Which XSCACE speaker is used in the Trevoc Royal Residences apartment?

XSCACE Bonsai, the 12 mm thin slim array speaker. It appears on the wall panels of the living room, the lounge, the dining room and the bedroom, in matte champagne on the timber veneer and in white on the pale panels. Each Bonsai is 90 mm tall, 22 mm wide, 12 mm deep and weighs 100 grams.

Can a speaker that small really fill a living room with a twenty-foot screen?

For television and music at the level a living room is used at, yes. Bonsai publishes 40 W RMS, 86 dB sensitivity and a maximum SPL of 103 dB, and its 140-degree horizontal dispersion spreads sound across a row of seats. In the reference room drawn for this article, the planner predicts 87 dB at a seat 5.5 metres away, 2 dB over the 85 dB reference. It is not a cinema speaker and is not sold as one.

Does Bonsai need a subwoofer?

Always. Its response runs from 300 Hz to 18 kHz, so every Bonsai system is designed with a subwoofer and a 300 Hz crossover. The recommended pairing is the Acacia 6 Powered subwoofer, and the crossover is set by measurement in XSCACE Studio rather than by a default.

How is Bonsai mounted on a finished wall panel?

By a keyhole wall mount. The box includes a screw template, M2.5 screws with plugs, double-sided tape and the connector wire. No bracket and no cut-out are needed, which is why it can go on a veneer, a lacquered panel or a plastered wall after the interior is finished.

What finishes does Bonsai come in?

Matte champagne, black and white as standard, and a custom RAL colour to match a specific panel. Marine treatment is available for humid or coastal installations.

What did the simulation predict for a room like this?

For a 7.5 by 6.5 metre reference room with a glazed rear wall and a 200-inch screen, two Bonsai give a mean of 70 dB at the seats with a ±8 dB spread, speech clarity of STI 0.69, and reverberation of 0.62 s in the voice band against a 0.52 s target. Heavy curtains over the glazing bring the voice band to 0.45 s, on target. A single subwoofer leaves an 11.3 dB seat-to-seat bass spread, which the article names as the compromise it is.

What amplifier drives Bonsai?

Bonsai is passive and 8 ohms. The recommended pairing is the XSCACE Air Amp streaming amplifier, with the Air Mini as the smaller alternative. Both are controlled from the XSCACE Controller app, which discovers every unit on the network and groups rooms.

How is a Bonsai system calibrated after installation?

With the calibration toolkit inside XSCACE Studio and a measurement microphone: RT60 and background noise at the main seat, polarity and level per channel, per-channel delay to the seat, the subwoofer crossover and phase swept with the FFT, X-Sense parametric EQ that cuts modal peaks and never boosts nulls, and a −30 dBFS pink noise reference set to 70 dBC at the seat for a residential room.

Bonsai Slim Wall Speakers in a Luxury Apartment: Case Study

Contents5 sections

Slim wall speakers for a luxury apartment have one job that is harder than it sounds: to be there in every room and seen in none of them. At Trevoc Royal Residences, the residence in this film puts XSCACE Bonsai on the wall panels of the living room, the lounge, the dining room and the bedroom, and the architecture carries on as if nothing had been added. Bonsai is 12 mm thin, 90 mm tall and 22 mm wide, and it weighs 100 grams. On a fluted timber veneer or a painted panel it reads as a strip of trim.

The film: Bonsai through the apartment, from the screen wall to the dining room

A white XSCACE Bonsai slim array speaker on a grey herringbone wall panel beside a timber-veneer panel — White Bonsai on the grey panel, level with the veneer joint

A white XSCACE Bonsai slim array speaker on a light wall panel beside a vase of blossom branches — White Bonsai on a light panel, at the height the room is lived at

A twenty-foot screen, and the sound it does not need

The film opens on the living room's screen wall, close to twenty feet across, and asks the question most people ask: does a screen that size not deserve some serious sound? The answer the room gives is not necessarily. Serious sound in an apartment living room is not a question of cabinet volume. It is a question of where the sound comes from, how evenly it reaches the seats, and whether the room's own reverberation lets dialogue stay clear. A pair of slim arrays either side of the screen, placed on the same wall plane as the picture, puts the stereo image where the eye already is.

Bonsai manages this with four half-inch power-dense drivers in an aerospace aluminium chassis, a built-in passive crossover, and a dispersion of 140 degrees horizontally by 40 degrees vertically. That wide, shallow pattern is the point: it spreads sound across a row of seats without throwing it at the ceiling and floor, which is what keeps a hard-finished apartment room from sounding like a corridor.

