Tag Archives: speaker

The Concrete Canvas Speaker That Refuses to Hide Its Wires

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Most audio equipment is designed around the premise of concealment. The drivers are hidden, the wiring is tucked away, the internal mechanics are sealed behind pristine panels of wood or brushed aluminum, and you’re meant to forget that any of it exists. You just press play and trust the box. Hagar Guri, an industrial designer, has a different idea entirely.

A-PQ 31.37 is a suspended open-baffle loudspeaker system that does the opposite of hiding. Built from concrete canvas, a flexible, fabric-reinforced material that stiffens into a rigid, curved shell when hydrated, the speaker hangs from steel cables and puts everything on display. The driver is exposed. The wiring is visible. The rear radiation surface, the structural elements, the mechanical connections: all of it is part of the visual experience, not an afterthought buried behind a grille.

Designer: Hagar Guri

The material choice alone is worth pausing on. Concrete canvas is not a typical choice for audio equipment. It is the kind of material you would expect to see in emergency shelters or civil engineering projects, not hanging in a listening room. But that is precisely what makes it interesting here. It is dense, rigid, and visually raw in a way that synthetic plastics and MDF simply are not. The curved form it takes in A-PQ 31.37 manages to look both industrial and surprisingly refined, which is not an easy balance to strike.

Open-baffle speaker design has existed for decades in audiophile circles, and the community tends to be evangelical about it. The principle is straightforward: without a closed enclosure, sound radiates both forward and backward, creating a more open and spacious listening experience that many describe as more natural. The trade-off is usually in low-frequency performance, which requires careful driver selection and signal processing to compensate. Guri addresses this through a custom control unit built into the system, incorporating digital signal processing, preamplification, and analogue controls. It is a complete system, not just a sculptural object with wires attached.

And yet, calling it a sculptural object is not wrong. The speakers are suspended from steel cables and appear almost detached from the floor, interacting with the surrounding architecture rather than sitting against it. It changes the relationship between the listener and the object. You are not looking at a box tucked into a corner. You are looking at something that occupies the room intentionally, that asks to be seen.

Exposed fasteners and typographic elements extend the material language across the system, which tells me Guri was not just thinking about the sound or the form in isolation. The details are consistent. The control unit belongs to the same visual world as the speakers. That kind of coherence at the system level is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is one of the reasons A-PQ 31.37 feels like a fully resolved idea rather than a student experiment that went interestingly sideways.

The broader conversation A-PQ 31.37 is pushing into is one the design world has been circling for a while: what does it mean to make technology honest? So much of our electronics culture is built around the aesthetics of smooth surfaces and hidden complexity. The sleeker and more seamless a product looks, the more sophisticated it is supposed to seem. Guri is suggesting the inverse: that visibility, the kind that shows you exactly how something is built and why it sounds the way it does, can be its own form of refinement.

Whether or not this becomes an influence on mainstream speaker design is genuinely hard to say. Audio equipment is a conservative category. Audiophiles are notoriously attached to conventions that go back generations. But for anyone following the intersection of material research, acoustics, and spatial design, A-PQ 31.37 is exactly the kind of project that makes you reconsider what a speaker is supposed to be. Not just something you listen to. Something you actually look at, and think about, too.

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Bang & Olufsen’s New Speaker Concept Is a Ritual, Not a Device

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Most speakers are designed to disappear. They sit on a shelf, blend into a bookcase, or hide in a cabinet, quietly doing their job until you need them and then fading back into the background. Mårten Malmnäs, a graduate from the Umeå Institute of Design, designed something that pushes back against all of that.

The Beosound Tableau is a wall-mounted audio object developed in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen. Malmnäs calls it “a fireplace for music,” an instrument not just for listening, but for living. The moment I read that, I had to stop. Because I’ve never heard a speaker described that way before, and suddenly, I couldn’t think of a more fitting comparison.

Designer: Mårten Malmnäs

Think about what a fireplace actually does. Yes, it produces heat, but that’s almost beside the point. A fireplace creates presence. It becomes the thing a room organizes itself around. People pull their chairs toward it, conversations happen because of it, and its absence is genuinely felt. That’s a completely different design brief than “fits on your desk” or “connects to your phone.”

