Tag Archives: Music

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.

Someone Built Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence Album Art as a Monochrome LEGO Diorama

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There was a solid decade there where every other Tumblr blog, VSCO caption, and breakup playlist owed a spiritual debt to one woman in a bikini top and a fringe crop, staring off into the California haze like she’d just been dumped by a guy named Jim who drove a vintage Mercedes and never called back. That’s Ultraviolence in a nutshell. Lana Del Rey’s third album didn’t just soundtrack a generation’s melancholy, it basically invented the aesthetic language for it (moody filters, palm trees, cursive fonts, the works). Ten years later, the album still feels like its own little universe, and apparently one LEGO builder agreed hard enough to spend an unreasonable number of grey and black bricks recreating it.

That builder is ErfinderEdlerBenny, and their LEGO Ideas submission called simply “Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey” takes the album’s iconic black and white cover art and turns it into a full physical diorama, vintage car, palm trees, wrought iron gate, and all. No color anywhere. Just a wall of grayscale brick that somehow captures a very specific kind of heartbreak. It’s the kind of tribute that only makes sense if you’ve actually sat with the record, and honestly, that’s exactly the point.

Designer: ErfinderEdlerBenny

Zoom into the left side of the build and you land in a smaller vignette pulled straight from the “Ultraviolence” music video, the one where Lana wears a white dress and veil that reads somewhere between bridal and funeral, which, fair, tracks with a song about a relationship that hits like a kiss and also just hits. A wrought iron gate, a gnarled black tree, and a scattering of butterflies (some black, some ghostly white) surround the minifigure, and the whole corner has a quiet, almost gothic hush to it that a lot of official LEGO sets wouldn’t dare attempt. It’s a small scene, but it carries a surprising amount of mood for something built entirely out of grey bricks.

The right side flips that mood toward the ocean, borrowing imagery from the “West Coast” video instead, think hilly landscape silhouettes and a Ferris wheel motif tucked among a pair of tall black palm trees. It’s a clever way to fold a second song into a diorama technically named after the album’s title track, and it gives the whole build a sense of narrative pacing you don’t usually get from a static display piece. Two songs, two moods, one connected scene, and somehow it never feels cluttered or like it’s trying to do too much at once.

Piecing an entire album’s visual identity into LEGO form is no small feat, especially when you’re deliberately working without color as a crutch. Most builders lean on bright palettes to sell mood and depth. ErfinderEdlerBenny does the opposite, using texture, shading, and clever part choices (that basketball net style foliage, those stacked grey slopes for the skyline) to create contrast entirely through shape and shadow. It’s a genuinely tricky design problem, and the fact that it still reads clearly as “sad LA girl in a vintage car” from across a room says a lot about the execution.

As of writing, the project sits at 284 supporters with 422 days left to hit its first milestone of 1,000, so there’s plenty of runway left for the Lana faithful to show up. If you’ve ever screamed “West Coast” a little too loudly on a road trip, or know exactly which era of your life is tied to this record, this is the kind of tribute worth backing. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote. My one wish is that they somehow rig the sun piece to glow, because nothing says Ultraviolence quite like brooding in monochrome komorebi.

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Someone Built a $3,500 Studio That Starts With You, Not the Gear

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The studio setup has always been a deeply personal thing. Two producers with identical gear can arrange it in completely different ways, because the physical organization of creative tools shapes how ideas flow from head to hands. Most solutions involve buying a desk, then a rack, then stands and cables and panels until the accumulated sum starts to resemble something cohesive. The ToyBox starts from the opposite direction entirely.

Weird Kid Engineering builds the ToyBox as a single, integrated physical object that collapses a full creative ecosystem into one custom-made enclosure. Music production gear, gaming systems, multiple displays, and storage all live inside the same structure, designed from the start to fit the specific workflow of whoever orders it. No two units are identical. Every ToyBox is hand-built to spec based on what each client actually does and needs.

Designer: Ellis Faulk (Weird Kid Engineering)

The hardware varies with each build, but a fully loaded configuration includes synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, effects pedals, gaming consoles, and displays, all integrated into the structure rather than resting on top of it. These aren’t tools that happen to share a surface; they’re components of a system designed around how they relate to each other and to the person using them. That relationship is what the build process is actually engineering.

