Mirai Speaker: This TV speaker throws a wicked curve

If you find yourself cranking your TV’s speakers to hear what’s being said, this curiously curved speaker promises to clear things up.

- JONATHAN TAKIFF

Having trouble discerning dialogue in a busy TV soundtrack? Feeling the wrath of viewing mates (and fighting over the remote control) for the sin of cranking the TV volume too loud? The Mirai Speaker (fave.co/421a62e) solves both problems-to a degree, at leastthanks to a design that's unlike any other I've encountered.

Created by veteran engineers from JVC Kenwood for a new venture called SoundFun, the amplified Mirai Speaker (Mirai is Japanese for "future") first caught my eyes and ears at CES 2023. During a show-floor demo, the chaps played a tinkly music box at a distance of 15 feet from the audience. Initially, the tune was inaudible over the din. But when the pitch man touched the mechanism to a convex-curved piece of plastic sheeting, the tinkling suddenly reached my ears with surprising clarity and volume. (A similar Mirai demo available as a YouTube video [fave.co/42laCNq] lets you witness the same party trick.)

A similarly curved rectangular wave guide visible behind the mesh grill of the Mirai speaker's wedge-shaped enclosure projects sound farther and across a wider horizontal arc than you'd get from a more conventional, concave cone driver. If you're reasonably close, you can turn the volume down to a "shush" and still hear what's going on. That's good for late-night talk-show watchers-like me-who don't want to wake housemates and party-wall neighbors. It's even better for Mirai's target audience: folks suffering from mild to moderate hearing loss. They won't need to crank this speaker to the max to get the gist of a TV conversation.

WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?

To make the Mirai Speaker more user friendly, its designers developed an obsession with clearing the sonic forest of nonessential audio distractions. To accomplish that goal, this speaker reproduces just the range of frequencies where speech is heard.