In the Era of Luxury Listening, You Deserve a Sci-Fi Speaker
Luxury sound demands a luxury rig, and is there anything more high-class than a sound system that would look as at home in an art museum as it would on a Dune set?
New York furniture designer Kouros Magsoudi and the aptly named hi-fi studio Silence Please just released a special edition of the Silence Please Hum, creating a collaborative speaker inspired by the defining features of NYC nightlife — think club speaker stacks and brutalist interiors rather than ketamized club nights and blurry Uber rides home.
This special variation of the Hum comes amidst a resurgence in luxury listening experiences, but sets itself apart from the likes of the $15,000 Hermès headphones or Bang & Olufsen and Japanese streetwear pioneer Hiroshi Fujiwara’s flower-shaped speaker with its almost alien form: A shrunken-down base of architectural slabs is topped by a curvaceous gramophone horn and finished in a buffed lacquer of either off-white Bone or deep Black.
The speaker may be officially inspired by club culture, but to my cinema-riddled eyes, the Hum feels more at home on the set of Tarkovsky’s Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its slick finish is almost ominous, daring you to play your favorite tracks through its distinctive horn, which, for speaker nerds, was inspired by a shape named for late French audiophile Jean-Michel Le Cléac’h.
You don’t need to know a tweeter from a subwoofer to get that music will sound really, really good on this speaker. But buyers, beware: this is no casual piece of sonic machinery. Only an amplifier and speaker cables will get your music barreling through this stunning sound system; there’s no built-in Bluetooth or smartphone app here.
We are in peak Luxury Listening. Clothing shops like Seoul’s Post Archive Faction and Tokyo’s a.PRESSE are incorporating high-end speakers into their retail experience, while those aforementioned Hermès will cost as much as a car (I don’t know how much cars cost).
Magsoudi and Silence Please are betting big on the high-end speaker trend and cranking the exclusivity dial up to 11: priced at around $6,600 per pair, only 10 Hum Speakers are available to buy, ensuring this masterpiece will become as rarefied as a Warhol for hi-fi enthusiasts. However, ordinary Hum speakers are always available for $4,900 apiece.
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