The appeal to anyone who has stared down a cluttered studio is immediate. Instruments, screens, and gaming consoles physically consolidated into one object changes the spatial and psychological experience of the room. You stop navigating a spread of disconnected surfaces and start working within a contained system. The friction of reaching across two desks or hunting for a buried cable doesn’t exist when everything is designed to coexist from the start.

The flagship version, fully loaded with audio gear, screens, consoles, and equipment curated to the owner, costs $12,500. Base builds start at $3,500. That range reflects how deeply each order is customized and how extensively the hardware is selected to suit a specific creative workflow. It’s not the cost of a desk with gear on it; it’s the cost of a single integrated object designed around how a particular person works and creates.

There’s something about the ToyBox’s form that most studio furniture doesn’t attempt. It reads as an object rather than as furniture that happens to hold other things. The visual coherence that comes from designing everything together, rather than assembling incrementally over years, is a genuine design quality. That totality separates it from a better desk or a more organized cable management solution, and it’s a distinction that most studios never even think to make.

The post Someone Built a $3,500 Studio That Starts With You, Not the Gear first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pro-Ject Just Solved the Two Biggest Problems With Getting Into Vinyl

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The entry-level turntable market has a pattern that rarely changes. A manufacturer adds Bluetooth, a built-in preamp, USB output, and auto-stop into one device, prices it somewhere between $100 and $250, and markets it to people who wouldn’t otherwise know what to do with a separate phono stage. The result is usually a table that does many things poorly rather than one thing well, and the vinyl experience that follows tends to confirm whatever doubts that person had about the format.

Pro-Ject has spent three decades making a different argument. The E1.2, which launched last year as a stripped-down, fully manual belt-drive turntable with no Bluetooth and no built-in preamp, was that argument restated clearly at a more approachable price. It borrowed the sub-platter design from the company’s Debut line, fitted a 730 g die-cast aluminium platter with a TPE damping ring, and used an 8.6-inch aluminium tonearm with a carbon-reinforced headshell. No extras, no compromises to the core hardware.

Designer: Pro-Ject

The new E1.2 BT and E1.2 Phono editions extend that platform rather than rethink it. The BT version adds Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX HD and aptX Adaptive codec support, allowing it to stream vinyl wirelessly to speakers, headphones, or compatible amplifiers. The Phono edition, in contrast, adds a built-in phono preamplifier for anyone connecting to an amplifier or active speakers that don’t already include one. The hardware underneath each variant is identical; the choice between them is a question of what your listening setup actually needs.

The Bluetooth functionality is a meaningful step up from the aptX implementations that have become common at this price tier. AptX Adaptive, in particular, transmits at near-lossless quality with variable bitrate, which makes a practical difference when the source material is a well-pressed record played back through a properly aligned cartridge. You’re not losing most of what the stylus picks up before it reaches your ears. For a household where the stereo system is in one room and the better speakers are elsewhere, that matters.

The Phono edition solves the other common access problem. Most modern integrated amplifiers, AV receivers, and streaming systems don’t include a phono stage, and asking a newcomer to source a separate one before they’ve even put their first record on is a reliable way to end the conversation. Having the preamp built in removes that step without downgrading the deck’s core components. The factory-fitted Pro-Ject Pick it MM E cartridge, a moving magnet design with a conical diamond stylus and miniature neodymium magnet, stays the same across all three variants.

Both new models come in the same finishes as the standard E1.2 and add additional color options. The BT sits at £399 / €399 in High Gloss Black or Walnut, stepping up to £449 / €449 for color finishes including Satin White and Satin Golden Yellow. The Phono edition is priced at £319 / €359. The standard E1.2, still available, remains at £249 / €329 for those who already have a phono stage and don’t need wireless output.

What makes the three-variant strategy work is that it doesn’t try to collapse every possible need into one model. Each one handles a specific friction point between a first-time buyer and their record collection, and none of them compromise the mechanical quality that the E1.2 built its reputation on in the first place. The BT streams well. The Phono connects simply. The standard version gets out of the way and plays records.

