We did not make it louder. We made the world quieter.

Design

Machined from a single billet of aluminium. Forty-seven parts became nine. The only seam left is the one your thumb finds in the dark.

Sound

A 40 mm beryllium driver, suspended so that it touches nothing. It moves air and nothing else — no housing, no rattle, no colour of its own.

Silence

Eight microphones read the room 48,000 times a second and answer it with its exact opposite. The train, the office, the engine — all of it arrives inverted.

Style

And then it simply looks like this. On your head, on a desk, on a hook by the door. Quiet is the whole aesthetic.

SOLACE 01 — Copenhagen

Every other pair fights the room by shouting over it. We would rather the room simply stopped.

Noise cancellation is not a feature we added at the end. It is the reason the rest of the object is shaped the way it is. The cups are sealed before they are styled. The clamp is measured in grams before it is measured in taste. Nine parts, because every seam is a way in for the world.

What is left is not a headphone that plays music loudly. It is a headphone that removes everything that was ever in the way of it — and then gets out of the way itself. You stop noticing the product roughly four seconds after you put it on. That is the entire design brief.

The short version

SOLACE 01 — over-ear

01 Driver 40 mm beryllium, free-suspended 5 Hz–40 kHz
02 Cancellation Eight-microphone adaptive array −42 dB
03 Battery Five minutes charged gives five hours 60 h
04 Body Machined aluminium, memory foam, lambskin 249 g

−42 decibels removed from the room before the music even starts

9 parts in the whole body, down from the forty-seven we started with

249 grams, which is about the weight of a paperback you forget you are holding

We spent four years building something whose entire job is to be the least interesting thing in the room.

Mads Halvorsen — head of acoustics