Tag Archives: Audio

Kellogg’s Hired a Designer to Make Your Cereal’s Crackling Louder — and It’s Gloriously Weird

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Whether you’re a milk-before-cereal guy or a cereal-before-milk guy (the only correct process btw), there’s an undeniable component about the cereal-eating experience that almost everyone takes for granted. That slight crackle and pop sound as the cereal’s air-pockets burst to get filled with milk. It’s a pretty simple yet fundamental auditory feedback that your cereal-eating experience would feel incomplete without. Seriously, imagine pouring milk into your cereal and dead silence, I guarantee you, it wouldn’t feel good.

That snap/crackle is such a core part of the cereal eating journey that Dominic Wilcox designed a bowl that amplifies the sound. If it sounds weird in theory, it absolutely is, and Wilcox isn’t one to shy away from weird inventions (including headphones that swap your left and right ears with each other so everything sounds strange). The aptly named “Snap, Crackle, and Pop amplification cereal bowl” is one such invention that leans into Wilcox’s need to chase the absurd. Designed to look like a gramophone, this bowl puts a microphone to your cereal, enhancing the musical journey you embark on every breakfast.

Designer: Dominic Wilcox

The cereal bowl was commissioned by Kellogg’s as a part of their challenge to make breakfast more interesting. While most people would simply put puzzles on a cereal box to keep kids occupied, this weird contraption tickles their fancy by leaning into the kind of chaos children tend to love. The bowl comes with a horn on top, and a knob on the rim. Load your cereal, add the milk, flip the on switch, and a microphone captures the audio, playing it through the speaker unit built into the horn. The volume knob lets you dial up or down the noise… and I can only assume there’s a battery somewhere in the base that needs charging every few days.

Needless to say, the Snap, Crackle and Pop amplification cereal bowl works with all types of cereal (as well as all types of milk). Just go about your breakfast the way you normally would, and listen to the gentle white noise of your cereal turning soggy. If you want to be even more unhinged, swap the milk out with soda and you’ll hear fizzing sounds too. Your dentist will hate me, but do it for the plot!

The post Kellogg’s Hired a Designer to Make Your Cereal’s Crackling Louder — and It’s Gloriously Weird first appeared on Yanko Design.

Plaud One AI Earbuds remember and summarize your conversations so you can focus on the work

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Most wireless earbuds are designed to disappear into the background while you listen to music or take calls. Plaud One is more ambitious compared to your normal buds, as it wants to remember what happens around you and then help turn those conversations into actual work.

The AI earbuds can record face-to-face conversations, phone calls, or online meetings without needing to stay connected to a smartphone. That is possible because the charging case includes built-in 4G LTE connectivity through an eSIM. Plaud says it has arrangements covering more than 80 countries and regions, allowing the earbuds to upload recordings even when your phone or Wi-Fi connection isn’t nearby.

Designer: Plaud

Recording isn’t limited to the earbuds, either. The case has its own microphones, allowing it to work as a standalone recorder when placed on a meeting table. Users can start recording from the earbuds, the case, or the app, while a recording indicator on the case provides a visible cue that audio is being captured. The earbuds can also natively capture audio from video-calling services such as Google Meet and Zoom. Once a conversation has been captured, Plaud’s software can transcribe it, summarize the discussion, and identify useful information. The more interesting step is what happens next. Plaud Agent is designed to use that conversational context to prepare follow-up work, such as an email, report, document or presentation.

It can connect with services including Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion and Slack, potentially allowing a meeting to produce something useful before you even return to your desk. That makes Plaud One different from an AI recorder that simply leaves you with a transcript to sort through later. The company is positioning the wearable as an AI system that can remember information across conversations and use that context to help automate workflows. You can also interact with the assistant using a voice command or the dedicated button on the case.

There is still a conventional pair of wireless earbuds underneath all this. Plaud One uses Bluetooth 5.4 with multipoint connectivity, supports SBC and LDAC codecs, and includes active noise cancellation rated for up to 40dB of reduction. The earbuds are IP54-rated for dust and splash resistance. Battery life is rated at up to six hours for music playback with ANC off, while the case adds up to 36 hours of additional listening time. Storage is built into the system as well, with 16MB in each earbud and another 512MB in the case. Plaud says the case can hold up to 30 hours of recordings. Recording endurance from the earbuds varies depending on the use, with up to six hours for in-person recording and around three hours for calls and podcasts.

The $250 Explorer Edition comes with $200 worth of Plaud Credits for its agentic AI features, but that allowance is not unlimited. Heavier transcription and AI use can require paid plans or additional credits, making the ongoing cost an important part of the product’s proposition.

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Harley-Davidson’s $3,299 Turntable Is Shaped Like Their Logo

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The moment you see the Pro-Ject x Harley-Davidson Turntable, you know exactly what it is, and you know exactly who it is for. That kind of immediate clarity is rare in product design, and it is worth paying attention to.

