Why a cylinder

The Halo is a cylinder. That was a design decision before it was an acoustic one.

Most speakers are boxes. Black, rectangular, technical — masculine objects. I wanted to make something beautiful instead. Look at the objects that are allowed to stand in view in a living room: lamps, vases, bowls. Almost all of them are round. The things we hide tend to be square.

So the shape came first. A painted cylinder, with textile where the technology sits. Nothing about it should say "device". You shouldn't see a single driver — everything lives behind cloth.

The acoustics turned out to be a fortunate consequence. A cylinder radiates sound evenly around itself. No front row, no wrong seat.

But the shape asks a price. A cylinder holds less internal volume than a box with the same footprint — and volume is what bass wants. Drivers are round, but the wall of a cylinder is curved; they don't sit in it naturally. One solution became part of the design: the subwoofer fires downward, through the base. It solved the geometry, and it turned out to sound better that way — the bass fills the room without pointing at anyone.

Building a cylinder is also simply harder than building a box. A box is panels and glue. A cylinder is milling, filler, sanding, paint, and sanding again. Most of the twelve prototypes were about exactly this: getting a curved, painted surface to a finish that holds up when you look at it every day.

None of this is the efficient way to build a speaker. It is the right way to build this one.

For homes where the speaker is allowed to stand in view.