Resonant Constellation

[rant]
I was reading an article today on Gizmodo in their Week of Audio Tech section, and I ran across this article on “The World’s Most Beautiful Audio Equipment. Some of the stuff on there is interesting, some is completely useless, some is great, all of them are expensive. One particularly intriguing idea caught my eye: that of Opera Sonora Speakers. This company makes very visually pleasing speakers (really sounding boards) out of expensive and rare tonewoods.

At first, I was very intrigued by this idea. As it often does, my mind began running with the concept. You could carve each of the pieces like an instrument sounding board and have interesting resonation boxes, there could be big, bass-like ones, and little, violin-like ones. It could sound really cool, I thought. In fact, you could practically build stringed instruments without the strings and it would probably sound fantastic-if you drive the pieces in the correct places. There are problems with even this idea, though. The volume and tone is severely limited by the types of the wood, and even without that, these “speakers” would only be good at reproducing stringed instrument sounds, winds wouldn’t come through as well. For an amateur audiophile like me, that’s a cringe-inducing thought.

One quick inspection of the site, however, makes all of these points moot. Here is an excerpt from one of their descriptions of their first product:

The idea was born thinking to the wind which blows among the spruces and accompanies day and night the life of the forest.

The point stretching to the top imitates the leap of the tree towards the sky and the curving lines seem to capture the wind like a sail swelling with the energy of nature.

The reduced dimensions confer a gentle response to the music, which can rise at the right time in the richest and swiftest pieces.

Wow, the bullshit is tangible. This is obviously an idea designed by an artiste with little to no background in audio equipment or luthiery. Now, I realize that there’s a place for pretentious artists (I think), but that place is sadly not in the home music entertainment industry. It could have been a very intriguing, if somewhat limited, concept, but it turned into a waste of rare and expensive tonewood. To everybody considering wasting tonewood: Stop That. It’s rare enough already, and those of us who use it in instruments would like to be able to afford new additions to the herd.
[/rant.]