Pro-Ject Audio has built a reputation for doing collaborations the right way. The Austrian turntable maker has previously teamed up with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Metallica, AC/DC, and Elvis Presley, and the pattern across all of them is consistent: these are not logo-on-a-box exercises. Pro-Ject uses each collaboration as an opportunity to rethink the physical design of the hardware itself, from the ground up. The Harley-Davidson edition follows that same standard, and arguably pushes it further than any of its predecessors.

Designer: Pro-Ject

The plinth, which is the chassis of the turntable, is literally shaped like the Harley-Davidson Bar & Shield logo. Not decorated with it. Shaped like it. That distinction matters more than it might initially seem. It means every design decision radiates from an identity that already carries enormous cultural weight, and Pro-Ject had to make the engineering work around that shape without cutting corners. The result is a chassis milled from solid MDF with no hollow spaces, which ensures maximum resonance damping and a dead-quiet noise floor. A precision-milled aluminum top surface sits above it. The whole thing looks like it belongs in a museum of industrial design, or possibly a very well-curated garage.

The materials continue the story. Polished aluminum, stainless steel, and a genuine leather platter mat that echoes the texture and feel of a classic Harley saddle. The 300mm glass platter sits above a diamond-cut aluminum sub-platter, and the total moving drive mass clocks in at 2.75 kilograms. The 915-gram Harley-Davidson record puck alone communicates seriousness. This is not a turntable that was assembled casually.

Then there is the tonearm. A hand-polished 8.6-inch S-shaped aluminum arm with an SME-style removable headshell, high-purity copper internal wiring, and a TPE-damped counterweight. The removable headshell is more useful than it might initially appear, because cartridge swapping becomes considerably easier, and Pro-Ject designed the arm to accommodate a wide range of cartridges for anyone who eventually wants to upgrade beyond the included Pick it PRO moving-magnet cartridge. Out of the box, it is ready to play. Down the road, it is ready to grow.

It is handmade in Europe, available for special order, and priced at $3,299. That is not an entry-level number, and it was never trying to be. Placed next to a $40,000 motorcycle inside a Harley-Davidson showroom, which is apparently one of the places where these will be sold alongside traditional hi-fi dealers, the price reads very differently. Context shifts perception. That is also one of the more quietly brilliant moves of this entire release: distributing it through Harley showrooms introduces serious audio equipment to an audience that may have never walked into a dedicated hi-fi store. That kind of crossover is genuinely good for the culture of listening.

My honest take is that this collaboration works because neither brand had to compromise to get here. Harley-Davidson’s visual identity is so iconic that a lazy licensed product would have been obvious immediately. Pro-Ject’s reputation is built on engineering, not lifestyle branding, so a piece that looked great but performed poorly would have been an embarrassment. The fact that both came away intact says everything about how seriously this was approached.

Production is limited, with no confirmed quantity and no guarantee of a second run. If the convergence of motorcycles, vinyl, leather, aluminum, and genuine hi-fi performance speaks to you at all, waiting feels like an unnecessary gamble. Some objects exist at exactly the intersection of who you are, and this turntable is very specifically that for a certain kind of person: someone who values craft, has opinions about sound, and is not apologetic about having taste with an edge. The open road has always had a soundtrack. Now it finally has a turntable to match.

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This ceiling fan hides an 80W Hi-Fi speaker and smart lighting in one sleek unit

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You get light from above. You get wind from above too. So at some point, somebody was bound to ask the obvious next question, why not sound from above as well? Ceiling fans have spent years quietly doing side quests with built-in lamps, remote controls, and the occasional smart feature, but this feels like the first time one has aimed for proper living room territory. The lamp-plus-fan combo has always felt like a polite upgrade to an appliance nobody was particularly excited about.

WindGroove’s AirFi One takes that idea and runs with it, folding a Hi-Fi audio system, atmospheric lighting, and airflow into a single ceiling-mounted fixture. The audio setup is co-developed with Jamo, the Danish speaker brand founded in 1968, which gives the whole thing considerably more credibility than your average gadget trying to do five jobs at once. It’s one of those products that sounds slightly absurd for about three seconds, right up until you realize how much floor space your speakers and fans have been stealing this whole time.

Brand: WindGroove

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Putting a speaker inside a spinning mechanical system is, acoustically speaking, a problem that mostly did not exist before. Motors generate vibration, and that vibration travels through metal housings and mounting hardware until it finds a speaker driver to rattle. At higher fan speeds, the blades also create periodic air pressure variations at blade-pass frequency, a rhythmic pulse that can cause a speaker cone to flutter and introduce distortion into the output. Positioning the speaker overhead compounds the issue further, because the ceiling acts as a large reflective surface, creating phase cancellation and comb filtering effects where certain frequencies pile up while others cancel out. Nailing clean Hi-Fi sound out of a product that is also spinning at variable speeds, mounted above a live listening environment, is a genuinely impressive engineering feat.