Where the speakers went, room by room

Every placement in the film follows the same rule: the speaker sits on a surface the interior designer had already decided on, and it takes that surface's colour. Three finishes are standard, matte champagne, black and white, and a custom RAL is available for a panel that matches none of them.

Living room: Bonsai either side of the screen wall, mounted at seated ear height on the panelling, so the stereo pair and the picture share one plane.
Lounge: Bonsai on the fluted timber-veneer panels behind the seating, in matte champagne to sit with the brass trim lines that run through the joinery.
Dining room: white Bonsai on the pale wall panels above the sideboard, where a conventional speaker would have had nowhere to go without a shelf.
Bedroom: a pair on the panelled wall opposite the bed, for television and music at low level, with the curtain wall left clear.

The lounge: the speaker is above the sofa, on the panel line

A white XSCACE Bonsai on a wall panel above a vase of dried blossom in the lounge — Bonsai above the blossom. The panel joint runs straight past it

A wide view of the lounge seating with a Bonsai speaker on the panelled wall and a palm in the corner — The lounge from the entry. Nothing in the room announces itself as audio

The grille, the chassis edge, and the panel it was made to match

XSCACE Bonsai in matte champagne on a warm panelled wall in the dining room — Champagne Bonsai in the dining room, at the height of the picture rail

The dining room. The speakers are on the panels either side of the mirror

The dining room at Trevoc Royal Residences with a set table, a mirror wall and XSCACE Bonsai on the panelling — Dining room: a set table, a mirrored wall, and sound from the panels

Bonsai, the numbers behind the size

A speaker this small is only worth specifying if its figures hold up, so here they are, from the published specification. Bonsai is lab verified at 40 watts RMS and 50 watts peak into 8 ohms, with a sensitivity of 86 dB and a maximum SPL of 103 dB. Its response runs from 300 Hz to 18 kHz at the minus 6 dB points, which is why every Bonsai system is designed with a subwoofer and a 300 Hz crossover rather than asked to make bass it is not built for. The recommended pairing is the Air Amp streaming amplifier and the Acacia 6 Powered subwoofer, and the recommended room is up to about 15 by 15 feet per pair.

Size: 90 mm tall, 22 mm wide, 12 mm deep. Weight 100 g.
Drivers: 4 × 0.5-inch power-dense custom woofers, neodymium, rubber edge. Built-in passive crossover.
Power: 40 W RMS, 50 W peak, 8 ohms. Sensitivity 86 dB. Max SPL 103 dB.
Frequency response: 300 Hz to 18 kHz (−6 dB). Recommended crossover 300 Hz to a subwoofer.
Dispersion: 140° horizontal × 40° vertical. Mount: keyhole wall mount, no bracket, template and screws in the box.
Finishes: matte champagne, black, white. Custom RAL on request. Marine treatment available.

How this room was planned, controlled and calibrated

Every XSCACE installation follows the same three stages: planned in the simulator, controlled from the app that matches the hardware, and calibrated with measurement. For an apartment that is finished to this standard, the point of the process is that the speakers are placed once, on the panels the designer chose, and never moved.

Planned

Floorplan Sound Simulation takes a plan from trace to bill of quantities in the browser. To show what it says about a room like the living room in the film, we drew a reference room to the screen's width: 7.5 by 6.5 metres with a 3 metre ceiling, furnished, with a glazed rear wall, a 200-inch screen on the front wall, two Bonsai either side of it at 1.6 metres, an Acacia 6 Powered subwoofer and an Air Mini as the source. The main seat is 4.8 metres back. The room is a stand-in, not a survey of the apartment, and the numbers below belong to it.

