Pent has decided your speakers should stop pretending they’re furniture and start acting like a point of view.
This is the same European design house that looked at home fitness equipment—treadmills, dumbbells, the things most of us shove into basements—and said, no, these should feel ceremonial. Now it’s doing the same thing to sound. Enter Pent Audio, a new line of loudspeakers that seem less interested in disappearing into your living room and more interested in staring you down.
The headliner is called Gulia, and it costs real money. We’re talking $7,200 on the low end, pushing close to $9,000 if you start making aesthetic decisions the way Pent clearly expects you to. That price alone tells you this is not about specs-per-dollar or the Reddit crowd comparing frequency charts at 2 a.m.
One Speaker, Full Presence
Gulia is a sculpture first. The shape is bold, almost confrontational—a wide, soft cone balanced on a wooden cylinder that looks improbably calm about the whole arrangement. It doesn’t try to disappear into the room and it absolutely doesn’t apologize for taking up space.
Marcin Raczek, Pent’s founder, talks about design, movement, ritual. That sounds lofty, but it tracks with what Pent has done so far. There’s a distinctly Polish sensibility here—craft-forward, slightly dramatic, allergic to minimalism for minimalism’s sake. These speakers don’t whisper “premium.” They announce it.
What’s more surprising is that Gulia doesn’t need a partner. This isn’t a left-right, cable-snaking, rearrange-your-room kind of commitment. One speaker. Full stereo image. That alone will make audiophiles either lean forward or roll their eyes.
Under the hood—or under the sculpture, really—there’s a 6.5-inch woofer tucked into the base, driven by an 80-watt Class-D amp. Above that, two midrange drivers and two silk-dome tweeters, each with their own amplification. Pent clearly doesn’t want these components fighting for attention. Everyone gets their own lane.
The result, according to the company, is immersive sound without visual clutter. You don’t need towers flanking your TV like sentinels from a bygone hi-fi era. Gulia stands alone. Literally.
Connectivity is modern, because of course it is. Bluetooth. Wi-Fi. AirPlay. Spotify. Tidal. Deezer. Internet radio. The usual suspects. There’s also an app on the way, still baking, that promises full control and multiroom support. That’s table stakes now, and Pent seems to understand that design alone doesn’t buy you forgiveness if the tech feels half-finished.
Still, the real story here isn’t wireless protocols. It’s materials.
Luxury Audio for People Who Care About Rooms
Pent lets you spec this thing like a luxury car. Walnut, ash, oak, black ash. Leather-wrapped enclosures in white, beige, darker beige, or black. Grilles in tones that sound like they were chosen by someone who owns linen napkins. Stainless steel or gold accents, because subtlety is optional.
You can pick from four curated combinations if decision fatigue sets in, which it probably will. This isn’t just customization; it’s an invitation to project taste. Pent wants you to feel like you authored the object, not merely purchased it.
And yes, this is indulgent. Deliberately so.
Pent isn’t chasing Sonos or Bang & Olufsen buyers. It’s chasing people who see their living spaces as extensions of identity, who don’t mind paying extra for the feeling that nothing in the room is accidental. Gulia doesn’t hide. It anchors.
Whether that’s worth $8,000 depends on what you want from technology right now. If you want invisible efficiency, there are cheaper paths. If you want tech that insists on being seen, touched, discussed—Pent is making a compelling case.
At the very least, Gulia raises a question the audio world has been dodging for years: why should speakers be apologetic? We live with them. We look at them every day. Maybe they should finally act like they belong there.
Pent seems to think so. And honestly, I’m inclined to agree.