WindGroove’s entire design thesis rests on one idea: technology should dissolve into the room, not announce itself from it. Making that happen acoustically meant solving real engineering problems, because a spinning motor introduces vibration into a speaker chassis and rotating blades create periodic air pressure pulses that can rattle a driver into distortion. Intelligent DSP processing that corrects for ceiling reflection and overhead projection in real time is WindGroove’s most elegant solution, allowing the speaker to disappear into the architecture and still fill a room properly. Total harmonic distortion is rated at 1% or below, keeping music sounding like music rather than like hardware working hard. A motor running at under 32 decibels reduces mechanical vibration at the source, so the DSP has considerably less chaos to correct for.

Jamo has been building musically balanced speakers rooted in Scandinavian design since 1968, and that acoustic philosophy is what WindGroove borrowed for the tuning here. The 80W 3-way setup, twin 15W mid-high drivers plus a dedicated 50W subwoofer, carries real Hi-Fi ambitions rather than the polite background-audio compromise most integrated appliances settle for. Frequency response runs from 45Hz to 20kHz, wide enough to cover genuine bass texture and crisp high-frequency clarity across the full spectrum of recorded music. Bringing in a heritage audio brand rather than speccing the cheapest available driver stack reflects WindGroove’s conviction that invisible technology still needs to perform at the highest level when you actually sit down and listen. Putting a Jamo-tuned 80W Hi-Fi system inside a ceiling fan is the kind of product decision that only makes sense if you believe the room should come first, and the hardware should figure itself out.

The fan boasts a maximum airflow of 4621 CFM at under 32 decibels, quiet enough to run while music is playing without competing with it, and the blade direction reverses seasonally so the unit pulls its weight year-round. The dual-zone lighting system combines everyday illumination with immersive ambience. The lower section serves as the primary light source, providing bright, even illumination for the entire room. You can choose from three color temperatures – warm white for a cozy, relaxing glow, natural white for comfortable everyday lighting, or cool white for a crisp, energizing feel. Stepless dimming lets you fine-tune the brightness to suit everything from winding down at night to working, reading, or getting ready in the morning.

Picture a Friday evening where you dim the lights, the room shifts to a warm amber glow, the fan hums almost imperceptibly overhead, and the music you put on actually sounds like the artist intended it to. No speaker on a shelf eating into the bookcase. No standing fan taking up the corner you always meant to do something with. No three apps open at once trying to get everything to behave. The ceiling handles it, and the room just feels right in a way that is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.

AirFi One is priced at $499 at retail and is available for purchase right now on WindGroove’s website.. Sure, you could just duct-tape a Bluetooth speaker to your fan and call it a day – but having an 80W sound system built into your ceiling fan isn’t something everyone can boast of.

Click Here to Buy Now: $480 $815 (40% off, use coupon code “YD15”). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Andover Audio’s FreePlay Is the Boombox We Always Wanted

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There’s a version of audio history where the boombox never went away. It just got smaller, cheaper, and unfortunately, a lot worse. The portable speaker category that exists today is essentially the boombox’s spiritual successor, and for most of its life, it’s been optimized for volume over everything else. Loud, plasticky, and designed to look tough rather than good. John Cusack’s character in Say Anything held that iconic box over his head because it was the most powerful sound system you could carry. Today’s equivalent should be doing better. The FreePlay, Andover Audio’s first portable speaker, makes a convincing argument that it finally is.

Andover Audio is a Boston-based brand that built its name on compact hi-fi systems, all-in-one record players, and powered speaker bases. Their entry point has always been “Hi-Fi for Modern Living,” which is a way of saying serious sound without the serious footprint. The FreePlay takes that same philosophy and adds a handle.

Designer: Andover Audio

And it is a real handle. The FreePlay is not a pocket speaker. At 10 inches tall, 13 inches wide, 6.5 inches deep, and nine pounds, it occupies real space. Fold-down carry handle, utility tie-down bars on each side, IP67 dust and water resistance. It’s built to be moved, secured, taken somewhere, and left out in the rain without incident. A matching shoulder bag with a cinch-top closure ships with every unit. This is not the brand’s afterthought moment. The packaging alone signals that someone thought carefully about the full experience.

The design is where the FreePlay earns the most attention, and rightly so. Available in Ivory, Olive, and Slate, it reads less like a piece of outdoor gear and more like something from a well-considered interiors brand. The soft aesthetic and clean lines have more in common with Scandinavian furniture than the rugged-industrial styling that dominates this category. It looks appropriate on a bookshelf, on a kitchen counter, or on a patio table. That kind of design versatility is harder to achieve than it sounds, and most competitors don’t bother trying.

Inside, the FreePlay runs a true stereo architecture: dual 5.25-inch aluminum-cone woofers with neodymium magnets, twin 25mm dome tweeters, and a 160mm rear-mounted passive radiator. Frequency response runs from 55Hz to 20kHz. For a portable speaker, this is a serious driver setup, and the key word in all of it is stereo. Most portable speakers collapse a recording into a single mono channel to save space, which is why so much outdoor audio sounds flat, harsh, and fatiguing over time. The FreePlay keeps left and right channels separate, preserving the actual width and dimensionality of a stereo mix. Instrument separation, tonal depth, and bass weight are treated as requirements here, not extras.