Malmnäs started the project with a design probe, a research method that explores the relationships people have with their homes, and from that came a set of experiments around values and behaviors. Eight experimental directions emerged from the ideation phase, spanning different input and output formats. Three of those directions clearly answered the design responsibilities he’d set for the project, and their shared qualities pointed toward one resolved object.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The original concept for the Tableau was screen-based, but a method called Wizard of Oz testing, where a human simulates the system to observe how people actually interact with it, pushed the design somewhere more honest. The interaction model shifted from screens to navigation by sound. And the principle that came out of it became the foundation of the whole concept: the most honest interface for a music object is music itself.

That’s a provocative idea. We’ve spent years layering more and more visual UI on top of audio experiences. Every streaming service competes on the complexity of its recommendation algorithm, the visual polish of its playlist covers, the grid of album art. Malmnäs argued the opposite, that sound should speak for sound. The result is the Sonic Token, a physical object that mediates between the listener and the Tableau. Tactile, intentional, and completely different from scrolling a touchscreen.

The Tableau is positioned as a focal thing for the home. An object to gather around and tend to. That language is deliberate, and it’s also a little radical. “Tending” to an audio object implies care and attention, a relationship rather than a transaction. You don’t tend to a Bluetooth speaker. You don’t gather around an app.

Bang & Olufsen has always occupied a rare space in the audio world, where design and sound hold equal weight, and where a product can belong in a design museum and still deliver extraordinary sound. But even by B&O’s standards, the Tableau concept asks a genuinely new question: what if the speaker were the focal point of the room, rather than just a feature of it?

There are fair questions about how a concept like this survives beyond a graduate show. The hands-on, material-driven process Malmnäs used, with 1:1 mock-ups and rigorous testing of the Sonic Token’s form and function, suggests this isn’t a vague idea dressed up in renders. It was built and tested as a real object. Whether it eventually reaches production or stays as a collaborative concept between a student designer and one of the world’s most revered audio brands is another matter.

But the value of the Beosound Tableau isn’t only in whether it ships. It’s in the question it refuses to let go of: why have we settled for speakers that ask nothing of us? The alternative, a speaker that earns its place on the wall, makes music feel like a gathering, and treats sound like something worth being present for, sounds like exactly what the living room has been missing.

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The Lexon x Jeff Koons Collaboration Makes Functional Art Worthy to Adorn Your Living Room

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Lexon has always operated in that precise zone where design meets desire, making objects that earn their place on a shelf by being genuinely useful and genuinely beautiful at the same time. Its speakers, lamps, and accessories carry a recognizable visual language: clean geometry, thoughtful materiality, the feeling that someone spent serious time thinking about how the thing would live in a room. The French brand has built that reputation over decades, and its collection reads like a masterclass in giving everyday objects enough personality to be noticed without screaming for attention. A collaboration with Jeff Koons, one of the most significant artists of our time, reads as a logical extension of everything Lexon had already been building toward. The purpose here is accessible art through design and technology, bringing high-concept sculpture into everyday functional objects.

Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog sits at the heart of contemporary art discourse. The sculpture, which lives permanently at The Broad in Los Angeles and has circled the globe through exhibitions and record-setting auction appearances, carries a cultural electricity that very few artworks can claim. Lexon and Jeff Koons have reimagined that masterpiece into two functional objects: the Balloon Dog Lamp and the Balloon Dog Speaker. The Chromatic Collection, introduced in 2026 as a time-limited edition available only this calendar year, expands the original collaboration with eight distinct models. The Lamp arrives in Platinum, Gold, Blue, and Red, while the Speaker comes in Gold, Blue, Red, and White. Each piece is crafted from optical-grade polycarbonate and carries Koons’ signature engraved on the front feet. Pre-orders are available on lexon-design.com at $800 per piece, with monthly shipping slots.

Designer: Lexon x Jeff Koons

Click Here to Buy Now: $800. Hurry, limited edition! Pre-orders capped at two pieces per color, per product, per collector

The collaboration was developed with The Broad, the Los Angeles museum that permanently houses Koons’ original Balloon Dog sculpture, and the first edition of this Lexon x Jeff Koons partnership proved that appetite is global: those pieces sold into collector hands across more than 90 countries. The Chromatic Collection expands that first chapter with eight new models in a broader color range, keeping the Balloon Dog form fixed while giving collectors fresh reasons to acquire. Every unit carries a certificate of authenticity with a hologram that matches one on the packaging box, creating a dual provenance trail designed to hold value over time. At $800 per piece, the Balloon Dog Lamp & Balloon Dog Speaker Chromatic Collection represents an entry point into owning a time-limited edition whose value stands to increase as the collection completes its run and moves to secondary markets.

