Thanks Bengt. In the end we went down rather than up for a simple reason, TV stand heights. Functionally you really only have 2" of safe zone to play with. The scoop also made for some nice light reflections from the LED ring (we ended up raising the ring a little less than 1mm)… but it also contained those reflections. A little bit of them is a nice aesthetic feature emphasizing when it is listening, but too much reflection under your TV viewing screen can be an annoyance, so the scoop nicely contains that. All of the final surfacing was done by Mark Werle, he did a fantastic job. The back I/O port also perfectly fits an Amazon FireStick… getting the fabric to wrap 360 degrees was a challenge with the factory. I went over to talk through construction methods and work out a bunch of the construction details.
I agree though, the surfacing on that raised one would have been really fun 
… in the doodle some of that bulge is going up, and some is going back. I was thinking perhaps the bar could be shallow but have depth locally to accommodate the LED/mic array… but we ended up needing the depth for acoustic cabinet volume.