There are two listening modes: Wide Range, which is the default hi-fi EQ, and a Loud Mode that adds 6dB of output for moments when the crowd and the wind are both working against you. It’s a practical concession, and having it as a toggle rather than a default keeps the sound quality intact until you actually need the boost.

On the connectivity side, the FreePlay runs Bluetooth 6.0 with LE Audio and supports LC3, AAC, and SBC codecs, which covers stable wireless performance even in crowded environments. There’s a 3.5mm aux input, a microphone input, and a broadcast mode that can link up to 99 FreePlay units simultaneously for synchronized playback. Battery life is rated at 24 hours. The charging setup is genuinely impressive. A 45W USB-C port handles bidirectional fast charging, meaning it powers the speaker and can charge external devices. A 5W Qi wireless charging pad sits on the top deck so your phone charges while the music plays. A 45W wall charger ships in the box, which is more than most brands at this price point bother to include.

Controls live entirely on the top panel. Volume, track selection, pairing, battery status, listening modes are all accessible without opening an app. It’s a quiet design decision that respects the user’s time and attention in a way the category has long overlooked. The boombox was always about taking music somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. The FreePlay understands that, and it adds everything the original couldn’t.

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The Click Wheel Is Back, and This Pocket Player Has 4 DACs

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The Shanling Q2 is a pocket-sized hi-fi player that fits four Cirrus Logic CS43131 DAC chips into a body smaller than most wallets. It measures 80mm x 50mm x 13.5mm, weighs 83g, and supports PCM up to 768 kHz/32-bit alongside native DSD512 playback. It also has a Click Wheel, which, depending on your age, will either mean nothing to you or mean a great deal.

The Click Wheel here is a touch-sensitive ring that sits alongside a 2.09-inch touchscreen, giving you two ways to move through menus and adjust volume. The touchscreen handles the broader interface work while the wheel handles the tactile stuff, volume adjustments and quick navigation without staring at a screen. Four physical buttons round it out. The combination is deliberate and slightly nostalgic, and it works.

Designer: Shanling

Those four DAC chips working in tandem are why the audio section matters. Through the 4.4 mm balanced output, the Q2 pushes up to 425mW into a 32 Ω load, which is enough to properly drive full-size headphones that most portable players give up on. The 3.5mm unbalanced output still delivers 120mW. Both gain settings, low for sensitive in-ear monitors and high for harder-to-drive cans, give you control over the amplifier’s output to match your headphones precisely.

One of the more useful things the Q2 can do is disappear into your current setup rather than replace it entirely. The bidirectional Bluetooth 5.2 works in both directions: as a transmitter to wireless headphones and speakers, and as a receiver that turns the Q2 into a DAC and amplifier for your smartphone. Plug a set of wired headphones into the Q2, pair it with your phone via Bluetooth, and you get a meaningful upgrade over your phone’s built-in audio without any extra hassle.

There’s no internal storage, which keeps the Q2 light and simple, but the microSD slot accepts cards up to 2TB. Most high-resolution music libraries won’t come anywhere near filling that, but it’s generous enough that the storage question essentially disappears. The dual-band Wi-Fi supports AirPlay and DLNA for wireless streaming, and native Tidal support means you don’t have to rely on stored files at all if you’d rather not.

Battery life holds up well relative to what’s being asked of the hardware. The 3.5mm output gets up to 13.5 hours; the balanced connection trims that slightly to 12.5 hours. Run the Q2 as a Bluetooth receiver using LDAC, and you get up to 16.5 hours, which comfortably covers a long-haul flight or a full day of listening without needing to think about charging.

The aluminum-alloy frame and glass rear panel keep it feeling premium in hand, and available colors are Smoky Grey, Moonlight Silver, and Twilight Orange. The MTouch OS runs on an Ingenic X2000 processor, and the interface is reportedly clean and fast enough that it doesn’t get in the way of actually using the player. In USB DAC mode, it extends its usefulness to desktop setups, handling PCM up to 384 kHz/32-bit from a connected computer.

The Q2 retails at around $269, which puts it squarely in the serious-but-not-extreme tier of portable hi-fi. It ships with a case, a USB cable, and a manual, and it’s available in all three colorways from launch. For anyone who has ever felt their phone was the weak link in an otherwise respectable headphone setup, the Q2 is a reasonably direct answer to that specific frustration.

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FiiO QX11 brings desktop-class audio power to a pocket-sized DAC

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A good DAC should disappear into the setup, not demanding any attention or taking over a desk. The high-resolution amplifier should be better at doing just one task – simply making your headphones or earphones sound better. FiiO’s new QX11 takes that idea in a more ambitious direction, packing the kind of amplification and audio processing normally associated with larger desktop equipment into a compact USB-C device that can travel with your modern-day gadgets.

The Chi-Fi brand’s latest offering is designed for listeners who want more than a basic headphone dongle. Beneath its compact aluminium alloy and forged carbon-fiber body are two flagship ESS ES9069Q DAC chips, paired with four Texas Instruments operational amplifiers. The configuration supports PCM playback up to 32-bit/768kHz and native DSD512, giving it plenty of capability for high-resolution music without turning the device into an unnecessarily bulky piece of hardware.

