Vince Ang, who leads Creative Technology’s product and industrial design team, calls Sound Blaster Roar “the mother of all portable Bluetooth speakers”. He says: “The design allows it to produce fantastic audio. It can actually replace the home theatre system”.

No larger than a portable booklet, the speaker delivers powerful, precision-tuned, high-fidelity sound. While most portable speakers use only one amplifier which compromises high frequencies in favour of low and mid ones, the Sound Blaster Roar boasts a bi-amplified design. With one amplifier for lows and mids, and another for high frequencies, it transmits uncompromisingly clear, high definition, well-balanced sound.

In designing the Sound Blaster Roar, the team had to consider a solid chassis that can withstand a high surge of acoustic output. “This translates to less energy wastage and better audio quality. The outlook of the design suggests a clean, high quality built with careful consideration for details”, Vince explains.

The speaker also delivers audio with space-filling dispersion. Its far-field high frequency drivers project audio further than most other speakers in its class. Thanks to its box-style layout, listeners hear “non-sweet, spot-specific audio and amazing tight bass”.

The product also comes with Roar, a feature that delivers instant additional audio power. A listener wanting sheer audio power can simply press the ROAR button to instantly boost audio loudness, depth and spaciousness.

There were challenges the team had to surmount to produce the Sound Blaster Roar, Vince reveals. For example, the device needed a big battery without increasing the speaker size. It also had to be more “feature-rich” than other speakers, with more components, circuits, buttons – without increasing speaker size. Ultimately, the speaker had to outperform those more than twice its price.

After several dozen design proposals were rejected, the team was left with models ACE1 – ACE4, each of which had one of the following four attributes: small and portable; great aesthetics; powerful with good sound; intelligent. The decision was to focus on ACE3, but incorporate the qualities of the other three models.

In Vince’s opinion, Sound Blaster Roar fulfills the President’s Design Award’s vision of design making a difference to people’s lives. “Singaporeans want the best of everything in life at the best value for money. We strived to create something that reflects this, and the Sound Blaster Roar is the result. It boasts killer audio, killer looks, killer features and a killer price. It is an excellent example of a well-designed, innovative speaker product that allows not just Singaporeans, but everyone, to enjoy premium quality wireless audio in music, videos, movies and games – anywhere, anytime”.