The atelier
If the cabinet has to stay still,
why do we keep making it out of wood?
Wood is perfect for furniture. From an acoustic cabinet, though, we ask something else: that it stay still.
Wood cuts, glues and finishes with ease: for furniture it is ideal. From an acoustic cabinet, though, we ask something different — that it stay still. Under the thrust of a driver wood works a little: it flexes and returns energy late, adding a colour of its own to the music. Stone, by mass and rigidity, stays still far longer.
Stone stays still. It is the material we build the things that outlive their builders from. The only problem is that it is difficult: heavy to move, impossible to correct, and every mistake costs a whole slab.
That is why almost nobody makes a loudspeaker in real stone — not a wooden box with a marble plate glued on top. Not because it does not work: because it is inconvenient.
The birth of the project
Two worlds that never spoke to each other.
ACUSTICA was born of a passion and a refusal. The passion is for sound: Ilios Cipriani, who imagined ACUSTICA, has always designed and built acoustic enclosures, for the sheer pleasure of making them — the project, the form and the choice of materials all begin there.
The refusal is aimed at our own age. True high fidelity is something we have forgotten: homes once held a washing machine, a television and a stereo; today all that remains are boom boxes, phones and earbuds. Hence the idea of an object that would bring sound back into the living room without hiding it — a piece of furniture that is at once loudspeaker and light.
First came wood: mockups made in the workshop, and a small CNC machine bought expressly to close in on the right form. Today's Vox Lucis is the fourth version — the first three taught the fourth.
Then stone ceased to be an idea, when Stefano Ghirardi came on board: a marble worker to his core, a visionary, in love with music. He did not merely welcome the project, he made it his own. In his vision the marble was not meant to clad, it was meant to resonate: natural stone finding a voice, and music becoming one more material.
High fidelity and marble — two worlds that rarely speak to each other — met here. ACUSTICA was born of that meeting, and of the wish for an object that belongs in a home the way a work of art does.
Who works the stone
Stone to those who work stone.
A loudspeaker in marble cannot be made by someone who builds loudspeakers: it has to be made by someone who works marble. The acoustic design is ours; the stone is followed by a specialist workshop, from the choice of block to the finishing of the last corner.
It is a division of skills, not a supply arrangement. The seat of every driver is opened and chamfered into the thickness of the slab by hand, one piece at a time: there is no machine to delegate it to, because there are no two identical slabs to set one up on.
The project
Born among the slabs. Shown at Marmomac.
The first pieces, in Noir Saint Laurent, were shown at Marmomac, the international marble fair in Verona.
That is not a biographical detail: it says which world this object belongs to. It was not born in an electronics workshop and then clad in stone. It was born among the slabs, and the acoustic design grew up inside that world.
The method
How we work.
We do not hold stock. Every pair starts from a slab chosen for that client. There is no loudspeaker ready to ship, and there never will be.
We do not make two identical pieces. Not as a commercial choice: the vein of a slab does not repeat, and no technology can make it repeat.
We do not promise you will receive what you saw on screen. The configurator is there to choose the character of a stone, not to reproduce its vein. You see that in the yard, or in photographs of the real slab before it is cut.
We do not sell online. The price is public and does not change, but the order goes through a conversation. A hundred and ten kilos of stone deserve a phone call.
Come and hear it.
It is the one argument we cannot write on a page.