Designer: Fiio

The biggest upgrade from FiiO KA17 is arguably the amount of power available to headphones. In Desktop Mode, the QX11 can deliver up to 800mW + 800mW, exceeding the 650mW + 650mW output of the predecessor. That extra headroom is particularly useful for demanding headphones and high-impedance models that can benefit from stronger amplification and better control. FiiO also wants the QX11 to work beyond traditional music listening. A dedicated Gaming Mode introduces audio profiles for FPS, ACT, and MOBA games, allowing the same device to shift from a high-resolution music DAC to a more gaming-focused audio interface.

Voice communication is also built in, as QX11 features a microphone and AI environmental noise cancellation intended to suppress surrounding sounds during voice chats. For someone using wired headphones, that means fewer accessories are needed to create a more complete gaming setup. The audio gadget also brings a more accessible approach to equalization with FiiO’s software ecosystem, as users can select supported headphone models and apply automatic correction profiles instead of manually adjusting individual frequency bands. Genre-specific EQ presets further allow the sound to be tailored to different types of music.

There is also a thoughtful solution to one of the less glamorous problems with powerful portable DACs: battery drain. The QX11 incorporates dual USB-C ports with 45W USB Power Delivery passthrough, allowing a connected phone or laptop to receive power while the DAC is being used. This makes it more practical for longer listening sessions or gaming away from a conventional desktop setup.

With green and gold finishes, Fiio QX11 has enough visual character to stand out without looking like conventional gaming hardware. At $170, the DAC is tailored for buyers who care as much about versatility as raw specifications. Rather than being another dongle focused solely on decoding high-resolution files, QX11 is a compact audio hub capable of moving between serious music listening, gaming, and everyday portable use without changing the rest of the setup. Indeed, something for a starter audiophile like me who likes things less complicated.

 

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The Cassette Revival Has Had a Player Problem, and FiiO Just Fixed It

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Vinyl already had its big cultural moment, dragging turntables and record stores back into the mainstream. Cassette tapes, quietly and without much fanfare, have been going through the same arc. Sales have been climbing for years, but the revival has lacked a player actually engineered for it. The FiiO CP11 is that player, and it comes with two years of R&D to back it up.

Getting to the CP11 wasn’t a straight line. FiiO originally planned to lead with the higher-end CP15, but as the new ultra-thin mechanism proved far more complex to engineer than expected, from structure and servo coordination to full system integration, the roadmap got reorganized. The CP11 was added earlier in the lineup so the new playback technology could reach people before everything else was perfected.

Designer: FiiO

The size of the thing is worth talking about. FiiO designed the CP11 to be genuinely pocketable, competitive with the Walkmans that defined portable listening decades ago. That’s a different proposition entirely from the thick, ungainly cassette players that have populated the modern revival market. The all-new ultra-thin transport mechanism is what makes that slim profile possible, and getting it right required repeated prototyping and refinement.

Inside, the CP11 moves away from the hardware compromises that hold most modern tape players back. It runs on a brushless motor paired with a new servo drive and revised circuit design, which together are meant to deliver more stable, accurate playback than conventional motors allow. The magnetic head has been upgraded as well, since even the warmest analog sound can only be as good as the head reading it.

Then there’s Bluetooth, which is probably the feature that makes the CP11 most interesting to a broader audience. The fully analog CP13, FiiO’s existing tape player, never had it. Adding wireless transmission here means you can pair the CP11 with any wireless headphones and listen to your mixtapes or favorite vintage tapes without a headphone cord to manage. The 3.5mm jack is still there for people who prefer it that way.

The design doesn’t try to pass off nostalgia as a substitute for intent. The body is clean and minimalist, available in cream, green, and silver colorways that feel more considered than retro-chic. There’s a battery hatch on the back, which suggests the cell might be user-replaceable, a small but meaningful detail for a device built around physical media and the culture of long listening sessions.

USB-C handles charging, which is a small but welcome concession to the present. It charges at 5V/2A, so any standard cable will do, and you won’t need to hunt for a specialized adapter while your tape collection gathers dust. Physical playback controls sit at the top alongside a dedicated Bluetooth button, keeping the experience tactile rather than forcing everything through a touchscreen or an app.

No pricing has been announced yet, though FiiO’s existing CP13 sells in the $99 to $110 range, giving some rough sense of where the CP11 might land. A late 2026 launch is the target, and the higher-end CP15 is progressing simultaneously, with its internals largely completed. The cassette revival doesn’t have a device worthy of leading it yet. The CP11 is making a case for the job.

The post The Cassette Revival Has Had a Player Problem, and FiiO Just Fixed It first appeared on Yanko Design.