Balloon Dog Lamp

Transparent optical-grade polycarbonate forms the entire Balloon Dog Lamp, and the material connects directly to the logic of Koons’ original sculpture: the pristine surface quality, and the way the form catches and refracts light. The lamp packs 400 individual LEDs capable of producing nine distinct colors and nine animation modes, all controlled through intuitive gestures on the nose. Brightness adjusts seamlessly from ambient glow to full 200-lumen output, and the battery delivers five hours of runtime at 75% brightness. USB-C charging keeps the lamp self-contained on any surface. The four physical colorways of the lamp itself, Platinum, Gold, Blue, and Red, each shift character dramatically depending on which LED color state is running, giving a single object dozens of distinct visual configurations. Lexon’s proprietary Easy Sync Bluetooth technology allows unlimited Balloon Dog Lamps to synchronize their lighting effects in real time, which makes a full four-color set a genuinely compelling proposition for collectors building installations.

Switch the lamp on and the polycarbonate body stops being transparent and becomes a vessel for pure color. The LED system pushes light through every balloon-twisted segment from the inside, separating the sculptural form into glowing chambers of shifting hue. The animation modes cycle through gradients and pulses that travel the length of the sculpture, creating the impression of movement within a static form. The four physical editions of the lamp, Platinum, Gold, Blue, and Red, each interact differently with the nine programmable LED colors. Platinum and Gold warm the output, while Blue and Red push it vivid, and all four configurations produce enough visual presence to anchor a room in near-darkness.

Balloon Dog Speaker

Ten speakers are packed into the same 29 x 11 x 28 centimeter form as the Lamp, six active drivers and four acoustic boosters, with the transparent polycarbonate shell putting all of that hardware fully on display. The drivers are distributed across the Balloon Dog’s body in a way that uses the sculpture’s geometry to push sound outward in every direction, achieving genuine 360-degree coverage rather than approximating it. Bluetooth 5.3 handles wireless connectivity, TWS technology enables stereo pairing between two units, and built-in microphones support hands-free calls and AI assistant interaction with a connected smartphone. The Speaker arrives in Gold, Blue, Red, and White, a distinct palette from the Lamp that keeps both product lines coherent as a collected set. At $800 with Koons’ signature engraved at the base, it prices like a collectible and performs like a serious speaker.

The drivers and acoustic boosters sit visibly across the interior of the Speaker, their circular grille faces pressing against the clear polycarbonate from the inside, turning the engineering into part of the object’s visual identity. The hardware maps to the Balloon Dog’s body segments, making the internal architecture visible from every angle. Two Speakers paired in TWS stereo, positioned facing each other on a surface, form a symmetrical sculptural arrangement that sits somewhere between a listening setup and an installation.

Purchases are capped at two pieces per color, per product, per customer, and orders move through monthly shipping slots on a first-come, first-served basis starting June 2026. The purchase limit maintains the integrity of this as a limited edition rather than a mass-market release, ensuring the collection reaches a broad international collector base while holding its exclusivity. Both the Lamp and Speaker colorways are locked to 2026 and will not be reissued, establishing clear boundaries for the edition and creating real scarcity in a category where reissues can undermine collector confidence. Pre-orders are live now at lexon-design.com, and given how the first edition performed across more than 90 countries, the window on these eight colorways is genuinely finite.

Click Here to Buy Now: $800. Hurry, limited edition! Pre-orders capped at two pieces per color, per product, per collector.

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This Wall Speaker Lets You Decorate Your Room with Music and Art

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The must-have for your home used to be a choice: a speaker or a digital frame. Good audio gear fills a room with sound but rarely does anything worth looking at. Digital frames look considered and calm on a wall but go completely silent the moment you need them to do something else. It seems obvious, in hindsight, that someone would eventually stop treating these as separate problems.

Monar is that someone. The Monar Canvas Speaker brings both together in a single framed wall piece that plays Hi-Fi audio while displaying art on a built-in screen, and the two functions are genuinely connected. When music plays, the display responds in real time, generating visuals that shift and react to the track. It fills your home with sound. It decorates your wall with art. It does both at once.

Designer: Monar

Click Here to Buy Now: $799 $1299 ($500 off). Hurry, only 122/150 left! Raised over $55,000.

