FEATURE
Waves and Frequencies (WAF) Audio
Location
Brooklyn, NY
Type
Interview
Contact
Meet Zoë Mowat and Dave Shaw, the duo behind WAF whose SP-01 speakers have become essential fixtures across NYC’s art and design scene. You’d find them at Fredericks & Mae, Head Hi, and some of the best design shows; they even supplied sound for Eckhaus Latta’s AW25 show. What started as napkin sketches over drinks in 2017 has evolved into speakers that treat audio gear as furniture, designed to enhance rather than interrupt a space.
We love how they’ve built their practice around collaboration and community, working with Chen Chen & Kai Williams on sandblasted glass record weights, textile designer Emma Harling on acoustically transparent grills, and venues like Marci in Montreal where sound quality truly matters. Zoë’s furniture design background drives their material sensibility while Dave’s engineering ensures performance without the typical audiophile nonsense.
The name itself playfully subverts audiophile culture’s outdated “Wife Acceptance Factor,” reframing aesthetic consideration as openness rather than obstacle. Working between Brooklyn and rural Ontario, they’re proving that good sound doesn’t have to look like gear, and as David Mancuso said, good sound is a human right. Keep an eye out for their upcoming SP-02 launch this fall! The full interview features special guest questions from Danny (House Under Magic), read now through the link in our bio.
What’s the story of how you first started designing sound systems?
We’re old friends — we met over 15 years ago in Montreal. Music and design have definitely been an unbroken thread of interest for both of us, so WAF feels like a natural extension of our friendship.
We lived with our partners in an industrial space we renovated and hosted a lot of music-focused parties over the years there — it became a community hub for music, dancing, and building things. Around the same time, we were regularly traveling to NYC for David Mancuso’s Loft parties, which became a spiritual and sonic touchpoint for us. We met a longtime attendee who had been collecting Klipschorn speakers for years, hoping to extend the spirit of those gatherings to other cities. Dave started engineering the audio for these satellite events, refurbishing and eventually building sound systems around this unique collection of speakers.
One evening in 2017 we sketched out a speaker together over drinks at a bar. That initial sketch evolved into multiple prototypes, and after years of development, became our first product, the SP-01. It all felt right as the first idea and the more we dig into it, the more it continues to feel like the right path.
We heard there was a fun tidbit about the significance behind the name Waves and Frequencies, can you tell us a bit about that?
In the audiophile community, WAF is shorthand for “Wife Acceptance Factor.” It’s an obviously outdated and sexist term that measures resistance to audio gear in the home, viewing women as aesthetic gatekeepers.
Waves and Frequencies, or WAF for short, is a cheeky nod to it. Yes, we build aesthetics into the core part of our process but it’s also a cue to rethink and reflect on the often insular nature of the audiophile world. We won’t go deep into a discussion of gender norms and technology, but our approach is based on openness and ultimately about sound and music as a conduit for connection. One of our goals for WAF is to demystify hifi, helping people engage with it in an approachable way.
Compared to a lot of other speaker designers, it seems you two have an ideal background to start this business with experience in furniture design, DJing, and engineering between the two of you. What parts of this new practice came naturally to you and which parts were your biggest challenges?
It’s been an energizing and fluid process from the start. Zoë has run a furniture and lighting design studio practice for many years and Dave is an industrial designer and builder. We’re both DJ’s with about 40 years of record collecting between us. Having solid footing in those worlds has been a springboard for our ideas and design language.
I think one challenge has been finding the right spaces for people to engage with our sound systems since we don’t currently have a brick and mortar listening room. It’s not like furniture, there’s another level of experience that needs to happen and with the right variables. As a result, we’ve been doing a lot of different events with our speakers in NYC, emphasizing their versatility for different kinds of spaces — retail stores, private dinner parties, art gallery openings, for example. We’re often curating the music component too, which is fun.
What is the work like for the two of you managing different ends of this practice, often from different cities?
We’ve eased into our respective roles pretty intuitively, with Zoë on the ground in Brooklyn and Dave managing production in rural Ontario, Canada. We have a consistent and conversational approach to design and development, with “mini” projects to complete and discuss. Working remotely has also been an opportunity to connect our far flung music communities in Canada and the US. We still keep a close connection to Montreal as a halfway meeting point.
What sets your sound systems and design practice apart from the existing speaker market?
