Arpeggiator
The new speakers are a side effect of research into electric guitar acoustics. Unsurprisingly the rules for building an electric guitar are similar to how acoustic guitars are built. And of course all of the concepts are the same as any acoustic instrument design principles (a drum or a guitar is basically a piece of wood resonating).
For a guitar to sound good:
1. It can have no paint in the neck pocket and no paint on the neck part that touches wood there. Contact between neck and body must be wood-to-wood.
2. No plastic paint helps. Plastic paint kills wooden resonance. Hence plastic paint must be avoided and wood-based oil varnishes used instead if a guitar (or speaker cabinet) is to sound good. If you have paint in your guitar's neck pocket (and on the neck where it touches the body) - remove it right away.
3. Nuts matter. A brass nut changes neck resonance a lot. This is to be expected as anything placed between the strings and the guitar affects vibration transfer from the neck to guitar. In the case of a nut its material also affects vibration quality (resonance/tone) of the neck itself. Tuners also affect vibration and sustain.
4. Electronics have to be decent, met-poly, silver-mica, poly caps, decent wiring (copper or silver-plated copper), Bourns 1 megaohm pots for volume controls, etc. Makers like Epiphone and Squier often spoil their guitars on purpose with crummy capacitive steel wire and polyester caps to make them sound thick and slow. In the case of speakers Nichicon audio-grade electrolycis or similar capacitors (high-speed/high-slew-rate) must be used for bigger capacitance values (like say 10000 microfarad).
5. Steel on the guitar body gives it a tougher tone, brass knobs give it a tougher classic metal tone, some sort of a glued neck arrangement with a special tenon might give it a woodier/more acoustic tone. Removing the neckplate already makes it sound more acoustic-like, removing bolts and glueing the neck in makes it much woodier and very reminiscent of an acoustic though not quite an acoustic tone.
Violin lacquer is a good idea in terms of paint as long as the lacquer is natural and not plastic. Otherwise natural oil varnishes and dyes are used on both guitars and speakers.
Acoustic guitars benefit a lot from very light wooden bridges (made from the likes of rock maple methinks to avoid getting spent) so depending on how the guitar is supposed to sound removing weight and anything non-wooden off the body is supposed to help an "acoustic" tone.
There's your guide to building a good guitar. Now guess how many of these rules are broken and denied and ignored all the time.
The new Solar speakers are built according to some additional principles:
1. Avoid as many electronics as possible in the current path. That is: No crossover, no preamp/tone controls if possible, and if capacitors or other components such as opamps are used they must be fast (of the fastest slew rate available).
2. Rather than avoiding wooden echoes altogether waveguides are laser-cut wood.
3. Where possible hi-fi fullrange drivers are used to avoid crossover holes
4. Organics everywhere: Paper-cone drivers and wooden boxes are expressive and natural, as they ought to be as musical instruments are made of wood.
5. Instead of damping the drivers and enclosures as much as possible they're allowed to vibrate freely, generating natural wood overtones to music. 6. Wooden legs are used (or screws on the prototypes) to allow natural speaker vibration/consonance.