The design draws its visual logic from classical oil painting. Traditional canvas proportions, the kind that have framed masterworks for centuries, informed the 4:5 portrait ratio of the panel, a deliberate departure from the widescreen format most screens default to. That historical reference is not decorative. It is the reason the Monar reads like framed art on a wall rather than a screen that someone forgot to put away.

The outer frame is interchangeable across eight options: premium ABS plastics, natural linen, and brushed aluminium, with one ABS option styled after Mondrian’s primary color geometry. Swapping the frame is a practical feature rather than a gimmick, since the object is permanent décor. If your interior changes, the frame can too.

The audio side makes bold claims for an enclosure that is only 4.9cm deep. Six drivers handle the load: 2 titanium tweeters, 2 midranges using a golden ratio cone geometry, and full-size subwoofers running through a 2.2-channel amplifier. The 20Hz to 20kHz frequency response is ambitious for a chassis this thin, and one definitely worth hearing.

Where the product earns genuine interest is in the everyday texture of using it. Put on an album, and one of 12 lyric display themes animates the words in sync with the music. Switch to the World Gallery and the screen cycles through more than 50,000 digitized artworks, from Van Gogh to Hokusai. Activate Meditation Mode and the visuals shift to ambient scenes timed to calming audio. When no music is playing, it displays personal photos or videos, so it never really goes blank or dormant.

The generative AI tools go further still. Monar’s AI Studio lets you create original artwork through text prompts, uploaded images, or even a musical concept. The result displays on screen, making it possible to have genuinely new wall art on demand without touching a single frame nail. These features run on a points system, with a free tier offering 100 points per month. The World Gallery and Meditation Mode cost nothing extra, regardless.

Paid AI tiers range from $9.90 to $39.90 per month for heavier creative use, and the free allocation covers casual experimentation comfortably. What makes the pricing structure interesting is what it says about the product underneath it: even without touching a single AI feature, the Monar already delivers a fully functional Hi-Fi speaker system and a complete digital frame in one object. That combination alone is something no single product category had managed to pull off before it came along.

A speaker that becomes a painting, a gallery that plays music, a frame that reacts to sound: the Monar pulls off a combination that no single product category has figured out before it. The real question worth sitting with is not whether it works, but how much your walls have been missing something like it.

Click Here to Buy Now: $799 $1299 ($500 off). Hurry, only 122/150 left! Raised over $55,000.

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IKEA’s $10 Speaker Is Tiny, But You Can Pair 100 of Them Together

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Bluetooth speakers have a curious problem. The ones worth owning tend to cost real money, and the ones that don’t cost much tend to sound exactly like they cost nothing. IKEA’s KALLSUP sits somewhere outside that tired formula entirely, not because it defies audio physics at $9.99, but because it was never really designed around audio physics in the first place.

The KALLSUP is a cube, more or less. At 2.75 x 2.75 x 2.88 inches and built from ABS plastic, it has the proportions of a large sugar cube and a silhouette that wouldn’t look out of place on a shelf next to a small succulent. Designer Ola Wihlborg, who wanted the speaker to be “as small and simple as possible,” made something that reads less like audio equipment and more like an object that happens to produce sound when you connect your phone to it.

Designer: Ola Wihlborg (IKEA)

That framing matters. Most portable speakers broadcast what they are through a certain vocabulary: rubberized grilles, cylindrical barrels, carabiner clips, the unspoken suggestion that they’ve survived a kayaking trip. The KALLSUP makes none of those promises. Its face carries a circular grid of perforations, two buttons sit on top flanking a small LED, and the back has a USB-C port for charging. Nothing announces itself as a feature. It just exists, neatly, without fuss.

The minimalism extends to the controls, though that’s where things get slightly puzzling. There are only two buttons: one for Bluetooth and one for playback. No volume control sits on the unit itself, so the connected device handles all level adjustments. Pairing multiple units requires a long press of the play button, not the Bluetooth button, and there’s no manual power-off. These omissions read as deliberate simplicity, but they also feel like the kind of tradeoffs that made a $9.99 price tag achievable.

What the KALLSUP can do is genuinely surprise at this price. The rechargeable battery is advertised to run 9 hours at 50% volume, covering a full workday of background music. Bluetooth 5.3 holds up to 10 meters without interference. The real trick, the one that reframes the product’s logic entirely, is pairing up to 100 units together. One KALLSUP is a desk companion. Four of them, scattered across a room, start to approximate distributed audio.

