I. Morphology

Medusa vitreosonans is a tripartite system: two satellite columns and a subwoofer, all housed in clear polycarbonate that conceals nothing of its own workings. The naturalist reads this transparency as a statement rather than an oversight. The subwoofer is a rounded dome, 232 millimetres across the base and 258 tall, tapering upward to a stem and flaring again at the crown, and the cnidarian comparison is not a stretch so much as the specimen’s entire design brief. Beneath it fires a single six-inch cone, downward, into whatever surface the animal has been set upon.

The satellites are slender clear tubes, 51 millimetres across and 254 tall, each standing on its own weighted chrome foot and tilting on that foot to be aimed at a listener. They are not mounted to the subwoofer and never have been. Each column carries four one-inch full-range transducers stacked in a vertical file, eight across the pair, visible through the housing and evenly spaced in a manner that suggests a segmented organism rather than a loudspeaker.

The whole is rated at forty watts: twenty to the subwoofer, ten to each satellite. All amplification lives in the subwoofer; the columns are passive, and receive their signal down transparent shielded cables the maker took the trouble to make see-through as well.

II. Behavior

The specimen takes audio through a single detachable 3.5mm stereo input and asks no further questions of its host. It is mains-powered, drawing sixty-five watts at maximum and four at idle. It is not powered over USB, does not speak USB, and has not spoken USB since 2004.

The placement of the touch pads is the specimen’s one genuine cruelty. They sit low on the right-hand column, unmarked but for a faint moulded glyph, and a guest who wishes the music quieter must first be told where the controls are, because nothing about the animal discloses it. Reviewers of the period complained of this without exception and the maker changed nothing for eleven years, which the naturalist takes as the correct response to a complaint one does not intend to act on.

Dr. Erasmus Gull, F.Z.S., has maintained in print and in company that the volume controls are sited on the subwoofer, and was observed at some length stroking the rim of that dome with two fingers, tapping his signet ring against the polycarbonate, and pronouncing the system "unresponsive, and very probably French."^{1The controls were, throughout this demonstration, eleven inches to his left, at the foot of the right-hand column, which he had earlier moved in order to have somewhere to set his glass. This naturalist did not say so at the time and does not regret the omission.}

III. Lineage & Related Specimens

The line begins not with the SoundSticks but with the iSub, announced by Apple in October 1999: a standalone six-inch subwoofer of clear plastic, connected over USB, compatible only with slot-loading iMac G3s and their Pro Speaker kin. Jony Ive designed it and said he had shaped it like a wind instrument, so that sound could flow freely. Harman Kardon and Apple then built the satellites to match, and the pair was shown together at the July 2000 Macworld expo as SoundSticks.

The naturalist wishes the record to be exact about what changed here, because the popular account is wrong in a way that flatters this generation. The severance from USB happened at the second generation, in 2004, along with the touch controls. The third generation, arriving in 2009, altered the accent colour from green and blue to black and changed the indicator LED from blue to ice-white, and that is very nearly the whole of it. The maker’s own literature of the period recommends the specimen chiefly on the grounds that it matched the gloss-black iMacs and MacBooks then in the shops.

This is not a criticism. Four generations across twenty years held one silhouette, and the changes were connective or cosmetic and never structural, an extraordinary tenure of morphological stability in a kingdom that defines itself by obsolescence. But the tenure belongs to the line. It does not belong to this specimen, which inherited a finished form and altered the trim.

The design took an Industrial Design Excellence Award gold in 2000 and the cover of I.D. magazine. The Museum of Modern Art acquired an iSub for its permanent collection in 2013, thirteen years after the fact and four years into the life of the specimen described here: an institution catching up to a shape that had by then been sitting on desks for over a decade, and acquiring, it should be noted, the subwoofer alone.

IV. Vestigial & Absent Structures

V. Field Notes

The specimen has occupied the same corner of a desk for years, connecting without ceremony to whatever is plugged into it, laptop or phone or mixer, indifferent to the source in a way the naturalist has come to regard as the correct temperament for any peripheral. The visible cone, pulsing in time with the signal, rewards the kind of attention most audio equipment goes out of its way to discourage.

It was designed for translucent machines, not for the beige ones, and it has outlived the translucence entirely. That it still looks correct beside aluminium and glass is either a triumph of design or an accident of taste, and this naturalist does not feel obliged to resolve which.^{2Gull keeps his own specimen under a linen tea towel, the ice-white LED having proved, in his account, "an interrogator's light." He has not switched the system off. He has covered a transparent object, chosen for its transparency, with a cloth. The naturalist has said nothing about this either, and finds the silence increasingly expensive to maintain.}

Submitted to the Archive — Silicon Naturalist, Machinatia Division · Coordinates Withheld