CMF Clip Pro Review: More Than Just a Pretty Case

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PROS:


  • Excellent physical controls

  • Distinctive case design

  • Comfortable open-ear fit

  • Balanced, clean sound

  • Polished Nothing X app

CONS:


  • Limited base weight

  • Price feels a little high by CMF standards

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS
ERGONOMICS
PERFORMANCE
SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY
VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

With smart physical controls, a comfortable fit, and more personality than most rivals, the CMF Clip Pro proves open-ear earbuds do not have to feel purely functional.

Open-ear earbuds used to feel like a niche product made for a very specific kind of listener. They were mostly aimed at runners, cyclists, and anyone who wanted to stay aware of their surroundings, and the category was long dominated by a small group of specialist brands. For years, that made open-ear audio feel practical rather than desirable, more about function than style.

That is no longer the case. Open-ear earbuds have quickly become one of the busiest segments in personal audio, with mainstream brands now entering the space and giving the format broader appeal. CMF, Nothing’s budget-focused sub-brand, is the latest to join them with the CMF Clip Pro. As you might expect, it leans heavily on design and distinctive hardware touches to stand out, including physical controls that give it more character than most rivals. On paper, it already feels more interesting than the average pair of open-ear earbuds. The real question is whether that personality translates into a product worth buying.

Designer: CMF (Nothing)

Aesthetics

CMF Clip Pro is a good reminder that an earbud case can matter just as much as the earbuds themselves. Here, the case is not just packaging. It is a big part of the product’s identity, and one of the first things that makes the Clip Pro stand out.

The shape is essentially a rounded rectangular pod. It is slightly chunky, but softly contoured, with curved corners, a matte finish, and a subtle rubber-like texture that feels warmer than the glossy plastic shells most earbuds still use. It also stands apart from the usual pebble-like cases, which gives it a more distinctive silhouette in the hand.

The detail that defines the whole design is the oversized circular dial at the top right corner, called Smart Dial. It immediately gives the case a focal point, but it also earns that space by being functional. The metallic finish, ridged edge, and two line markings give it a sharper, more engineered feel, which contrasts nicely with the softer body of the case.

The rest of the design is restrained. There is only a small CMF logo on top, with the status LED and USB-C port kept discreetly out of the way. That minimalism works in the case’s favor, because it lets the shape and the dial do most of the talking.

The color options reinforce that identity. Light Gray and Dark Gray are the safer choices, but Coral is the one that feels most like CMF. It is brighter, more playful, and better suited to a product that clearly wants to stand apart. Most importantly, the case feels designed with intent rather than treated as an afterthought, and that alone gives the Clip Pro an edge.

Ergonomics

The Smart Dial on the case is one of those details that immediately makes the product feel more thoughtful in hand. Each turn delivers crisp, clicky feedback, and pressing the dial has a satisfying weight to it. It feels tactile and deliberate rather than decorative, which makes everyday use that bit more enjoyable.

The case has a matte texture that feels soft in the hand, while the earbuds are mostly glossy. At around 52.1 x 26.7 x 51.0mm and roughly 38.8g, the case stays compact and easy to carry. I also like that it can stand upright on a surface, which is a small but practical advantage over the usual round, pebble-like earbud cases. Each earbud weighs just under 6g, and that lightness helps with long-term comfort.

The Clip Pro is easy to wear for hours without feeling pinchy or awkward. CMF has also built physical buttons into the rear section of each earbud, where they are easy to reach without much adjustment. The earbuds do not interfere with glasses either, which is a nice touch. They can clash slightly with earcuffs depending on their position, but in my experience that is only a minor issue.

There is still a small ergonomic quirk with the charging case. Putting the earbuds back can be a little confusing at first because the left and right sides are not interchangeable. The rear section needs to sit at the bottom with the C-bridge facing inward, and until that becomes second nature, the process feels slightly less intuitive than it should.

Performance

Sound quality is always the challenge with open-ear earbuds because the format comes with clear limits. Without a seal inside the ear canal, you do not get the same bass weight, isolation, or intimacy as you would from a good pair of in-ear buds. The goal here is not to beat traditional earbuds at their own game. It is to sound full and clear enough that the open-ear tradeoff feels worthwhile.

The CMF Clip Pro uses a 10.8mm dynamic driver and supports LDAC, AAC, and SBC codecs. In practice, the tuning is more restrained than on some of CMF’s other earbuds. I found the CMF Buds 2 and Buds 2 Pro I reviewed last year noticeably bass-heavy, but the Clip Pro does not lean in that direction, even with Bass Enhancement set to Level 2. Instead, it sounds more balanced, which suits this category better.

Bass still lacks the weight and punch you would get from sealed earbuds, but that is to be expected. The upside is that the sound never feels bloated or as if it is trying too hard to compensate. Clarity is decent, and the overall presentation is clean and easy to listen to. It is not especially rich or immersive, but for casual listening, podcasts, and everyday music, it works well enough.

There is no noise cancelling, and no real isolation either. Some leakage is still present, as you would expect from open-ear earbuds, but it is mild in everyday use. People nearby are unlikely to notice unless they are very close or you’re listening at high volume. CMF also includes an anti-leakage mode, but while it helps, it also makes the sound noticeably more muffled.

