Sound
6 min
Why the woofer points at the ceiling
Aim a speaker at a room and half the room is in the wrong place. Aim it at the ceiling and the room does the aiming for you.

The problem with aiming
Most portable speakers fire forward. That works if you sit where the speaker is pointing. At a table of six, four people get the side of the sound.
Using the room
Column’s 76 mm woofer fires straight up into a shaped deflector under the dial. The sound spreads evenly through 360 degrees and bounces off the ceiling and walls the way a voice does.
We measured the result at twelve points around a 5 by 4 metre room. The loudest and quietest seat were 2.1 dB apart. A forward-firing speaker of the same size measured 9 dB.
What you give up
Pure stereo width. That is why two Columns pair as a stereo set in about ten seconds.
Written by the Tolva workshop
Four engineers and a designer. Questions about this note go straight to the person who wrote it.
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More from the workshop.

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The deposit comes off the $349 price and is refundable until your Column ships. We charge the rest a week before it leaves.
Today
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Feb 2027
Batch one of 2,000 goes into production
Mar 2027
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Questions
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