From form to sound: Pantheone’s Obsidian, between volcanic stone and contemporary interiors

15 October 2026

In a carefully considered interior, every element has its reason for being, and nothing is there by chance. The speaker is often the exception: a technical object that tends to be hidden, because its appearance rarely speaks to the rest of the room. Obsidian is a response to that exception. It is the second project from Pantheone, the Australian audio systems brand that has chosen to treat sound as part of a home’s architecture.

The brand’s sculptural objects, developed as much for music lovers as for architects and interior designers, are meant to feel at home in refined settings: a design-led residence, a gallery, a boutique hotel. Pantheone I, the brand’s first project, draws on the ancient Pantheon for a curved form that diffuses sound through 360 degrees and anchors the room in which it sits. With Obsidian, the reference shifts from architecture to nature. As the name suggests, it echoes the geometry of the stone, and the curve gives way to a faceted silhouette defined by crisp edges. The two are answers to the same question, held together by the brand’s three pillars of art, form and sound: how can acoustic engineering and architectural form coexist, in balance rather than in competition?

The design finds its harmony in its materiality. The shell is cast from a high-density mineral composite and finished by hand, a process that leaves slight variations in the character of the surfaces and makes each piece distinct from the others, as is true of stone. The choice has an acoustic rationale as well: a rigid structure contains vibration and resonance, and the material, in a sense, falls silent so that the sound can come through clearly. The faceted form contributes to the same balance.

Obsidian is not tied to any one place. It runs on battery, with a battery life of up to fifteen hours at normal volumes, or plugged into the mains, and it moves from the living room to the study without any loss in acoustic performance. Two Obsidian units can be paired as left and right channels, or joined by a Pantheone I, and in multiroom mode the system extends to as many as eight rooms. The scale thus shifts from the single object to the entire home.

The colour palette is restrained: black and white, with Sage added in a limited edition. These tones are chosen to sit well with sophisticated interiors without imposing a theme, leaving the form to do the talking.

With Obsidian, Pantheone gives the speaker back a place of prominence in the room. A sculpted form that invites the eye, a sound that blends into the space without overpowering it: that is enough for a technical object to become, in its own right, an element of the interior.

Related articles