LAS VEGAS — With its wide base and gently sloping sides, the Archt one speaker looks a little like an egg pod from Alien or the business end of a bomb.
Its outer shell is sleek black plastic, with a flat ring around the top that gives it a space-age feel. If the killer looks aren’t enough to grab your attention, the speaker’s ground-thumping bass will.
“It gets really loud,” Archt CEO Evan Foo told Cult of Mac.
While the all-in-one wireless speaker is certainly loud — it was ballsy enough to cut through the background noise here at the International CES trade show — the goal is to deliver CD-quality sound, no matter the source of the audio.
“If it’s a compressed file, we’re up-converting,” said Don Inmoni, Archt’s vice president of sales and marketing.
Having worked as a buyer for Apple, where he curated products worthy of display in Cupertino’s retail stores, Inmon knows something about quality and the quest to find the sweet spot where form meets function.
To produce the Archt (pronounced “ark”) speaker’s omnidirectional sound magic, a patented Sound Array disperses music so everybody in the room hears the same thing. A proprietary digital signal processor and custom digital audio converter produce sound that’s pumped out of one 80 mm full-range speaker, a 120 mm woofer and a 150 mm passive radiator, all of which are housed in the distinctive-looking case.
The Archt one, which wouldn’t look out of place on a pedestal in a modern art gallery, can handle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (both AirPlay and DLNA) and can stream audio from from iOS devices. An analog input facilitates wired connections. (Inmon said he prefers listening to vinyl or high-resolution digital files on Neil Young’s Pono portable player.)
It’s also made to be cranked up — to really fill a room with music.
“We built it so you can beat the crap out of it and it still sounds great,” Inmon said.
Archt will begin delivering units to Kickstarter backers in February, with retail distribution in March at a list price of $599.
