A panel brand from Portugal’s furniture town.

Artnovion is a Portuguese maker of acoustic panels that sells itself on looks as much as on numbers: its website’s slogans are “Passion for Acoustics” and “Engineered for performance, designed for emotion.” Portuguese company records, as summarised by the business directory Racius, show Artnovion, Lda incorporated on 29 July 2014, with its seat in Paços de Ferreira, in the Porto district, and an earlier company name, Artfazium – Engineering. The brand’s website first appears in the Internet Archive in May 2015.

The company presents Jorge Castro as “the man behind the brand.” In a short text that has stayed on its about page since 2015, he writes that he has “nurtured a passion for sound ever since I can remember” and that “Artnovion has become my life’s mission, the canvas I created to share this journey with you.” The website does not name any other owners.

The town is best known for furniture: Portuguese Wikipedia describes Paços de Ferreira as a major centre of furniture production, whose annual furniture fair runs under the slogan “Capital do Móvel.” Artnovion is not the only acoustic brand there — Vicoustic, founded in Portugal in 2007, says it opened its research and development centre in Paços de Ferreira in 2012.

The early range set the tone. Captures of the 2015 website show three markets — pro audio, high end, and architecture and engineering — and products with single names: the Komodo and David absorbers and the Eiger tuned bass trap, which the company then called its flagship. A 2015 press release promised panels creating “the unexpected illusion of tridimensional perspectives.”

Slats, resonators and a signature line.

Artnovion’s catalogue today is divided by setting: music industry and broadcast, hi-fi and living room, home cinema, architecture and engineering, healthcare — a line called MedLine — and soundproofing. Within those, panels are grouped as absorbers, diffusers, bass traps and hybrids. The Galan range, for instance, pairs an acoustic core of foam and Helmholtz resonators with parametric slats that, the company says, morph and unfold as a viewer moves; the Athos W, which it calls “an Artnovion signature panel,” comes in natural wood or lacquered HMDF on a marine-grade plywood frame. The Siena, a slatted panel built on a QRD sequence, is described by the company as having “the highest absorption rate among wooden absorbers on the market” — its own claim, published alongside lab reports measured to EN ISO 354.

The brand also leans on software and collaborators. Its Impulso apps, on Apple’s App Store, are presented as tools for acoustic measurement. A Jan Morel Signature Line is described as the work of a “world renowned studio designer” combining his style with Artnovion technology, and the company shows a studio for the DJ Hardwell in Curaçao credited to Morel. The office-furniture brand Kuietly says it partnered with Artnovion for the acoustics of its pods and panels.

Its case studies go beyond studios. Artnovion says it designed and supplied the treatment for the Chamber of Representatives in the Palace of the Nation in Brussels, after a public tender won by its Belgian distributor, Amptec: Helmholtz resonators tuned to the problem frequencies, broadband absorbers, and a custom-printed curved panel matching the room’s marble. It also says it treated the main reception hall of Lisbon’s Hospital de Santa Maria, which it calls Portugal’s largest hospital, with antimicrobial, sterilisable materials.

Acoustic treatment as a brand.

The seven brands here make the same kind of thing: objects that change how a room sounds. Absorbers soak up reflections, bass traps tame low frequencies, and diffusers scatter sound rather than remove it. Customers run from recording studios to home cinemas.

Four are North American. GIK Acoustics was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2004 by the musician Glenn Kuras; it says its panels are built to order in Atlanta and, for the EU, in Kielce, Poland, with UK orders fulfilled from Bradford, England, where its European arm started in 2008. Auralex, which Eric Smith says he founded in his garage in 1977, is based in Indianapolis. Primacoustic, in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, began in 2000 as a division of Radial Engineering; Radial says its founder, Peter Janis, sold the company to Regimen Equity Partners in 2018.

RPG, which Peter D’Antonio founded in 1983 around what it calls Reflective Phase Grating diffusors, now trades as RPG Acoustical Systems, LLC, from Passaic, New Jersey, its website says.

Three are European. Vicoustic was founded in Portugal in 2007 and has its headquarters and research centre in Paços de Ferreira; the brand is owned by Visound Acústica SA, and in 2026 it said it had joined forces with United Acoustic under the name UniVicoustic. Artnovion is run by Artnovion Lda, a Portuguese company whose EU-funded projects are registered in the country’s Norte region. t.akustik is the house label of Thomann, the family-owned music retailer in Treppendorf, Bavaria.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“100% Portuguese technology,” it says.

Public-funding notices on Artnovion’s website give an unusually detailed picture of a small company’s growth. They list EU-backed projects under the Norte regional programme from 2015 onwards: one to take “the Portuguese architectural acoustic technology brand” abroad, through a new sales team, eight trade fairs and 26 prospecting trips; one to develop ten new products and three services; one on fire-resistant materials with research centres; and, from 2020 to 2023, a “World Stage” push for a brand of what it calls “100% Portuguese technology” on five continents. More recent notices describe a low-frequency product combining passive and active elements under DSP control, and a 2025 project on insulation made from recycled tyre textiles.

The pages we checked do not say where the panels are physically made, beyond that “100% Portuguese technology” line, which we give as the company’s own description. Artnovion sells through distributors in dozens of countries, listed on its contact page, from Belgium and France to Singapore, Chile and India. It also sells a mounting system, FixArt Tube, which it describes as patented and as improving a panel’s absorption by leaving an air cavity behind it.

For a design guide, Artnovion shows how acoustic treatment can be sold as interior design — geometric surfaces, wood and lacquer finishes, and products with names rather than codes. Compare Vicoustic, another Portuguese acoustic brand with a base in Paços de Ferreira, and RPG Diffusor Systems, whose founder turned Manfred Schroeder’s diffuser theory into products. For this guide we use graphite, oak and a deep teal with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Artnovion’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.