Egg London · 2025
Panel Speakers
Hand-built four-channel spatial audio system
These flat panels are speakers — Distributed-Mode Loudspeakers (DML), where an exciter vibrates the whole panel to radiate sound. I want to see them everywhere: cafés, bars, living rooms, hanging from trees, public spaces.
I built a four-channel spatial audio system from scratch in two weeks for the Architectural Association’s club night in London — hand-cut birch panels, hand-soldered DML exciters, and custom stem-splitting software, all self-taught.
I used AI to split a playlist into individual instrument stems, then routed each to its own panel with custom processing — so 600 people could walk through the band.
I had no studio access (I wasn’t a student there), so I recruited collaborators inside the school to use their workshop. I was paid for the commission, and the speakers now live in the Royal College of Art’s sound lab for ongoing research.
The brief
Egg London runs high-energy DJs on floors 1–2. As guests arrive, they need a welcoming, hi-fi lounge on entry — so the creative direction was to dissect the space as a fluid sound canvas.
Why DML panels
- Wide 2-way dispersion — true spatial immersion
- Flat panels — minimal footprint, maximal impact
- Instrument-specific playback — walk “through the band”
The build
I built the four panels from scratch — birch plywood bonded onto beech frames, two Dayton Audio exciters mounted on each, wired up and hand French-polished (about four hours of polishing for all four). One thing I learned along the way: a layer of foam dramatically improves the low end by increasing the panel’s acoustic coupling.
Drivers
Dayton Audio EX32VBDS-4 exciters — two per panel (40 W, 4 Ω)
Panels
4 mm birch plywood, hand-cut
Frames
Beech timber from Hooke Park
Finish
Hand French-polished
Amplification
Denon AVR-X2300W AV receiver
Audio
Stem-separated tracks · custom MainStage patch
The night
An ambient lounge — soft jazz-funk, downtempo, Brazilian, dub, Latin, avant-garde. Each of the four panels was voiced for a single instrument, so the band spreads across the room and you can move between players.
I built a custom MainStage patch and split each track into instrument stems. Every stem was routed to its own panel over a dedicated HDMI channel, all running through the Denon receiver — so I could control the whole mix, per instrument, with precision.
Custom MainStage patch, routed through the AV receiver — each instrument stem to its own panel.
At home
After the event, I set the panels up in a bedroom to see how they’d behave in a domestic space — hung off the wall, run through the Denon receiver, with the amp on the floor beside a lamp. They disappear into the room and just fill it with sound.