Floorplan Sound Simulation plan view of the reference living room with two Bonsai on the screen wall, an Acacia 6 subwoofer, the main listening position and the sofa — The reference room in plan: two Bonsai on the screen wall, the sub in the corner, the seat 4.8 m back

The 3D model of the reference living room in Floorplan Sound Simulation with the predicted sound coverage painted across the floor — The 3D model with predicted coverage painted on the floor. Warmer is louder

Coverage: a mean of 70 dB across the seating at ear height, with a uniformity of ±8 dB from the quietest to the loudest spot. That spread is the honest result of a single pair in a room 7.5 metres wide; a second pair, or ceiling fill, is what the planner points at when the brief is even sound at every seat rather than a stereo pair at the screen.
Headroom: the loudest Bonsai reaches 87 dB at the main seat 5.5 metres away, 2 dB over the 85 dB reference. Enough for television and music at the level a living room is used at; not a cinema, and not sold as one.
Speech clarity: STI 0.69, in the good band, with a critical distance of 1.9 metres.
Reverberation: 0.45 s in the bass, 0.62 s in the voice band and 0.39 s in the treble, against a 0.52 s target for the volume. The voice band is over target because of the glazed wall.
Room modes: axial modes at 22.9, 45.7 and 68.6 Hz along the length, 26.4, 52.8 and 79.2 Hz across the width, and 57.2 Hz in height. Schroeder frequency 130 Hz, so everything the subwoofer does below that is modal and seat-dependent.
Bass at the seats: a seat-to-seat spread of 11.3 dB with one subwoofer, worst at 106 Hz. One sub is a compromise in a room this size, and the plan says so.

Floorplan Sound Simulation technical analysis showing predicted loudness at ear height across the reference living room as a colour map, from 50 dB quieter to 115 dB louder — Loudness at ear height across the room, from the technical analysis

The 3D model showing the interference pattern between the two Bonsai speakers across the reference room floor — Interference between the pair, which is what decides where the stereo image holds

The 3D model showing first reflection paths from the Bonsai speakers off the side walls and glazing to the seat — First reflections to the seat. The glazed rear wall is the one that needs treating

The acoustics assistant in the simulator proposes the least intrusive fix first. For this room it is heavy curtains over the rear glazing, which brings the voice band from 0.62 s to 0.45 s and on target, with the screen wall left exactly as it is. That is the kind of note an interior designer can act on without a single panel being added.

The acoustics panel in Floorplan Sound Simulation showing the reverberation target of 0.52 s and the predicted change from heavy curtains over the glazing: bass 0.45 to 0.34 s, voice 0.62 to 0.45 s, treble 0.39 to 0.30 s — The reverberation prediction, now and after curtains over the glazing. Voice band on target

Controlled

With the Air Amp or Air Mini as the source, the rooms are controlled from the XSCACE Controller app on any phone, which discovers every streamer on the network, groups rooms, and holds the volume limits set at commissioning. The owner never touches a DSP; the integrator never has to come back to change a preset.

Calibrated

The calibration toolkit inside XSCACE Studio measures what the room actually does once the furniture and curtains are in, and works with the measurement microphone the integrator already carries. For Bonsai the order of work is fixed:

Measure the room: RT60 and a waterfall at the main seat, and an unweighted FFT of the background, so the target is the room's own and not a generic one.
Check every channel: polarity per driver, a near-field response overlay per speaker, and a 3 dB seat-to-seat level match.
Delay to the seat: per-channel delay to the main listening position, set to the millimetre, so both Bonsai arrive together.
Blend the bass: the 300 Hz crossover, phase and level swept with the FFT so the Acacia 6 joins the pair without a bump or a hole. Crossover chosen by measurement, sub aligned, not guessed.
Correct and protect: X-Sense parametric EQ cuts the room's modal peaks and never boosts nulls; PsySculpt adds equal-loudness compensation at low level; a limiter guards every channel.
Set the reference and hand over: −30 dBFS pink noise set to 70 dBC at the seat for a residential room, with the exported plots and measurement report delivered to the client.

The calibration section of the XSCACE client report, showing the steps Blend the bass, Correct and protect, and Set the reference and hand over, with XSCACE Studio screens — The calibration steps as they appear in the client report, with the Studio screens behind them

What this apartment settles

An apartment is the hardest brief for architectural audio because nothing can be built in after the fact. Walls are shared, ceilings are services, and the joinery is the finish. Bonsai answers that with a speaker that mounts to a keyhole on any panel, needs no bracket and no cut-out, and takes the finish of whatever it is fixed to. The film shows four rooms; the same logic runs through a whole floor. Read the fluted foyer case study for Bonsai in an entrance, the lacquered wardrobe for a bedroom where the speaker disappears into joinery, or pick the living room in Room Solutions to see the systems XSCACE would put in a room like this one.

The bedroom at Trevoc Royal Residences with a curtained window wall and panelled walls — The bedroom. Be it a living room, a study or a cinema, the film says; the rule is the same