AURALIS began not with a business plan, but with a question: if the wood of the marimba can sing for a thousand years, what else might it be asked to do?
The Xoc family has shaped marimbas in Antigua Guatemala for four generations. The tools are old. The hands are older. Wood comes in as raw slabs from the highlands — Hormigo, mostly — and leaves as instruments tuned by ear against the weight of a chisel.
In 2014, Mateo Xoc — the youngest son, trained as both luthier and electrical engineer — noticed something. The very qualities that made Hormigo sing for marimba keys were the qualities loudspeaker designers spend fortunes trying to synthesize in MDF: controlled resonance, internal damping, tonal warmth. So he stopped trying.
He took a pair of Hormigo offcuts, shaped them with joinery instead of screws, and fitted them with drivers he had designed as a thesis project. The sound was not neutral. It was not analytical. It was alive. That pair became the first K'uhul.
The ancient Maya understood acoustics in ways modern science is only now rediscovering. For them, sound was not entertainment — it was how the physical and spiritual worlds spoke to each other. Every major ceremonial site was engineered to shape it.
A clap at the base of Kukulkan's pyramid at Chichén Itzá returns as the chirp of a quetzal — 1,144 years after it was engineered. Modern acousticians have replicated the result. They cannot yet explain how it was designed.
Ceremonial plazas at Palenque and Tikal were laid out so that a single human voice speaking from a ruler's platform could be understood clearly at the far edge of the gathered crowd. No amplification. Only geometry.
Four sacred hardwoods appear again and again in Mayan musical tradition: Hormigo, Granadillo, Conacaste, Cocobolo. Each chosen not for appearance, but for voice. Each now a foundation of the AURALIS catalogue.
The AURALIS workshop sits on a quiet street four blocks from Antigua's central plaza. Inside: air-drying racks of slabbed tonewood, a single CNC router used only for driver cutouts, and a long bench where every cabinet is fitted by hand.
A pair of speakers takes six to eight weeks. Not because we are slow — because the wood is. Hormigo spends twenty-four months on the racks before a single cut is made. The cells relax. The resins settle. What comes off the bench is no longer lumber. It is an instrument waiting to be voiced.
Each cabinet begins with a hand-picked slab, matched to its pair for grain and density.
Mortise-and-tenon, finger joints, no fasteners. The cabinet is the first instrument.
European drivers installed; crossover hand-wound and tuned against a reference pair.
Fifty hours of burn-in. Three listening sessions. Mateo signs the inside panel in pencil.
AURALIS sources its wood through a cooperative of Guatemalan forestry families who have managed highland and Petén woodlands for generations. We buy only from slabs that were already felled — by storm, by age, or by selective thinning that keeps the canopy intact. We never commission a cut.
For every pair we ship, three native hardwood saplings are planted through our partnership with ARCAS, Guatemala's wildlife-and-forest rescue association. The wood we use is a debt. We pay it back with interest.
No commissioned cuts. No clear-cutting. Ever.
Three native hardwood saplings planted for every pair that ships.
Slow cells. Stable cabinets. A better speaker, two years later.
Fourth-generation marimba maker. Trained in electrical engineering at Universidad del Valle. Voices every pair before sign-off.
K'iche' forester who works directly with highland cooperatives. Selects every slab that enters the workshop.
Designs and hand-winds every crossover. Former BBC Research engineer, now three thousand miles south.