The post Pro-Ject Just Solved the Two Biggest Problems With Getting Into Vinyl first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Actually Made a Fully Playable Banjo From a Party Balloon

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I’ll be honest: the first time I saw images of Co:Creation Lab’s Balloon Banjo, I laughed. Not in a dismissive way, but in the way you laugh when something is just genuinely delightful. It’s lime green and baby blue, shaped like a proper banjo, and where a wooden drum body should be, there’s a round, inflated party balloon clamped neatly into place. It looks like something that fell out of a toy box, which is exactly the point, and also exactly why it’s brilliant.

The concept is almost absurdly simple. You download 19 3D-printable parts, assemble them into seven components, and thread nylon fishing line as the strings. The balloon slots in underneath the frame and does what balloons do: it holds air. But that air is doing real acoustic work. The taut rubber surface acts as the sounding board, vibrating when you pluck the strings and creating an actual, if quirky, musical tone. Want to change how it resonates? Just add more air or let some out. No tools, no glue, no specialist equipment. The physics are right there in your hands, adjustable in real time.

Designer: Co:Creation Lab

One of the more considered decisions in this design is how it handles assembly. There are no metal screws. Instead, the parts use 3D-printed plastic screws, sized so that a six-year-old can turn them with their fingers without stripping the threads. That small detail says a lot about Co:Creation Lab’s thinking. This wasn’t designed to impress engineers. It was designed with a specific constraint in mind: a parent should be able to build it together with their child. The build is the experience, not just the end result.

I find that kind of intentional constraint genuinely refreshing. Design often gets celebrated for how much it can do, how many features it can pack in, how complex it can become. The Balloon Banjo goes the other direction entirely. Every choice is stripped back to what’s necessary, and what’s necessary turns out to be enough. The design files are available to download, and the materials cost next to nothing beyond the printer and filament. A party balloon, some fishing line, and a little patience. That’s it.

Is it a real musical instrument? Technically, yes. Is it going to replace your ukulele or compete with an actual banjo? Absolutely not. It’s more of a homebrew science toy than a concert-ready instrument. But I don’t think that’s a limitation so much as a reframing. The Balloon Banjo doesn’t ask to be taken seriously as an instrument. It asks you to be curious. It asks you to understand why it makes sound, what changes when you add more air, and what happens if you pull the string tighter. Those are good questions for any age.

The aesthetic is also doing a lot here. That lime green frame and the pastel blue balloon aren’t accidental. The color palette is cheerful and toy-like, which signals immediately that this is meant to be played with, not displayed behind glass. Compared to the earnest seriousness that tends to follow a lot of maker culture projects, the Balloon Banjo has a lightness to it, a sense of humor about itself, that makes it more accessible rather than less.

The broader conversation around 3D printing still tends to lean utilitarian: replacement parts, custom brackets, functional objects. What Co:Creation Lab has made is a reminder that fabrication can also just be fun. That you can hand a kid a finished thing, and the fact that they helped build it is what makes it matter. Good design doesn’t always have to solve a problem. Sometimes it just has to make you want to pick it up and pluck a string. Even if the sound is a little wonky.

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Razer’s Pompompurin Kraken Kitty V2 headphones Brings Sanrio charm to gaming

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Razer is adding another Sanrio character to its growing lineup of gaming accessories, this time giving Pompompurin the starring role on its Kraken Kitty V2 BT wireless headphones. The Pompompurin Edition takes the familiar feline-inspired headset and reworks its appearance around the yellow Sanrio character, complete with distinctive ears and themed detailing. It is scheduled to arrive at Target online and in stores on October 4, 2026, priced at $140.

Rather than simply applying printed artwork to an existing headset, Razer has incorporated Pompompurin’s visual identity directly into the hardware. The headband features the character’s signature ears and brown beret, while additional artwork appears underneath the headband. The result is a character-inspired object compared to other conventional gaming headphones with a decorative skin.

Designer: Razer

Underneath the playful exterior, the cans retain the core hardware of the Kraken Kitty V2 BT. It uses Razer’s TriForce 40 mm drivers, which separate high, mid, and low frequencies for clearer audio, along with Bluetooth 5.2 and a dedicated Gaming Mode designed to reduce wireless latency. The audio accessory is compatible with Windows PCs, Android and iOS devices, making it suitable beyond a traditional gaming setup. Communication is handled by an integrated HyperClear cardioid microphone rather than a protruding boom mic. Razer says its pickup pattern is tuned to prioritize the user’s voice while reducing sound from other directions. The headphones also support 7.1 surround sound for positional audio, although that feature is limited to Windows 10 64-bit and newer systems.

