A panel maker in a furniture town.

Vicoustic was founded in Portugal in 2007, the company says, to offer acoustic treatment that combined high performance with “aesthetic design.” The trade press gives the same date; audioXpress wrote in 2024 that the company was “founded in Portugal in 2007.” The brand belongs to Visound Acústica S.A., which owns and manages it, and its founder and chief executive is César Carapinha, named as both in a February 2026 press release. Its earliest website, archived in May 2007, already offered panels for control rooms, rehearsal studios, vocal booths and home theatres, and it listed distributors by that summer.

The company is based in Paços de Ferreira, in the Porto district of northern Portugal. audioXpress describes the town as “an important hub for furniture, wood and composite materials manufacturing,” where many of Vicoustic’s suppliers are also based, and the company gives its headquarters as Freamunde, in the same municipality. An archived 2013 version of its About page named Paços de Ferreira as the main office, research centre and logistics base, with a second office at Charneca da Caparica, across the Tagus from Lisbon.

Vicoustic opened its headquarters and research centre in Paços de Ferreira in 2012. The 2013 site described a test room with magnetic walls, a hi-fi listening room and a lab with a variable-volume chamber that could be set up as anechoic or reverberant, and it quoted Carapinha: “Many people buy expensive speakers, and use them in very bad acoustic conditions.” In 2024 the company opened a new purpose-built factory across from that building, inaugurated at a convention attended by partners from 28 countries; audioXpress called it the fourth facility since the company’s founding. Vicoustic describes it as one of the world’s largest acoustic treatment factories.

Wavewood, VMT and the VicBooth.

The signature product is the Wavewood panel, a wooden panel with a wave-like face that the company dates to 2008, says was inspired by “sound’s natural flow,” and protects as a Registered Community Design at the EU intellectual property office. It was already a “top seller” on the archived 2008 website, which presented it as part of the company’s “Absorption and Reflection Control System” research, and in 2013 the company said the entrance of its new logistics building was inspired by what it called its “flag ship panel.” Early catalogues also included portable gear such as the Flexi Screen microphone surround and the modular Flexi Wall.

In 2017 Vicoustic introduced VicPET Wool, a recycled-plastic fibre, and the Flat Panel VMT. VMT stands for Virtual Material Technology, a surface-imaging technique that lets a panel imitate wood, concrete, marble or stone; the company calls it patented. audioXpress reported in 2024 that VicPET Wool is made primarily from ocean-rescued plastic bottles and is used in VMT panels and inside the VicBooth sound-isolating booths, a range extended in 2020 with the modular VicBooth Ultra. The company has also run a training programme, the Vicoustic Academy, since 2016.

Its design record is long for an acoustic-panel maker. The company lists a Red Dot Product Design award for its GEN_VMT collection in 2020 and another for the VicShape 3D panel in 2025; a German Design Award for VicBooth in 2022; a Japanese Good Design Award for the VicBooth range, which it dates to 2022 and Wifi Hifi dated to 2023; and Visual Grand Prix awards in Japan in 2025 for its Cinema VMT panels and the Wavewood Diffuser Ultra MKII. It also says it holds PEFC and FSC certification.

Design and documentation.

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.

A Portuguese–Indian joint venture.

In February 2026 Vicoustic announced a joint venture with United Acoustic Private Limited, part of India’s United Group. United Acoustic became an investor in Vicoustic, Essential Install reported, and the two companies are merging the Vicoustic and UniAcoustic brands into one name, UniVicoustic, in a phased rollout during 2026. The relationship began in 2023, the same report says, when Vicoustic licensed its VMT technology to United Acoustic, which used it to build an acoustic factory in India with its own PET production line. The size of the stake has not been published. United Group, according to its own website, was co-founded in 1994 by Shabbir Rajkotwala and began with Unitile raised access floors.

The combined business says it has production and offices in Porto and in eight Indian cities, more than 300 staff and about 18,000 square metres of manufacturing space. So the question of where the products are made now has two answers: Vicoustic’s panels come from its Paços de Ferreira factory, the company says, while UniVicoustic describes manufacturing in both Portugal and India. The new brand made its trade debut at ISE 2026 in Barcelona, where its stand placed third in the show’s stand design awards. The company says it sells in more than 70 countries; in January 2026 CE Pro reported that it had named Playback Distribution as its partner for the United States and Canada.

For a design guide, Vicoustic shows how acoustic treatment can be sold as interior design rather than studio hardware. Compare GIK Acoustics, another maker of studio and home acoustic panels, and Focal, a European audio brand that also courts home-cinema buyers. For this guide we use walnut, concrete grey and a deep teal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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