| Listen to the Sound of that Ferrari
The team at David Wiener Ventures was recently challenged by Italy’s Ferrari SpA to design a freestanding loud speaker for their Art.Engine home audio series. The challenge included providing balanced sound channels to any location of the room. Towering 47” (199cm), the system combines two speaker arrays, wireless signal input and digital electronics in a single tower. Described as “three-dimensional,” the room-filling sound field brings audio performance to a new level.
Full of organic shapes with few flat surfaces, the Art.Engine’s ports are designed to simulate the racing-style NACA vents on the Ferrari automobile. Also featured in the design are carbon fiber baffles and a Ferrari-inspired paint finish in characteristic red, black, silver or gray.
Wiener’s team did the entire design in Cobalt™, sending the finished parts directly to their milling machine for production. This showed them the details of fit, aesthetics and finish early in the process. As Wiener describes it, “We were working within very tight tolerances. The surface had to be perfect because it was to be hand-finished for Ferrari paint.”
What Wiener’s team found most amazing was that everything fit the first time. There were no rejected parts. One team member commented, “Cobalt eliminates traditional prototyping so we can prototype virtually on the computer. When we like a product we can go straight into production.”
Cobalt’s built-in rendering capabilities not only helped the client visualize their dream completely in situ, but also gave them a pole position on marketing materials. Brochures and web images were done before the finished speaker rolled off the production line.
“My team and I have designed everything from fashion to furniture, from vehicles to aircraft to audio gear,” said David Wiener. “We’ve used all kinds of production methods. The constants across all these designs have been advancing performance, advancing style and using Ashlar-Vellum software.”
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