The visual side is equally configurable. Razer Chroma RGB lighting illuminates the earcups, with support for more than 16.8 million colors and a range of effects. The Pompompurin edition additionally supports stream-reactive lighting, allowing the illumination to respond to emotes, alerts, and other activity during streams. Comfort comes from hybrid fabric and leatherette ear cushions, while the headset weighs approximately 325 grams. USB-C handles charging, and the battery is rated for up to 40 hours depending on configuration. Razer’s broader specifications list up to 40 hours with lighting enabled and up to 60 hours with Chroma RGB disabled.

The Pompompurin Edition truly carries a collectible identity, and at that price tag it is an absolute buy for fans. Like other themed Kraken Kitty V2 BT editions, this pair of cans stands out for its character-focused design, as much as its gaming features. For sure, an eye-catcher on the streets for onlookers!

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Madkids Empire Is Turning Intimidating Synth Gear Into Pure Play

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Most musical instruments communicate one thing very clearly before you even touch them: you have to earn this. The arrangement of knobs, the wall of technical labeling, the thick manual sitting smugly beside the unit. It is an initiation ritual disguised as product design, and for most people, it works exactly as intended. They back away.

Madkids Empire, a studio founded by a designer named Xam, has built something that works in the opposite direction. Their collection of analog synthesizers is covered in illustrated surfaces, organic silhouettes, and, deliberately, Chinese annotations that describe functions through metaphor rather than engineering terminology. Instead of telling you what a knob controls, the labeling hints at what it feels like. It is the difference between reading a recipe and being handed a fork.

Designer: Madkids Empire

The visual language alone is worth paying attention to. Each instrument looks less like a piece of audio equipment and more like an illustrated landscape you could reach into. Wooden frames and brass details soften what would otherwise read as industrial objects. The shapes curve and flow in ways that suggest something natural rather than manufactured, which is intentional. Xam builds the design around the circuit itself, starting with the technical structure of the sound and then finding a natural concept that mirrors it. A lake. A mountain. A tree. The interaction you have with the synth is meant to feel connected to that concept, so patching a cable or turning a dial carries a kind of environmental logic, even if you could not explain exactly why.

The result is an instrument that looks like you are supposed to explore it, and the collection does not disappoint on that expectation. The flowing silhouettes and playful interfaces do not just look inviting; they function that way too. Xam has said that what they want users to understand is that musical knowledge is not the entry point. Curiosity is. When someone hears a sound they like during experimentation, they have made something entirely their own, something they arrived at through play rather than study. That reframing matters more than it might initially seem.

Most design conversations around synthesizers orbit gear obsession and technical hierarchy. How many oscillators, what filter topology, which vintage unit did it draw from. Madkids Empire does not seem particularly interested in that conversation. The chaos baked into these instruments, and yes, chaos is a deliberate design choice here, provides feedback that evolves with what you are doing. Unlike randomness, which offers no relationship between action and outcome, the unpredictability here responds to you. You become part of the system. It is closer to improvising in a new environment than operating a machine.

That philosophy has a real audience right now. The broader design and tech world has spent years talking about removing barriers and making things accessible, but the actual execution is usually just simpler interfaces with less functionality. Madkids Empire took a different approach: keep the depth, remove the intimidation, and replace the instruction manual with the experience of discovery itself. The instruments are not dumbed down. They are just designed with a different entry point in mind.

The aesthetic choices also position these synths somewhere unusual on the cultural map. They are not vintage recreations chasing the warmth of a classic unit, and they are not sleek minimalist tech objects trying to disappear into a desk setup. They are objects you would notice on a shelf. Objects that invite a question. That sense of presence, the feeling that a thing has a personality before you interact with it, is genuinely rare in hardware design.

Xam has built something that sits at the crossroads of instrument, sculpture, and game. The synthesizer as landscape. The knob as terrain. Whether or not you ever make music with one, the thinking behind Madkids Empire’s work is the kind that deserves to travel beyond the synthesizer community and into a wider conversation about what it means to design something people actually want to touch.