The yellow-green colorway, one of three available alongside white and pink, sits in that particular register of color that’s neither subtle nor aggressive. It’s the kind of green that shows up in membrane keyboards and silicone phone cases aimed at people who want their objects to feel a little more alive.

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Motorola’s Bose-Tuned Speaker Automatically Follows You Room to Room

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Bluetooth speakers have largely solved the portability problem and mostly failed the living room one. They tend to look like gym equipment that wandered indoors, sit awkwardly on a shelf, and demand a ritual of reconnecting whenever you walk back in the door. The moto sound flow, Motorola’s first portable speaker and the newest addition to the moto things lineup, takes a different angle on all three of those frustrations.

The design makes the first impression. Two Pantone-curated colorways, Carbon and Warm Taupe, wrap the cylindrical body in a twill-textured fabric finish that reads more like a decorative object than consumer electronics. It’s the kind of thing you’d leave on the coffee table without thinking twice, which is precisely the point. Motorola calls it “crafted to be seen and tuned to be heard,” and for once, the marketing copy isn’t entirely hollow.

Designer: Motorola

The hardware inside includes a dedicated woofer, tweeter, and dual passive radiators, producing a 30W output tuned through Motorola’s Sound by Bose partnership. That collaboration, which also appears in the razr fold, applies Bose’s EQ expertise for balanced, detailed sound rather than the bass-heavy thump most compact speakers default to. A companion app also lets you adjust the equalizer to your own taste, available on both Android and iOS.

The moto sound flow also distinguishes itself in terms of connectivity. Beyond Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5, AirPlay, Google Cast, and Spotify Connect, the speaker uses UWB technology to do something more interesting. Walk close to it with a compatible phone, and it picks up your audio automatically, no tapping required. Run two units together, and Room Shift reroutes music to whichever speaker is nearest, while Dynamic Stereo adjusts left and right channels based on where your phone sits between them.

Those UWB features do carry a fine print worth reading. They require a compatible Android 9 or later phone with UWB enabled, so iPhones and older Android devices don’t qualify. The speaker still works over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for everyone else, but Room Shift and Dynamic Stereo, the parts that make the pitch most compelling, are locked behind a hardware requirement many buyers won’t check before purchase.

The 6,000 mAh battery covers long listening sessions, and the IP67 rating makes outdoor or poolside use fair game. A dock handles charging instead of a cable, which keeps things tidy. Four built-in microphones manage speakerphone calls. Starting at €199, the moto sound flow enters a competitive space where JBL, Sonos, and Bose already have devoted followings, each with years of speaker-only focus behind them.

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BreakX1 Just Made Karaoke Machines Actually Worth Displaying

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Remember when karaoke machines were those clunky black boxes that looked like rejected stereo equipment from the 90s? Yeah, those days are officially over. The BreakX1 Smart Karaoke by designer Liu Wei just snagged a Silver A’ Design Award for 2025, and it’s proof that home entertainment tech can be both functional and seriously good-looking.

What really sets this thing apart is how it moves. The BreakX1 features an innovative hinge design that connects the screen to the speakers, letting you rotate the screen 180 degrees front to back and 120 degrees left to right. It’s the kind of flexibility you didn’t know you needed until you think about it. Whether you’re belting out power ballads from the couch or standing up for your best Beyoncé impression, you can adjust the angle to actually see the lyrics without doing neck gymnastics.

Designer: Liu Wei

The design inspiration comes from an unexpected place: minimalist automotive design, specifically the clean lines of Tesla and Porsche. That aesthetic shows up in the machine’s sleek, soft curves and compact form. It doesn’t scream “karaoke machine” the way older models do. Instead, it looks like something you’d actually want sitting in your living room, not hidden away in a closet between uses.

Liu Wei, who works with Dongguan Aika Electronic Technology Co., developed the BreakX1 between October 2023 and January 2024 in Shenzhen, China. The device is built for the wireless entertainment era, designed to work seamlessly whether you’re hosting an indoor party or taking the show outside for backyard gatherings. That portability is key because modern life doesn’t always happen in one room anymore.

The tech specs back up the design ambitions. The BreakX1 comes equipped with a 2K HD screen that delivers crystal-clear visuals for lyrics, music videos, or whatever else you want to throw at it. The Red Dot Design Award jury noted that the machine “impresses with its exceptional ease of use and attractive appearance,” which is basically the holy grail for consumer electronics. Too often, devices choose one or the other, but this manages both.