As for call quality, the CMF Clip Pro uses a four-mic setup, with two mics on each earbud, alongside noise reduction. It does a decent job of keeping voices clear enough for everyday calls, even in busier environments. It is reliable enough that taking calls on the go does not feel like a compromise.

The physical controls on both the earbuds and the case are easily one of my favorite things about the Clip Pro. In a category where touch controls often feel inconsistent, CMF takes a more tactile approach that immediately helps these stand out. The buttons on the earbuds are easy to use and support a surprisingly broad range of inputs, including double press, triple press, press and hold, and double press and hold. That gives the Clip Pro a level of flexibility that feels more thoughtfully implemented than many rivals.

What really elevates the experience is the Smart Dial on the case. It handles volume through rotation, and it can also be customized for playback, track skipping, voice assistant access, low lag mode, and call controls. That makes the case feel like more than a simple charging shell, giving the product a bit of personality in everyday use. More importantly, the physical controls work very well in practice. They feel responsive and dependable, which matters far more than simply offering a long list of possible shortcuts. My only complaint is that the sound cue for volume changes can lag slightly behind the actual adjustment.

The earbuds’ controls work right out of the box, while Smart Dial has to be enabled manually in the Nothing X app. Beyond that, the app lets you adjust features like spatial audio, anti-leakage mode, bass boost, low lag mode, and dual-device pairing. There are also five preset EQ modes, plus a custom three-band equalizer that gives you a good amount of control over the sound. Nothing X is not doing anything radically new, but it remains one of the best earbud apps around. It looks great, feels intuitive, and makes it easy to tweak settings without any fuss.

Battery life is rated at up to 10 hours on the earbuds themselves and up to 32.5 hours with the case, while a Long Battery Mode pushes that to 36 hours. In my testing, which included a mix of music, video, and a 20-minute video call, the earbuds still had more than 50 percent battery left after about five continuous hours of use, so CMF’s claim appears to hold up well. CMF also says a quick 10-minute charge can deliver up to four hours of playback, which adds to the overall convenience.

Sustainability

CMF leaves a few unanswered questions here. The Clip Pro earbuds themselves are rated IP54, which adds useful protection against dust and light splashes in daily use. The case, however, is only rated IPX2, so it is best kept away from water.

There is also less clarity around environmental impact than I would have liked. Unlike Nothing’s mainline products, CMF does not seem to clearly publish details on recycled materials, carbon footprint, packaging, or manufacturing for this line. That does not necessarily mean sustainability was ignored, but it does make the product harder to assess on those terms. For a brand that puts so much emphasis on design and presentation, a little more transparency here would have made the Clip Pro feel more complete.

Value

At $99, the CMF Clip Pro sits firmly in the mid-range. That price feels a little high by CMF standards, especially for a brand that has built its reputation on strong value. Even so, the Clip Pro still manages to punch above its price in a few key ways, particularly through its design, physical controls, comfort, and overall user experience.

That said, value here depends heavily on what you want from your earbuds. If you are drawn to the look, appreciate the physical controls, like the fit, and want an affordable open-ear option from a recognizable brand, $99 can still make sense. If you are comparing purely on specifications, protection, or feature depth, this one may feel a little less convincing.

Verdict

The CMF Clip Pro does not completely redefine what open-ear earbuds can be, but it gets more right than wrong. The sound still carries the usual limitations of the format, yet it is tuned with enough balance and clarity to work well for casual listening, podcasts, and everyday music. The price also feels a touch high for a CMF product. Even so, there is a lot to like here. The design is distinctive, the fit is comfortable, the controls are genuinely excellent, and the overall user experience feels more considered than most rivals in this space.

What makes the Clip Pro stand out is that it does not rely on one gimmick alone. The Smart Dial is clever, but it is also useful. The physical buttons are unusual, but they are there because they work. Add in a polished app and solid battery life, and you end up with a pair of open-ear earbuds that feels thoughtfully put together from top to bottom. It may not be the obvious value champion in CMF’s lineup, but it is one of the brand’s most interesting products yet, and one that gets the basics right in ways that matter.

The post CMF Clip Pro Review: More Than Just a Pretty Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art

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The iMac G3’s translucent Bondi Blue shell sold 800,000 units in its first five months, which was Apple’s way of proving that exposing a computer’s internal geometry could be its single most compelling feature. Nothing put a transparent back on a phone in 2022 and made every other Android’s solid slab look like it had something to hide. Skeleton mechanical watches have been charging a premium for visible gear trains for centuries. Teenage Engineering turned exposed PCBs into a full aesthetic identity. The pattern is clear enough: when mechanisms are beautiful, hiding them is just a waste. CD sales have been quietly growing for four years now, physical music is back in force, and the SYITREN RM1 arrives to give CD players the transparent treatment they probably always deserved.