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Someone Built a LEGO Bedside Radio With 1,400 Bricks And Inner Circuitry

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Remember when clock radios had personality? Before phones ate every function a bedside table used to need, you had this chunky little box with dials that clicked, buttons that thunked, and a display that glowed just enough to bug you at 3am. That exact vibe is what 91-Brickdesigns set out to capture with the Legosonic BSR-12, a LEGO Ideas build modeled on the radio alarm clocks that ruled nightstands in the late 70s and early 80s. And they didn’t just nail the look, they nailed the fidgetiness of the thing too.

Around 1400 pieces went into this build, and a big chunk of that count is doing unnecessary, delightful work. The toggle switches have actual spring mechanisms so they click when you flip them. The sliders drive a gear underneath just so they feel smoother in your hand, despite doing literally nothing. Even the snooze button is a running joke, since pressing it accomplishes exactly zero. It’s the kind of overbuilt charm we loved in the LEGO Classics Computer a while back, cranked up another notch.

Designer: 91-Brickdesigns

The front panel alone is a lot to take in. You’ve got three round dials up top that turn but don’t actually control anything, a row of colored indicator lights, and a genuinely functional time-set system where you spin the big dial and lock it in with a couple of chrome buttons. Next to that sits a flip clock style display frozen at 20:58, glowing like it just woke up from a nap, and a tuning window with a red needle you can slide across a fake FM and AM band using a little wheel on the side. None of it plays actual music, but every piece of it looks like it should.

Pop the top cover and there’s a full circuit board hiding under there, with brick built resistors color coded the way real resistors are, a couple of capacitors, and a chip sitting exactly where you’d expect one on an actual PCB. Slide the ventilation grille open and there’s a speaker cone waiting behind it. Flip the whole thing around and the back has a proper spec plate, an AC input, and an on off switch that wouldn’t look out of place on a real appliance from a Best Buy circa 1983. My favorite detail might be the plate itself, which reads “Made in Two Tiles, Legany,” because apparently even fictional radio manufacturers deserve a pun.

This isn’t the first time we’ve watched builders chase this exact strain of nostalgia. The JVC pyramid TV that hit LEGO Ideas earlier this year leaned on the same appeal, and LEGO’s own Icons Retro Radio proved there’s real demand for gadgets that remind adults of a time when electronics had weight and character instead of just a glass slab and a charging port. The Legosonic BSR-12 fits right into that lineage, except it goes further than most by building the guts as carefully as the shell.

The build currently sits at Staff Pick status with 589 days left to hit its 5,000 supporter mark, on the way to the 10,000 votes needed for LEGO’s official review. If you’re the kind of person who misses a nightstand that made noise when you touched it, head over to LEGO Ideas and give it a vote.

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PAC-MAN Shrank Into a Tiny $28 Synthesizer and It Actually Works

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Some crossovers make obvious sense. Some don’t. The Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN is the rare kind that manages to be both completely absurd and entirely logical at the same time. Two icons of Japanese pop culture, each beloved for being a little weird, a little niche, and deeply joyful, have merged into one pocket-sized musical toy that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about.

Let’s start with the basics. PAC-MAN entered Japanese arcades in 1980, and the iconic yellow dot-muncher has barely stopped showing up in culture since. The Otamatone, on the other hand, is Maywa Denki’s strange and lovable musical instrument: a tadpole-shaped squeezable synthesizer with an expressive face that produces sounds somewhere between a theremin and a very distressed seagull. If you’ve ever seen someone play one, you already understand why it has developed a devoted global fanbase. If you haven’t, please stop what you’re doing and look it up immediately.

Designers: Pac-Man and Otamatone

The Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN takes the whole concept and shrinks it into a keychain format, measuring just 1.6 by 3.75 by 3 inches and running on a CR2032 battery. It comes pre-loaded with 11 songs, which you select by pressing buttons on the tail, and you play along by pressing a stem button while squeezing the cheeks to create that signature “wah” effect. Low, medium, and high pitch modes round out the playable range. The packaging includes a keychain attachment, which means yes, you can absolutely wear this as an instrument. That detail matters more than you’d think.

