Origami Speakers

This afternoon I was watching Current TV which featured a profile of Muji. Think Japanese IKEA, minus the cute names. Muji's central ideas are quality, simplicity, and modesty. The product that caught my attention was a pair of single-driver speakers that use a collapsable card board box as their enclosure, retail is a cool $42. Never mind the kinds of frequency response problems that such an enclosure would introduce, I want to hear these speakers and I don't even know why. Muji just opened their first US store in New York. These would be right up the alley of Stereophile's Art Dudley. Single-driver? Check. Japanese? Check. Original in a wacky way? Check. Esoteric? CHECK!

According to Muji's website:

THE PHILOSOPHY
What is MUJI? MUJI is not a brand whose value rests in the frills and "extras" it adds to its products. MUJI is simplicity - but a simplicity achieved through a complexity of thought and design. MUJI's streamlining is the result of the careful elmination and subtraction of gratuitous features and design unrelated to function. MUJI, the brand, is rational, and free of agenda, doctrine, and "isms." The MUJI concept derives from us continuously asking, "What is best from an individual's point of view?" MUJI aspires to modesty and plainness, the better to adapt and shape itself to the styles, preferences, and practices of as wide a group of people as possible. This is the single most important reason people embrace MUJI. MUJI - in its deliberate pursuit of the pure and the ordinary - achieves the extraordinary.