La Voix du Luthier – creator of acoustic resonators for electronic musicians – has introduced La Voile (the sail in English, due to the shape of the back soundboard).

Acoustic resonators are an alternative to using speakers to amplify electronic instruments. They are in the tradition of the diffuseurs of French instrument designer Maurice Martenot. Instead of being designed to reproduce sound accurately or ‘flat’, they’re designed to resonate, to become part of your electronic instrument and part of your sounds.

La Voix du Luthier has previously released two acoustic resonators, the Onde and the Pyramide. Here’s what they shared about La Voile:

“Based on our experience with the Onde and the Pyramid, we designed a new resonator, where we integrated the principle of “floating soundboards” that is not often used but that you can find in some old music box, for example.

Its principle is to have 2 suspended spruce soundboards and therefore no soundbox. The result is a gain in sound precision but, as compared to the Onde and Pyramid, a little less bass and sound level.

To compensate this we have added an optional preamplifier, with input Gain and Low, Mid, High frequency controls (it applies only on the line input, not on the Bluetooth). The curved soundboard has no equivalent and results from our own research and experiments: it is designed to be very complimentary to the front circular soundboard.

The name La Voile (the sail), comes from this very unique soundboard. The enclosure has been designed to remind the shape of traditional guitar amplifiers and to make it highly portable (and as for the Onde and Pyramid, it can be battery-powered), but it is 100% built of wood (poplar) with an elegant clear finish. The embedded electronic amplifier is exactly the same as for the Single Body Pyramid. These design choices allow a simpler building process, and therefore a significantly lower price, while still keeping a high quality level.”

Connection panel details

• Power Supply input(also used to charge the batteries), no external PSU.
• On/Off switch.
• Bluetooth LED (Bluetooth is available in addition of the audio input on the two 6.35 mm jack).
• Two 6.35 mm input Audio jack (unbalanced) for a stereo input (Left and Right driving separately the 2 soundboards). One input can be used as “mono” to send the same signal to both soundboards.
• 2 volume potentiometers (one for each soundboard).

Main characteristics of the Voile

• 60 cm high, 58.5 cm width, 20 cm depth, 5.3 kg weight.
• 2*30W Class D amplifier driving 2 carefully selected wideband transducers.
• Built following the traditional stringed instrument maker’s know-how, integrating two sonically complementary soundboards.
• Separated volume control for each soundboard.
• Line level stereo in (2×6.35 mm TS jack).
• Bluetooth Audio (and APTX). Line level input and Bluetooth can be mixed together.
• Battery-powered option, with initial tests showing up to one full day of use between charges.

Possible options

• Preamplifier, with input Gain and Low, Mid, High frequency controls (applies only on the line input, not on the bluetooth). Recommended if you want a deeper bass level.

Pricing and Availability

La Voile is available to pre-order at an introductory price of 557 € (tax and shipping excluded) or 667 € with the preamplifier option. The intro pricing is limited to the first production batch of 40 orders. Deliver is expected to be in March 2023.