Sonic Impact BM101: Panel Turns Bed Into Speakers

Audio company Sonic Impact is talking up the "BM101 speaker panel," designed to slip between your mattress and box spring, using the latter as a subwoofer-like resonator and sending up sound through the former. The two-by-four-foot panel will be anywhere from $200 to $400 when it goes on sale this spring, reports Eliot Van Buskirk.

I've always liked the idea of pillows with speakers in them, although I don't quite know why any of this stuff would be be any better than just having speakers around your bed. You could certainly mess with someone's mind if they didn't know this sort of technology existed, however, whispering murderous poltergeist messages to them as they drifted to sleep.

In-Bed Speakers: Why Had No One Thought of This Before? [Gadget Lab]

[#1 posted by Skep , January 7, 2008 4:40 AM]

A matress with springs or foam (especially "memory" foam) seems like a bad choice for trying to transmit sound. Maybe some one did think of this before and realized it is a stupid and pointless idea.

[#2 posted by mralistair , January 7, 2008 9:15 AM]

i wonder if the frequency range is low enough to play
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note

would make an interesting practical joke.

[#3 posted by Josh Michtom , January 7, 2008 9:28 AM]

I'm not saying that I know this from first-hand experience or anything, but it is customary in Buenos Aires for teenage couples wanting some, ahem, privacy, to go to "albergues transitorios" - pay-by-the-hour hotels, essentially - and in one such establishment, there is (or there was, in 1992) a bed with curlicue cutouts on the headboard, which cutouts are backed with colored plexiglass, and with a small lamp on the side table, and set in the side table is a three-way switch. When the switch is all the way to the right, the table lamp is on; when the switch is in the middle position, the lamp is turned off and lights inside the headboard are illuminated to make the curlicue cutouts glow warmly; when the switch is all the way to the left, the cutouts remain illuminated and, additionally, soft, Barry White-style disco music to emanates from somewhere within the bed. The effect is, to put it briefly, incredibly awesome. I predict great things for this bed-speaker-device, and the proprietors of hot-sheets motels around the globe are advised to purchase it in order to offer the finest low-cost luxury to their discerning clients.

[#4 posted by Anonymous , January 7, 2008 6:41 PM]

"Why do I hear a B flat note at 110dB from you room for 15 minutes after you go to sleep?"