This Indian Brand Made 70 People Listen Blindfolded Before Launching Its First Speaker

The last time I spoke to Raghu Reddy, Co-founder and CEO of Circuit House Technologies, I told him that soundbars would be the obvious next step for Lumio, and he agreed that the opportunity was very much there. So when the company announced its third category this week, I expected a soundbar with a fancy name. Instead, they have launched the Aura 5, a pair of Hi-Fi bookshelf speakers priced at Rs 24,999, with an early bird price of Rs 19,999 on Amazon from October 15.

That choice is strange on paper. Almost every TV brand in India that enters audio starts with a soundbar because that is where the volume is. Bookshelf speakers, on the other hand, are a category most Indian buyers have never seriously looked at, sold here mostly by international brands at prices that begin where Lumio's ends.

I got on a call with Raghu Reddy, along with Co-founder and COO Kailash Sankaranarayanan and Co-founder and Head of Product Sudeep Sahu, to understand why they went this way. The conversation turned out to be one of the more interesting ones I have had with an Indian brand this year, not just because of what they are building but because of how openly they talk about it.

I tell you about why Lumio's story matters at the end of this article, that's something you should not miss if you feel thrilled to see promising brands coming out of India.

So Why Not A Soundbar

Raghu began by explaining why soundbars won in the first place, and he was fair about it. The biggest reason they became popular, he said, is that setting one up is effortless, because "customers wanted better sound in their home entertainment setup, and soundbar was the easiest option where you just take an HDMI cable, connect it from a TV to a soundbar, and there you have it."

The people who genuinely care about sound, though, never went down that road. They stayed with what he calls separates, which means bookshelf or floorstanding speakers, but that world came with its own tax. It was expensive because "you didn't just need the speakers, you also needed a bunch of other paraphernalia, which is amps and DACs and so on," setting it up was complicated, and it left a lot of clutter in the living room. Most people simply gave up and bought a soundbar instead.

So the team went looking for a middle path, trying to bring in "the simplicity of a soundbar, but with the hi-fi sound that you expect of a bookshelf." The answer, Raghu said, came when they realised they could put HDMI ARC inside a bookshelf speaker and keep the setup as easy as plugging in a soundbar, while still giving people the benefits of separate speakers.

Sudeep summed it up more directly when he said that a soundbar "basically has convenience but no fidelity," while bookshelf speakers traditionally offered "fidelity but no simplicity," and what Lumio is attempting is to merge the two along with versatility. The Aura 5 has a built-in DAC and amplifier, which means you only connect an HDMI cable and a power cord, and it offers seven input modes including HDMI ARC, optical, coaxial, 3.5mm, USB and Bluetooth 5.4, so the same pair works with a TV, a laptop, a desktop or even a turntable.

The Blind Test That Settled It

This is where the story gets genuinely interesting. For TVs, Lumio had famously scraped more than 50,000 Amazon reviews to arrive at the slow TV problem, so I asked Kailash what the data told them about the speaker market. His answer was refreshingly plain, because there was barely any data to begin with, and as he put it, "if people don't know what is better, then they are happy with what they have."

The idea came from inside the team instead. A lot of it, Kailash admitted, came from the personal experience of people like Sudeep and a few others who had built proper home theatre setups with separates and knew how much better that sounded compared to a soundbar. But a hunch is not a business case, so before committing, they invited close to 70 people to their office and made each one sit through a blindfolded listening session, comparing popular soundbars in the market against the Lumio speakers across a detailed checklist. The response, he said, was unanimous, with everyone indicating that "this sounds very good, and if we know what this is, we would love to buy it."

Sudeep, who ran the technical side of that test, said the speakers in the room were from LG and JBL alongside their own, and four things stood out clearly. The soundstage was wider so that sound seemed to come from all around rather than from the speakers, the bass went deeper, the mids and highs were cleaner, and the material itself made a difference because their cabinets are built from real wood rather than plastic or metal grilles, which gives the sound a warmer signature.

He also made a point I had not thought about before. Sound, he said, is almost always created in separates in the first place, because whether it is music or a film, the recording and mixing happens on studio monitors, and what Lumio wants is to bring that same reproduction of input into Indian living rooms.

The Watts Problem Lumio Wants To Fix

One of the sharper things Sudeep said was about how the entire audio industry has been selling loudness to us. For years, he said, sound has been sold "by sheer this word called watts," and people have been trained to believe that a higher wattage number means a louder speaker, when the actual measure of loudness is decibels.

The numbers he shared make the point. The Aura 5 puts out 100W sustained and 200W peak, but hits 105 dB of sound pressure at one metre, which is roughly what soundbars claiming 400W or 500W actually deliver.

