems quickly multiply when you start
adding multiple channels for a home theater
system. As a result, homeowners, designers, and
decorators have dreamed of the ultimate
architectural solution: the invisible loudspeaker.
Yet, short of some magic invisibility cloak
straight out of Harry Potter (wand not
included), how do you make a loudspeaker (or a
7.2.4-channel system of speakers) disappear?
In rooms like these, in-wall speakers with traditional
grilles just wouldn’t suffice. You’d never guess that
Nakymatone invisible speakers are hiding in the walls.