The collection covers the full PAC-MAN roster: the original yellow character and all four ghosts. Blinky in red, Pinky in pink, Inky in that distinctive cyan, and Clyde in orange, each keeping their arcade color identities perfectly intact. The visual translation is genuinely clever. PAC-MAN’s circular body replaces the Otamatone’s face naturally, almost like it was always supposed to go there. The proportions work. The ghost designs translate with equal elegance, their rounded arcade silhouettes sitting comfortably within the Otamatone format. As far as licensed crossovers go, the design team clearly took this seriously enough to get the details right.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Otamatone Melody isn’t exactly a sophisticated musical instrument. Compared to the full-size Otamatone, which demands real technique and rewards it with genuinely expressive sounds, the Melody format is more toy than tool. The controls are simpler, the sonic range is narrower, and the whole point is portability and accessibility over performance depth. It exists comfortably in the space between collectible, music toy, and glorified novelty, and it makes no apologies for that positioning.

But that’s precisely where the appeal lives, and I’d argue it’s the smarter design choice. Not everything needs to be serious. The Otamatone was never competing with professional instruments; it was built to be joyful and a little absurd, and the Melody version simply leans further into that mission. The PAC-MAN edition layers cultural nostalgia onto an already culturally loaded object. You’re not just carrying a tiny synthesizer; you’re carrying a piece of arcade history that produces music on demand. That’s a rare combination, and it’s one that will resonate well beyond people who consider themselves fans of either brand.

The broader rollout reinforces just how seriously this partnership has been taken. PAC-MAN has appeared across both the Regular and Deluxe Otamatone formats, with Blinky, Pinky, and Inky joining the full-size Regular line earlier this year. The original PAC-MAN Regular model even incorporates pixel graphics and a pellet motif on its controls, the kind of small, referential detail that collectors notice and quietly love.

At $27.99, the Otamatone Melody PAC-MAN isn’t trying to be a luxury object or a serious instrument. It’s a functional collectible, a desk toy that plays music, a nostalgic artifact that earns its place on your keychain with a little wah and a surprising amount of personality. The fact that it exists at all feels like a small cultural gift: two strange, beloved things that had no obvious business merging, somehow making perfect sense together.

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If the iPod Nano and Game Boy had a baby, you’d get this $85 Hi-Fi Audio Player

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The dedicated music player had a solid twenty-year run: Walkmans, MiniDiscs, the Rio PMP300 (look it up), the iPod in all its generations, and the Zune if you were feeling brave. Streaming services and the smartphone ate all of it, and what survived was a niche audiophile DAP market that mostly traded in expensive, sensible-looking black rectangles with impressive chip specs and absolutely zero personality. That category is fine if you want to spend $300 on a slab, but it left a gap for a well-engineered, genuinely fun music player you’d want to show off rather than bury. Hidizs, a Hong Kong audio brand, decided to fill that gap with the AP30 Music Boy. They designed it to look like a Game Boy, snap to your phone, hang from your neck, and decode DSD256, all at once.

The AP30 is built around a Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC chip, the kind that typically shows up in players costing $200 or more, paired with an RT6863 amplifier and RKNANOD master chip for a signal chain that produces 137mW per channel balanced and an SNR of 127dB. The 68x53x17mm body comes in a lightweight plastic edition at 56 grams and a CNC aluminum edition at 80 grams, running Hidizs’s own purpose-built HidizsOS rather than a general Android build. It supports DSD256 native decoding, PCM 192kHz/24bit, and lossless formats including FLAC, APE, WMA, WAV, ALAC, Apple Lossless, and DSDIFF, plus Bluetooth 5.3, USB DAC mode via Type-C, dual wired outputs, and a microSD slot accepting cards up to 256GB. There is also a built-in Retro Block Puzzle Game, which tells you exactly what kind of product this is. Hidizs designed the whole thing to be worn rather than pocketed, and that premise shapes every decision in the hardware.

Designer: Hidizs

Click Here to Buy Now: $85 $119 (23$ off) Hurry! Only 16 of 480 units left.