The RM1 houses its full CD mechanism inside a dual-layer ultra-clear acrylic frame, with precision metal corner pillars and the disc, optical pickup, and PCB all visible from the front. SYITREN, founded in 2017 and recognized by the MUSE, London, French, IDA, and A’ Design Awards, designed it with the CD’s own iridescence as a feature rather than a side effect. You press a disc onto the transport and suddenly there’s a spinning, light-catching object on your desk or wall that is also playing music. Audio routes out via Bluetooth 5.3 or 3.5mm AUX, with SYITREN leaving the speaker out entirely and trusting you to own one already. It measures 260 x 260 x 42mm, weighs 0.9kg, and starts at $89.

Designer: SYITREN

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

Dual-layer acrylic panels sandwich the CD mechanism between them, and the precision metal corner pillars at each corner read as structural jewelry rather than hardware fasteners. As the disc spins, its iridescent surface catches ambient light through the panels and scatters it differently depending on the label design, the printing, and the reflective surface underneath. Some discs glow gold under warm room lighting, others catch cool blue from overhead. A disc with a dense printed label plays completely differently as a visual object than a silver-surface one, which means every album in your collection has a slightly different personality in this frame.

A warm-yellow 2×8 LED matrix, visible through the acrylic from the front, shows track number, animated visuals, and volume level alongside a linear progress bar. The amber glow against the spinning disc creates what SYITREN calls a “visual rhythm,” and it’s a phrase that actually earns its keep here. Warm lighting and a slowly rotating disc at the center of a room does something to the quality of an evening that a Spotify queue on a phone simply cannot. It’s a mood object as much as an audio component. The choice of warm yellow over a cooler white or blue LED tone is clearly deliberate, positioning the RM1 alongside lamps and wood furniture rather than making it look like something pulled from a server rack.

SYITREN’s decision to ship the RM1 without a built-in speaker is both a nod to the Discman-meets-headphones culture, but also just fair common-sense engineering. Squeezing a driver into a 42mm-thick transparent frame would have produced tinny, directionally compromised sound that undermined everything else about the product. Instead, the RM1 connects to your existing speakers or headphones via Bluetooth 5.3 at a 10-meter range with a 95 dB SNR, or through a 3.5mm AUX jack for wired setups. For anyone who already owns a decent Bluetooth speaker or a bookshelf stereo, this approach makes the RM1 a source component and a visual object, which is exactly what it should be. It’s the same logic that drives high-end audio separates: source, amplification, and output each handled by the component built specifically for that job.

A built-in 16-bit DAC and 24-bit DSP sit at the core of the RM1’s signal chain, sampling at 8-48 kHz with a CD audio SNR of ≥85 dB and total harmonic distortion plus noise below 0.1 percent. Dynamic range lands at ≥70 dB, which is a respectable figure for a consumer portable at this price. Supported formats include standard audio CDs, MP3 discs, and WMA discs, which covers everything from your 2004 burned collection to freshly pressed albums. Playback modes offer repeat one, sequential play, and shuffle, with a remote control included in the box. The battery is an 18650 cell rated at 2000mAh, charging via USB-C in one to two hours and delivering six to eight hours of continuous playback.

Wall-mounting a CD player requires solving a problem that horizontal-tray consumer units have never had to worry about. CD optical pickups are designed to track a horizontally spinning disc, and tilting the whole assembly vertically introduces vibration and skip risks that would make most standard mechanisms unreliable on a wall. SYITREN addressed this with a 40-second anti-shock buffer for standard audio CDs and a 120-second buffer for MP3 discs, pre-reading and caching audio data so that ambient vibration or minor disturbances can’t interrupt playback. The optical pickup itself was also specifically engineered for vertical operation. Most people who buy the RM1 will probably never think about any of this, which is precisely where engineering and design blur together in the best way.

The RM1 ships with both a wall-mount system and a detachable desk stand, making the placement decision entirely yours and entirely reversible. Hung against a wall between picture frames, it reads as a kinetic art piece during playback and a minimal geometric object when the disc isn’t loaded. On a desk or shelf, the angled stand positions the disc facing you directly, turning the player into the kind of object your eye keeps returning to from across the room. SYITREN’s own imagery places it in apartments, studios, cafes, and living rooms, and the transparent form factor genuinely holds up across all of those contexts. At 0.9kg and 42mm deep, it’s also considerably lighter and thinner than photographs tend to suggest.

The RM1 starts at $99 and is available through SYITREN’s campaign, with the N200 Bluetooth speaker bundled together for a price of $139. The 18650 cell charges via USB-C in one to two hours and delivers up to eight hours of continuous playback, so the unit is genuinely portable if you want to move it between rooms. SYITREN doesn’t publish a formal warranty term in its current materials, so confirm those details directly before purchasing. The company has been manufacturing and shipping audio hardware since 2017, with distribution across more than 15 US retail cities and five global markets. At $99, the RM1 is the most considered CD player I’ve seen that treats the format as something worth displaying, and for anyone sitting on a collection of discs that hasn’t been played in years, that’s a genuinely compelling reason to dust them off.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $179 (45% off) Hurry, 62 of 1200 units left!

The post This Clear Acrylic CD Player Turns Your Music Collection Into Kinetic Art first appeared on Yanko Design.