NACSound Geminos review

NACSound was founded by Italian acoustics guru Francesco Pellisari in the late 90s, and Geminos is his latest brainchild. Or should we say brain children – Geminos means ‘twins’, not only a reference to the two identical speakers but also to Pellisari being an identical twin himself and the father of twin girls.


Design
It’s (they are? - Ed.) a stereo speaker system designed with iPads and iPods in mind, aiming to combine solid sound quality with a splash of Italian panache. And sure enough they’re an immensely stylish pair, each one a 25cm diameter sphere dressed in a seriously luxurious high gloss white finish. This makes them feel incredibly solid and weighty, which impressed us as soon as we lifted them from their equally chic cylindrical packaging.

Like monozygotic human twins, the two speakers look identical but they’re actually not. One of them is an active speaker containing an amplifier, which has to be plugged in to the mains and hooked up to the passive speaker using a supplied cable. These awesome-looking orbs sit on spongy neoprene rings, which let you point them any way you want. It’s a basic but effective tabletop mounting option. The speakers are quite imposing and will take up a fair chunk of your desk space if used with a PC for example, but with such a gorgeous design that’s not a big problem.


But here’s the part that’ll really make you go ‘ooh’. The active speaker incorporates a Magic Touch control system, which allows you to adjust volume or turn it on and off by simply holding your hand on the sides. One side increases volume, the other decreases, and to turn it on or off you have to hold both sides simultaneously. It’s very cool and likely to impress your mates, but it’s a shame there’s no remote control for those times when you’re not up close.

Through the mesh on the front of the active speaker you can see a row of four blue LEDs that indicates the volume level. When altering volume, the lights illuminate half way then fully, giving you eight incremental steps. The Magic Touch system works well, responding instantly to our commands but it’s not so sensitive that you accidentally turn up the volume every time you touch it.


Connections
On the back of the active speaker is a port housing the connections. Alongside the input for the mains adapter is a 3.5mm line input and a socket for the cable that links the passive speaker, and that’s it – there’s no USB for direct connection of iPods to keep signals in the digital domain, and no digital/analogue inputs for other kit. Thankfully, that versatile mini-jack input covers most bases.