If this sounds familiar, it should, because Lumio ran a similar campaign in projectors where everybody was quoting LED lumens or source lumens while nobody was measuring in ANSI lumens, which is the standardised figure. Sudeep said they want to drive the same education in audio.

On bass, the Aura 5 goes down to 35Hz at 80 dB, which is a notable jump from the 38Hz at 70 dB that the Vision 9 TV manages, and that TV was already unusually good on sound for its price.

A Small Design Choice That Says A Lot

The one detail that genuinely impressed me is that the bass port sits on the front of the cabinet rather than the back.

Sudeep explained that 99 percent of bookshelf speakers place the port at the rear, which means you need to keep the speakers a few feet away from the wall to get proper bass, and in his words, "in a country where all our sofas are slammed to the wall, expecting somebody to keep three feet away to get optimum performance is not" practical. So they moved it to the front, knowing fully well that Indian buyers are going to push these against a wall or even wall mount them.

That is the kind of decision you only make if you have actually thought about how Indian homes are laid out, rather than importing a design and hoping for the best.

The package also includes a Bluetooth remote with an OLED display, which Lumio is calling the Minion remote, along with three tuning modes called DGS Studio, DGS Cinema and DGS Groove. Studio is the default and is meant to be flat and balanced, and Sudeep believes the tuning is good enough that most people will never feel the need to switch, though there are physical knobs for treble and bass on the side because every room behaves differently.

What It Does Not Do

There are a few limitations worth being clear about.

There is no cross-play between the Aura 5 and Lumio TVs, which is something Samsung and LG offer by using the TV as a centre channel. Sudeep said this was a deliberate call rather than an oversight, because the wooden cabinets of the speakers and the plastic housing of a TV produce different timbres, and mixing the two would not sound right.

TLDR, Lumio's content discovery app, will also not run on these speakers, and Kailash was straightforward about the reason, which is that the device has no memory and no storage, so nothing can run on it. A separate companion app for Android and iOS is coming to handle setup and controls, and while TLDR already has a music tab with curated playlists, a deeper integration between the two is not on the cards yet.

The speakers are also launching only in grey, which is Lumio's signature palette across TVs, projectors and remotes. When I pushed on colour options, pointing out that bookshelf speakers are as much a desk setup and aesthetics purchase as an audio one, both founders agreed and said they have had the same discussion internally, and that something may come down the road.

Where The Price Sits

The Rs 24,999 pricing makes more sense once you see what Raghu is comparing against. Speakers from KEF, Elac and Edifier with a similar 4.5-inch woofer and an HDMI input, he said, start at around 500 dollars and go all the way up to 1,400 or 1,700 dollars, which means there is simply no product in the range where an ordinary Indian buyer would consider it. That gap is what Lumio is walking into.

The Aura 5 is being manufactured in India at a different factory from the TV and projector lines, and it comes with a one year comprehensive warranty on the speaker pair and six months on the remote, backed by Lumio's network of over 300 service centres with home service.

Why This Story Matters

Raghu is upfront that speakers are not going to move the revenue needle. If the goal was pure scale, he said, they should just focus on selling more TVs and the numbers would follow on their own, and while this product "definitely" will not add to the topline the way TVs do, it "completes our portfolio" for a brand trying to be a full home entertainment player.

That is an unusually honest thing for a founder to say about a product before the launch day.

The business itself, meanwhile, has kept moving. After crossing Rs 100 crore in gross merchandise value within 13 months of launch, Raghu said the company is now trending "about three times higher than last year in terms of revenues" across May, June and July, with both TVs and projectors contributing to that growth.

But the line that stayed with me came when I asked what gives a television brand the confidence to take on companies that have done nothing but audio for decades. Raghu answered that what sets them apart is having "a bunch of passionate folks who spend a lot of time just going down rabbit holes," including people who will spend an inordinate amount of time chasing the perfect tuning simply because it bothers them when it is not right.

Having covered Indian consumer electronics long enough, I know how rare that is. The standard playbook for a brand entering a new category is to find an ODM, put a logo on a reference design, undercut everybody on price, and then slowly sink under the weight of its own after-sales complaints. Lumio is doing the opposite, moving one category at a time with a team of around 40 people, and so far it seems to be working.

Whether the Aura 5 actually delivers on all of this is a separate question, and one I plan to answer properly once a unit reaches me. Sudeep's own invitation was exactly what you would want to hear from someone confident about what they have built, when he said, "please test with any speaker, any soundbar, compare it with anything, we are very open to all of that."

We will find out soon enough whether that confidence is earned.