The bamboo audio system from iFi
Let your bamboo speaker make a noise
Most speakers are designed to disappear into your home, looking as utilitarian as they can. The Aurora, a wireless music system from UK brand iFi, makes a bid for pride of place in the living room. An eyepopping clash of bamboo fins and aluminium girders with a touchsensitive trapezium OLED display, it makes a statement. Inspired by the architecture of Tokyo’s Omotesando district and French product designer Julian Haziza’s experience of working in home furnishings, it deploys the opposite strategy of curved edges/grey mesh exterior used by Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod. (It is named for the aurora borealis; as that fills the sky with dazzling light, this uses sound to… you get the idea.)
“We wanted to create a system that stands out,” says Haziza, who grew up in Paris in the Nineties, watching Leiji Matsumoto anime, listening to French house and electro, and with a poster of a Lamborghini Countach on his wall. “Its form perfectly mirrors its function. Bamboo is not just attractive, it’s also highly effective acoustically. These days, lots of people just listen to music on their phones and computers. The decline of physical audio formats has led to the evanescence of stylish systems of the kind considered design classics, like vintage Brionvega and Bang & Olufsen products. Owning an audio system used to be a statement about what music means to you.”
As well as streaming music, Aurora will connect to Apple devices and use Amazon Echo, plus there’s outputs for TV, CD and DVD drives.
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