What makes the BreakX1 feel current is its versatility beyond just karaoke. Sure, you can use it for singing your heart out, but it’s also designed for listening to music or engaging in what the specs call “audio visual creativity.” That vague-but-intriguing phrase suggests this is really a multi-purpose entertainment hub that adapts to how you want to use it, not the other way around. The design also addresses a real problem with portable entertainment systems: they usually look temporary or makeshift. The BreakX1’s integrated approach, where the screen and speakers form one cohesive unit connected by that flexible hinge, creates a device that feels intentional. It’s the difference between furniture and something you assembled from random parts.

This isn’t just about making karaoke look better (though it definitely does that). It’s about recognizing that home entertainment equipment has become part of our living spaces in ways it wasn’t before. We’re not hiding our tech in cabinets anymore. It’s out, it’s visible, and we want it to look like it belongs. The BreakX1 gets that shift. Liu Wei’s work represents a broader trend in tech design where aesthetics and function aren’t competing priorities but complementary ones. The rotatable screen isn’t just pretty engineering; it solves the real challenge of making one device work for different body positions and room configurations. The minimalist styling isn’t just trendy; it helps the device fit into more home decor situations.

The Silver A’ Design Award recognition confirms what’s already becoming clear: smart entertainment devices need to be smart about more than just their features. They need to understand that users want equipment that enhances their space, not clutters it. The BreakX1 delivers on that promise while still packing in the technology that makes modern karaoke actually fun. Whether this sparks a wave of better-looking karaoke machines remains to be seen, but it’s a solid start. At the very least, it proves that party tech doesn’t have to look like party tech. Sometimes it can just look good.

The post BreakX1 Just Made Karaoke Machines Actually Worth Displaying first appeared on Yanko Design.

IKEA Just Made a Mouse-Shaped Speaker That Kids Can Actually Carry

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IKEA’s GREJSIMOJS collection started with a dog-shaped lamp that dims when you hold its head for bedtime, turning a light switch into something closer to petting a sleepy puppy. The limited collection is more than just about cute animals, but also about playful behavior baked into everyday objects. That same thinking now shows up in a tiny Bluetooth speaker shaped like a mouse, with four stubby legs and a braided tail that doubles as a carry loop.

The GREJSIMOJS portable Bluetooth speaker is a small, mouse-shaped character IKEA calls a “cute little music friend” for playful people of all ages. It is meant to follow kids from room to room, turning background sound into something they can carry and interact with, while still being a straightforward wireless speaker for parents who just want podcasts in the kitchen or bedtime audiobooks without fumbling with phone speakers.

Designer: Marta Krupińska (IKEA)

Picture a child drawing at a desk, the purple mouse sitting nearby quietly playing an audiobook or favorite songs. Pairing is as simple as connecting a phone over Bluetooth, and the sound is tuned for everyday listening rather than shaking walls. The built-in volume limit protects sensitive ears, so kids can turn it up without parents needing to hover over the controls constantly or worry about hearing damage.

The braided tail makes it easy for small hands to grab and move the speaker from bedroom to living room. Charging happens over USB-C, though the cable and adapter are sold separately, and IKEA says adults should handle that part. The speaker cannot play while charging, which creates a split that lets kids control what they listen to while adults manage batteries and power.

The multi-speaker mode lets the mouse pair with other IKEA Bluetooth speakers supporting the same feature. That means the same music can play from multiple spots, turning a hallway and playroom into one sound zone without complicated app setups. It is an easy way to make dance parties or tidy-up time feel coordinated, even if the tech behind it stays invisible to everyone involved.

The collection’s goal is to inspire play and togetherness across the home, and the mouse fits that mission well. IKEA notes that £1 from every GREJSIMOJS product sold during a set period goes to the Baby Bank Alliance, adding a layer of purposeful giving. More than just decor, the speaker is a small facilitator for shared stories, music, and movement in family spaces without needing complicated setup rituals.

The GREJSIMOJS mouse speaker, like the dog lamp, treats technology as something that should feel approachable and a bit silly rather than cold. Rather than competing with serious audio gear, it is trying to make rooms feel more alive without asking kids to sit still or parents to manage another app. In homes where screens already demand enough attention, a small purple mouse that quietly pipes in sound might be exactly the kind of tech everyone can agree on.

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NAK Studio Imagines a Hi-Fi Stack You Would Actually Want on Display

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Most Hi-Fi gear still looks like anonymous black rectangles, even in carefully designed living rooms. Serious listeners often hide their amps and speakers in cabinets because the hardware rarely matches the rest of the furniture, even when the sound is great. The default assumption is that audio equipment belongs out of sight, tolerated for its performance but not celebrated for its presence.

