Made in Singapore, this futuristic speaker packs one heck of a punch

Unless you’re a wealthy person with deep pockets – in which case you can stop reading this now – or an audiophile, you’d probably think twice before parting with top dollar for a premium sound system.

If you’re neither, you’d also face some problems in setting up your speaker set for maximum efficiency. Here’s how us normal folks do it. We’d pre-determine the spot where we’d usually sit at to chill – usually a sofa in the living room – and aim the whole set of satellite speakers and subwoofer alike at it. Case closed.

The typical living-room speaker arrangement.

This works perfectly whenever it’s just you and you alone enjoying the sweet spot. When a small party gathers in your living room, though, it’s a whole different ballgame. Chances are that there’ll be many unhappy souls either not being able to hear what’s going on in the movie, or hearing way too much of it – neither of which make for a fun time.

Let’s not even begin to talk about the spider web of wires that will be running around the room. Certainly not an environment you’d want your children to be in!

Such a scenario is something that Sam Tan, a car audio industry veteran from Singapore, has been working towards preventing. Having spent more than 30 years in the car audio industry, he wanted to take his philosophy of elegant design and innovative audio acoustics to the homes.

The last five years has seen Tan working on creating a speaker that would make high-end home audio simple – like in a car – where users can enjoy room-filling sound at the touch of a button. But unlike a car’s confined spaces, the quest to develop a speaker that could be placed anywhere in a room but produce a consistently high-quality experience was far more difficult.

In 2011, he finally did it. Inspired by the concept of high-end omnidirectional speakers that typically cost more than US$100,000, Tan created the now-patented Sound Array, which eventually became the core technology behind the speaker he built it into – the ARCHT One.

High-quality sound, anywhere

What goes on inside the ARCHT One.

Without going too much into the science of it, here’s basically how the Sound Array technology works. The ARCHT One is comprised of two speaker drivers – which sends the sound waves to your ears – and a passive radiator. Of the two drivers, the first covers mid- and high-range frequencies, while the second is a sub-woofer which correspondingly produces the lower frequency, bassy sounds. The radiator amplifies the bass, creating a fuller sound overall.

Here’s where the genius comes in. This is basically what the Sound Array itself looks like – it is placed in between the first and second speaker drivers:

Made in Singapore, validated in the US

To Kickstarter