We definitely put our personal selves into our projects and try to approach “gear” through our own lens. Zoë’s background in furniture design is the driver of our approach to materials, form, and proportion, etc. but because they’re speakers, every design starts with the feeling and fidelity of the sound. After that we design around the physics.
We want our products to have a degree of customization, and thoughtful features that make them flexible, like the SP-01’s articulating base and removable magnetic grill. From a technical side, we’re definitely in the “no bullshit” camp of engineering, so we use premium materials and components in the places they make a difference, and otherwise don’t get caught up in esoteric serpent oil. We put a lot of care into making a product you can have a very long relationship with.
Can you walk us through the design process for Marci, and what kind of experience do you want to create for visitors?
The bulk of the work on a good installation — before you get to the gear — is treating space itself. We consulted with the Marci team early on in their design process and they made some material and design choices that really enhanced the acoustics of the space, allowing our SP-01 models to sound their best. As a result, you can enjoy a conversation in a packed restaurant while still being able to hear and feel detailed sound with little to no EQ. This is important to us.
Marci is a client who took our component seriously from the start and we’re grateful for that. As a side note, we’ll take this opportunity to heap praise on Montreal as a super fertile and very supportive space for hifi and dance. So much is happening there and we’re lucky to have supplied the sound for a handful of active spaces in the city, like Sans Soleil and Multi Culti’s Space Garage.
Why do you think we’re seeing this renewed interest in high-fidelity audio? How do you see this scene changing in the next few years?
There’s definitely a confluence of reasons. We’d like to think there’s been some natural rebalancing after a long epidemic of small bluetooth speakers and over-compressed, distorted music in spaces where sound is the very last line item of consideration. People might not put a name to it, but bad sound affects us physiologically.
Conversely, a good hifi or well-tuned sound system can really feel like you’re hearing music for the first time, and people are spending their time more intentionally post-pandemic. We’re aligned with other creators who are elevating everyday listening and we’re committed to the idea that everyone deserves better sound in their day-to-day. Hopefully that’s where things are headed. To quote Mancuso, ‘good sound is a human right.’
What’s in store for WAF this year? How do those plans tie into your long term vision?
In addition to sound systems, our long term plans for WAF include growing our library of selector mixes, accessories, furniture, and events with a collaborative ethos at the core. Our first accessory is a sandblasted glass vinyl weight designed by Chen Chen & Kai Williams. It’s also the first of a series of limited edition record stabilizers done in collaboration with artists and designers. Keep an eye out for the next one, which comes out this summer.
For speakers, we’ll be launching our new SP-02 in the fall and we’re currently working on a high fidelity PA for dancefloor deployment. It’s based on a large-scale multiple entry horn we’ve been developing, with revision help from John White (JW Sound). The fiberglass mold was built with aerospace engineering students at a local college. It’s been a lot of fun to develop.
Guest Questions from Danny Keith Taylor of House Under Magic:
I love the form of the SP-01 – in simplicity and function. When you set out your first drafts, was the idea of having the stand and curved form to allow it to “kick back” at the core of its design or did it come via the need for box volume / performance? Was there a conversation about the curved form being justifiable / essential despite the increased complexity (and cost) of fabrication?
Thank you!
As soon as we had drawn out the shape of the speaker on paper, we knew the curve had to have a purpose and intuitively hint at its function. Mechanically, it took trial and error to achieve, but we also spent time iterating on the proportions and scale and then got the tuning / internal volume to all agree. We landed on a unique mid-size that definitely isn’t a tower or bookshelf, but sits in a kind of Goldilocks zone for us. They work well on a piece of furniture, suspended from the ceiling, or just on the floor where that optional “kick back” can take the place of a stand and angle to your listening position. The manufacturing takes extra time, but we know it’s a unique feature and with the added functionality, we feel it’s worth it.
Were there any specific historical design movement(s) / languages that you are drawn to when considering motifs?
Like many, we’re fluent in speaker styles throughout the years and we feel it’s important to recognize and nod to what’s come before and not simply design a spaceship. That being said, we wanted to approach the design as if it were furniture and not just “gear” by considering how it interacts with and complements the landscape of a space. References for forms came from outside of the speaker world with a material and color palette from Zoë’s design language. The landscape (and landfill) are full of great sounding speakers — what can we add that makes our product unique and worth having a relationship with?
