Sound outdoors, without boxes on the walls.
The client wanted music in the garden: properly, across the different outdoor areas, without big speakers bolted to the house or dominating the planting.
This is a garden system only. It's a separate installation from any audio inside the house, designed for the way the outdoor spaces are actually used.
Gardens are hard places to make sound good.
Outside there are no walls or ceilings to reinforce the sound, so small speakers on their own sound thin, and the usual answer of a couple of large speakers turned up loud just blasts one area and annoys the neighbours.
Everything also has to live outdoors all year: in the soil, in the rain and among plants that will grow around it.
Sonance Landscape Series, in three zones.
We used the Sonance Landscape Series. Small LS4T satellite speakers sit low in the borders among the planting, spread out to give even coverage at a comfortable level rather than loud spots. The bass comes from the LS12T, a 12-inch subwoofer that is buried in the ground, so all that shows is a small dome in the border.
The system is split into three zones, driven by Sonance amplifiers and controlled through Control4, so each area can play its own music, share the same music or be left quiet.
The first time the music played.
The video was taken during first testing, before the garden was finished, with music playing through one of the three zones: the border beside a patio. You can see the satellites in the planting and the subwoofer in the bed.