Antoine Brieux of NAK Studio designed a complete stack he would personally want at home, treating it as a thought experiment about what happens when an integrated amplifier, speakers, and turntable are drawn as one family from the start. Color, tactility, and proportions are treated as seriously as the signal path, so the system could earn a spot in the open rather than behind doors or under furniture.

Designer: Antoine Brieux (NAK Studio)

The integrated amplifier is a low, solid block with a ribbed cylinder grafted onto one corner, turning the usual volume knob into a full control column. That cylinder suggests precise, satisfying adjustments for volume, inputs, and tone, giving your hand a clear place to land instead of hunting for tiny knobs or touch buttons scattered across a cluttered front panel.

The tall monochrome display beside the cylinder shows track info, a big dB scale, and twin bar-graph meters dancing with the music. The list of inputs covers phono and TV to Bluetooth and USB, and a warm-to-cold tonal slider sits below, so the front of the amp feels like a calm, legible dashboard rather than a technical interface that demands constant attention or an instruction manual.

The compact speakers are each a rounded rectangle with a single driver and tweeter, but finished in mixable Pantone colors, letting you treat them as color accents in a room. You could pair teal with orange, or match a pair to a shelf or wall, so they become part of the space’s palette instead of something you try to hide or apologize for when guests visit.

The matching turntable sits on the same footprint as the amp, with exposed suspension pillars and a straight arm that echoes the cylinder theme. The three components stack visually into a tidy tower, making the whole listening setup feel intentional, almost like a piece of modular furniture for records and streaming alike, cohesive enough to anchor a sideboard or desk.

NAK Studio’s concept is not about chasing specs, but about imagining a Hi-Fi system that earns its place in the open. The controls invite touch, the colors play with the room, and the stack looks as considered as the music it is built to play. It starts to feel less like a fantasy and more like how audio gear should have evolved all along.

The post NAK Studio Imagines a Hi-Fi Stack You Would Actually Want on Display first appeared on Yanko Design.

NAK Studio Imagines a Hi-Fi Stack You Would Actually Want on Display

Posted on by

Most Hi-Fi gear still looks like anonymous black rectangles, even in carefully designed living rooms. Serious listeners often hide their amps and speakers in cabinets because the hardware rarely matches the rest of the furniture, even when the sound is great. The default assumption is that audio equipment belongs out of sight, tolerated for its performance but not celebrated for its presence.

Antoine Brieux of NAK Studio designed a complete stack he would personally want at home, treating it as a thought experiment about what happens when an integrated amplifier, speakers, and turntable are drawn as one family from the start. Color, tactility, and proportions are treated as seriously as the signal path, so the system could earn a spot in the open rather than behind doors or under furniture.

Designer: Antoine Brieux (NAK Studio)

The integrated amplifier is a low, solid block with a ribbed cylinder grafted onto one corner, turning the usual volume knob into a full control column. That cylinder suggests precise, satisfying adjustments for volume, inputs, and tone, giving your hand a clear place to land instead of hunting for tiny knobs or touch buttons scattered across a cluttered front panel.

The tall monochrome display beside the cylinder shows track info, a big dB scale, and twin bar-graph meters dancing with the music. The list of inputs covers phono and TV to Bluetooth and USB, and a warm-to-cold tonal slider sits below, so the front of the amp feels like a calm, legible dashboard rather than a technical interface that demands constant attention or an instruction manual.

The compact speakers are each a rounded rectangle with a single driver and tweeter, but finished in mixable Pantone colors, letting you treat them as color accents in a room. You could pair teal with orange, or match a pair to a shelf or wall, so they become part of the space’s palette instead of something you try to hide or apologize for when guests visit.

The matching turntable sits on the same footprint as the amp, with exposed suspension pillars and a straight arm that echoes the cylinder theme. The three components stack visually into a tidy tower, making the whole listening setup feel intentional, almost like a piece of modular furniture for records and streaming alike, cohesive enough to anchor a sideboard or desk.

NAK Studio’s concept is not about chasing specs, but about imagining a Hi-Fi system that earns its place in the open. The controls invite touch, the colors play with the room, and the stack looks as considered as the music it is built to play. It starts to feel less like a fantasy and more like how audio gear should have evolved all along.

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