Concrete Speakers

Furniture & Lighting Music
Concrete Speakers

The thing about speakers, of course, is that there’s not really any good way, that I can think of, to convey their most important functional quality online:  How do they sound?

Still, these prototypes from industrial designer Shmuel Linski look so good I couldn’t pass ’em up. Snip:

The horn speaker technology that I used in my project, works just great with the concrete, even without the need of padding the speakers from the inside. The driver, which is located in the top part of the speaker, moves the air through a pipe (96cm long) and into a horn-shaped mouth in the bottom of the speaker. The weight (56kg) makes the speakers very solid.

Exposed, as he calls the set, was a capstone project for Linkski’s course of studies at Israel’s Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. There’s not much by way of explanation, but his press kit includes a series of photos that demonstrate the casting process, which I’ve annotated below…

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The key missing detail is the inner mold geometry that creates the horn and speaker- and panel-mounting recesses. I think it has to be a sacrificial form, of some sort, that gets chipped, dissolved, burned and/or melted out after the concrete has hardened. Polystyrene foam, maybe?

linski design

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

View more articles by Sean Michael Ragan

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