Designing the Lower East Side
Though Audyssey’s newest speakers may at first look like just another pretty face, they were born of an epic battle between designers and engineers. Punches were thrown, paper flew and protractors nearly turned into life-threatening weapons as people whose brains work in entirely different ways tried to make cohesive decisions. And while a couple of interns may have been lost along the way, the resulting product, forged from equal parts intelligence and aesthetics, is easily worth the loss in manpower. Allow us to introduce the Audyssey Lower East Side Media Speakers.
Why Lower East Side? We got tired of awesome technology being given names such as, R2D2 or MX2000, so we decided to come up with a better product ID and nomenclature for our consumer products. Audyssey is a small crew of musicians, music fans and audio geeks from all over the world and, in talking about music all the time, we inevitably talk about music origins. We picked our favorite cities and further, we picked our favorite neighborhoods – starting with SoMa in San Francisco, looking forward to Silver Lake in our hometown of Los Angeles and now focusing on the Lower East Side, the birthplace of New York sound.
Once we had our concept, we teamed our research & design nerds with Ammunition Group’s savvy designers and got to work. They, along with Audyssey COO Neal Osterhaus, CTO Chris Kyriakakis, Director of Hardware Andrew Turner, VP of Engineering Felix Bertram and VP of Marketing Robb Mason then figured out how to translate the punk rock vibes of the Lower East Side into a consumer-friendly media speaker.
We knew we wanted it to be raw, urban and authentic. We also knew we wanted it to work with a wide array of media players, both optical and digital. Ammunition translated this into some key design themes: low visual complexity and clean, sliced shape, rigid assembly, and use of simple materials such as metal, cloth and plastic.
With these ideas in mind, Ammunition put together a giant wall of mock-ups for Audyssey, showcasing sketches in multiple design languages. This variety helped the Audyssey team visualize the product and allowed the engineers to push back on what was technologically feasible, challenging and marketable. Much of the design detail was forged via this day-to-day discussion. The smallest detail was up for innovation and development and even simple things such as the radium of a curve were discussed in order to make the product both beautiful and functional.
So what makes them so awesome? “They sound great,” explains VP of Marketing Robb Mason. “At the end of the day, Audyssey is most concerned with sound quality, but with these speakers we found a way to have both great sound and great design.”
The Lower East Side Media Speakers will be in stores in August, feature deeper bass, audio clarity and power than speakers of similar size and are the only speakers to feature an analog 3.5 mm line and optical audio input to easily connect to your Apple TV.