How Do You Make the Ultimate Brutalist Speaker?
Daniel Alm has spent the morning listening to the most eclectic assortment of music he can think up. The thumping distorted bass of “Mask Off” by Future is followed by the dreamy folk-rock of Fleetwood Mac, then contrasted by the crisp drums of “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. It’s all been blaring from Braque, a towering speaker system, which Alm and his audio engineer wanted to put through its paces. This is the final step in ensuring Braque hits Alm’s exacting standards, where the sound is “warm, but still revealing.”
Braque is a collaboration between two of Alm's companies: Studio D.A, his design studio, and Nocs Design, a Swedish audio company he founded in 2003. “We are complete nerds,” he says lovingly of his small Nocs team that slowly pushes out handcrafted hi-fi equipment.
In the simplest of terms, Nocs' design language is minimal. The company’s Monolith speaker, winner of a Red Dot award in 2023, is a rectangular black wooden box punctuated by five circular speakers screwed onto the front, and the DJ headphones that first made the brand’s name used by everyone from dubstep pioneer Skrillex to veteran Brazilian electronic music producer Gui Boratto, are equally sleek and devoid of color.
But even for Nocs, its newest speaker, Braque, is refined to the extreme.
Braque’s brutalist design comprises of two boxes. There’s a 55-pound steel box that’s been cut, welded, and brushed by hand in Sweden to achieve a soft matte finish, atop of which is a plywood speaker cube assembled by what Alm describes as “an old-school factory” in Estonia, where it’s finished in a deep matte black oil, applied in two layers for a jet-black finish.
Beyond a circular coaxial speaker, which pumps out deep bass and clear notes powered by a driver from century-old UK manufacturer Celestion, there’s nothing to detract from the speaker's materials. Even the speaker vent, used to create a more hard-hitting bass, is moved to the back, mostly because Alm is “not too fond of looking at the hole.”
“You can see the veneer of the wood, and then you see the brush of the metal so close together. Splitting those materials into two, something really nice happens there,” says Alm. “Sometimes with design, you have an idea that’s been on the back burner, and you haven’t found the right components for it. And then, all of a sudden, it just makes sense. I think Braque is one of those projects. It's almost subconscious, in a way.”
This is by far the biggest of Nocs’ typically compact speakers, Alm deciding not to operate within his usual size constraints. It’s also the most expensive, available now for $6,000. By Alm’s own admission, it’s a pretty penny, but expert craftsmanship doesn’t come cheap.
“For many years, a lot of brands have saved costs on screws,” says Alm, appalled that any serious speaker-maker would glue their components together to shed a few dollars in screw costs. “That shows where we’re at in the consumer product lifecycle, and also manufacturing-wise. On Braque, I don't know how many screws we have… [it’s] too many screws!”
This approach is what has won Nocs multiple awards and made the independent company revered amongst serious audiophiles. Alm says he never designs with a retail price in mind; instead, he picks out the finest handmade materials, takes time selecting the best audio equipment, and puts it all together with umpteen screws. The price? Well, let that be whatever it has to be.
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