How a Reference Media Room Hides Its Technology Completely

Imran Azam and I spent time at Habitech Limited recently with Giovanni Scatola, sound engineer and brand manager for Sonance and James by Sonance. The media room he showed us is the cleanest example of a brief I get more often every year: "I want immersive sound, I do not want to see the speakers."

The room is finished in painted plaster and warm timber. There is no acoustic foam visible, no speaker grille, no subwoofer cabinet anywhere in the line of sight. The system is fully Sonance Invisible Series — drivers buried inside the wall behind a thin plaster skim — paired with concealed in-ceiling subwoofers and a discreetly housed amplifier rack. You walk in, and the first thing you notice is how calm the room feels. The second thing you notice is that the audio is filling the space at a level that should not be possible from speakers you can't locate.

The trade-off in invisible installation is real, and you cannot ignore it. The driver has to push sound through a layer of plaster. That layer has mass and damping characteristics that subtly colour the high frequencies. Done by someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it sounds muffled. Done by Sonance with the right wall buildup and the right driver loading, the colouration is small enough that most listeners cannot identify it as a compromise.

But the build cost is higher than a conventional install, not lower. The wall buildup needs to be specified during the architectural drawings, not retrofitted. The driver position has to be coordinated with stud placement, MEP routing, and the finishing trade's plaster sequence. The integrator and the architect have to be in the same conversation from the start. Skip that step and you end up patching, repainting, and apologising.

The interior designers I work with are pushing for invisible AV across every project right now. The reasoning is consistent. The art direction of a luxury room — the curated finishes, the careful lighting, the considered material palette — is what the client paid the designer to deliver. A black box on the wall undermines all of it. The technology has a job to do, and that job is to disappear.

What Giovanni and the Habitech team have built is a working demonstration of the brief executed properly. For any project where the design language matters as much as the audio performance — and that's most of them at the upper end — invisible is no longer a niche option. It's the default specification, and it pays back in client satisfaction every time.