Every device you own right now is either trying to get your attention or listening for a chance to sell you something. Your phone buzzes, your watch taps your wrist, your earbuds announce that someone liked your post, and AI glasses are arriving to overlay all of it directly onto your vision. The AP30 runs on HidizsOS, a system crafted for high-fidelity audio, and that is genuinely the full scope of its ambitions. It plays music, adjusts volume through a physical wheel, and the agenda ends there. A piece of technology in 2026 that takes one job seriously and refuses to negotiate with the attention economy is a genuinely radical object, and the AP30 earns that description through hardware and software decisions that are all, unanimously, in service of sound.

The 2.0-inch (296×240) HD IPS screen ensures that browsing your music library, navigating menus, and playing games is a seamless and clear experience, and it is a non-touchscreen display, which means physical controls handle everything. The volume control is a Japanese ALPS wheel, chosen for tactile precision over digital convenience, delivering the kind of satisfying resistance that sliders on glass can never replicate. The backplate carries an engraved whale motif that symbolizes the ocean’s freedom and majesty, tied to Hidizs’s ongoing collaboration with WDC (Whale and Dolphin Conservation), bringing awareness to the beauty and importance of marine life. The aluminum edition is CNC-machined in Pixel Purple and Arcade Black, while the plastic version spans Crystal Ocean Blue, Shadow Black, and Classic White. Both editions share identical internals and the same sharp retro energy.

The 3.5mm single-ended output supports everyday headphones, while the 4.4mm balanced output satisfies audiophiles using high-impedance in-ear or over-ear monitors. Specifically, single-ended delivers 61mW+61mW at 32Ω with THD+N of 0.0008% and SNR of 120dB, while balanced pushes 137mW+137mW at 32Ω with SNR of 127dB and frequency response spanning 20Hz to 90kHz at ±0.03dB. HidizsOS gives you six EQ presets or a custom build, high/low gain adjustment to match headphone impedance, four playback modes, and digital anti-aliasing filters alongside DoP (DSD over PCM) for professional listeners. Even headphones with built-in microphones are fully compatible, making the AP30 a versatile companion for any audio setup. Certified by Hi-Res Audio, the AP30 Music Boy meets the highest standards in sound reproduction, which means the numbers back the claim rather than decorate the packaging.

Hidizs built three distinct ways to carry the AP30: neck strap, bag clip, or magnetic phone attachment. The neck strap turns it into a pendant, small enough to forget you are wearing it, distinctive enough that people ask. A bag clip hooks onto any strap and streams audio wirelessly to earbuds. Slide the AP30 into its magnetic case and it snaps to the back of your phone with a satisfying clack, no extra adapters, no Bluetooth pairing dance, just a clean magnetic connection that turns your phone into a Hi-Res rig. USB DAC mode works over Type-C to any Windows, MacOS, or OTG-supported device, with the AP30 running on its own battery during operation to reduce noise interference from the host device and preserve its battery life.

With support for a 256GB microSD card, the AP30 can store over 8,500 Hi-Res lossless tracks for offline listening, no buffering, no streaming interruptions, whether commuting, traveling, or relaxing at home. Bluetooth 5.3 ensures fast, low-latency, stable connections, and the AP30 permanently remembers paired devices, covering headphones, speakers, and car audio without fuss. The 1200mAh battery charges in about one hour and keeps the AP30 ready when you need it, delivering 10 to 12 hours of single-ended wired playback, 8 to 10 hours balanced, or 6 to 8 hours wirelessly, with a 60-day standby. The AP30 also supports loading eBooks on a microSD card for reading on its HD screen, transforming commutes and waiting periods into enjoyable, productive moments without sacrificing portability. And then there is the Retro Block Puzzle Game, which is exactly what it sounds like, costs nothing extra, and is honestly the reason at least some people will choose this over a more austere-looking DAP.

The AP30 Music Boy comes in two editions: the Lightweight Plastic at a discounted $85 in Crystal Ocean Blue, Shadow Black, or Classic White, and the CNC Aluminum at $99 in Pixel Purple or Arcade Black. Every unit ships with the player, the magnetic protective case, a Type-C charging cable, a Type-C to Type-C OTG data cable, two screen protectors, a user manual, and a warranty and QC card, with a one-year warranty against factory defects covering the device. Shipping begins in early October 2026 (free globally), with retail distribution following in November 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $85 $119 (23$ off) Hurry! Only 16 of 480 units left.

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