IKEA today announced its new Symfonisk Picture Frame speaker, its latest collaboration with Sonos. This flat speaker, no more than a few inches deep, is designed to mount on your wall, allowing you to place speakers in a place where you otherwise couldn’t install an audio source.
The IKEA Symfomisk Picture Frame speaker will cost $199 and be available on July 15 at IKEA stores and the IKEA website. Here’s everything that IKEA revealed about its newest audio product.
In order to produce robust audio, speakers need to be able to move a large volume of air; most achieve this through deep cavities. However, to be able to create something thin enough to mount on a wall — it’s 2.4 inches deep — yet still offer the same resonance, this latest IKEA Symfonisk speaker is very wide. It’s similar to what Apple has done with its iMac 2021 and Sony does with the Acoustic Surface Audio in its Sony Bravia A8H OLED TV.
The Picture Frame speaker has one woofer and one tweeter; a wave guide will direct audio from the tweeter to fill your room.
While you’ll be able to pair two Picture Frame speakers for stereo sound, you won’t be able to pair them with other speakers. However, you will be able to add them to a Sonos multiroom audio setup, and they can also be configured as rear surrounds with the Sonos Playbar, Playbase, Sonos Amp, Sonos Arc and Sonos Beam. While the Picture Frame speaker will support Wi-Fi and Airplay 2, it will not have Bluetooth. Also, like the other Symfonisk speakers, there will be no smart assistant built in.
The Picture Frame speaker will come in either white or black, and has a detachable acoustic panel with an abstract design on the front; it looks like a series of triangles connected to each other. During its presentation, IKEA representatives hinted at the possibility that other panel designs will be available in the future.
The speakers are fairly large, and can be mounted on a wall, or stood up on a shelf. You can plug a second speaker into the first, so you only need to use one outlet.
The Symfonisk Picture Frame speaker is the third collaboration between Sonos and IKEA; their first partnership resulted in the IKEA Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker, which sells for less than $100; there’s also the Symfonisk Table Lamp ($179), which combines a speaker and a light in one.
We can see these speakers being very popular for those who want to set up a home theater, but don’t want to go through the effort of cutting holes in their wall to mount speakers, or who don’t have the space for larger bookshelf-style speakers. We’ll be interested to hear how the Picture Frames look — and more importantly — sound.
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