Tag Archives: Audio

WiiM’s First Soundbar Has a Round Touch Display Built Into the Front

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The soundbar has become the default home theater upgrade for anyone who doesn’t want to fill a room with floor-standing speakers and receiver cabinets. It’s a sensible trade-off, but most soundbars operate as completely passive objects once they’re set up, reflecting nothing about what’s actually playing or offering any real interaction beyond a remote nobody can ever find. The visual side of the experience has always been an afterthought.

WiiM is entering the soundbar market for the first time with the WiiM Bar, and the defining choice it made is a 2.1-inch round touch display embedded in the center of the bar’s front face. That decision drives the entire product concept, making the soundbar itself a point of interaction rather than something you control exclusively from your phone or a remote that lives behind a couch cushion.

Designer: WiiM

The glass-covered round display sits within a gentle wave-shaped recess on the bar’s surface, showing album art, track info, the time, EQ settings, Smart Presets, and Recently Played content in a format readable from across the room. A tap plays, pauses, skips, switches sources, or selects an EQ profile without reaching for anything else. Clock faces and dynamic wallpapers take over when nothing’s actively playing.

Sonically, the WiiM Bar delivers a true 3.0.2 Dolby Atmos configuration using an eight-driver array: three front mid-woofers, three front tweeters, and two full-range drivers on top that fire upward for height effects. Four passive radiators, two on the front and two on the rear, extend the bass response. The system peaks at 135W and includes HDMI eARC alongside optical, line-in, and configurable USB audio connections.

RoomFit auto-correction measures the acoustic characteristics of the space and adjusts the output accordingly, so placement against a wall doesn’t work against the sound. A Clear Voice mode uses AI-powered dialogue separation in real time, which is genuinely useful for anyone who reaches for subtitles not because a show is quiet, but because the mix buries speech under effects. Night Mode keeps that clarity intact at lower volumes.

The 3.0.2 configuration is a starting point rather than a ceiling. Compatible WiiM devices can be added wirelessly as surrounds and a subwoofer, taking the system to a full 5.1.2 home theater without additional wiring. The WiiM Home App manages EQ, Smart Presets, and multi-room grouping, letting the bar sync with WiiM Amp, Ultra, Pro, and Mini devices across the rest of a home.

Streaming reaches over 20 services through the app, with direct casting via Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Qobuz Connect, Google Cast, Roon, and Amazon Music Cast. Wi-Fi 6E covers all three bands, Ethernet offers a wired fallback, and Bluetooth 5.4 with LE Audio handles device pairing. A USB host port lets the bar serve a personal media library to other WiiM and DLNA devices on the network.

The WiiM Bar ships in July 2026, priced at $479, available for pre-order now through wiimhome.com, Amazon, and select retail partners. For a market full of soundbars that treat control as an afterthought and expansion as an expensive aftermarket exercise, it offers a fairly direct argument: an on-device touch interface, honest Dolby Atmos performance, and a clear path to a proper surround setup whenever the moment calls for it.

The post WiiM’s First Soundbar Has a Round Touch Display Built Into the Front first appeared on Yanko Design.

KLH’s $1,000 Floorstanding Speaker Actually Fits in Your Apartment

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Serious hi-fi speakers have long demanded a certain kind of listener, one with a dedicated room, a generously sized space, and the freedom to place enclosures wherever the acoustics dictate. That’s a fine arrangement for a fortunate few, but most people live in apartments, condos, and first homes where the furniture stays where it is, and the speakers need to fit around it, not the other way around.

KLH Audio has spent nearly seven decades building speakers for exactly that reality, and the Model Four is its latest expression of it. Unveiled at High End Vienna 2026, it’s a three-way acoustic suspension loudspeaker designed to fill the gap between the bookshelf-sized Model Three and the fuller Model Five, bringing genuine floorstanding performance into a cabinet compact enough to sit comfortably close to a wall.

Designer: KLH Audio

The technology that makes this possible is acoustic suspension, the sealed-enclosure design that KLH pioneered in the 1950s. Unlike ported enclosures, which become muddy and bloated when pushed against a wall or tucked into a corner, a sealed cabinet performs consistently wherever it lands. The Model Four delivers tight, accurate bass with just a few inches of rear clearance, a freedom that ported designs simply can’t match.

The cabinet measures 26 inches tall and just 8.25 inches deep, making it the shallowest floorstanding speaker in KLH’s lineup. The included 6-degree slanted riser adds the angle needed to align the tweeter and midrange with the listener, bringing the total depth to just under 11 inches. That’s narrower than many bookshelves and considerably thinner than the floor plans most audiophile floorstanders require before they’ll sound right.

Inside the sealed, reinforced MDF enclosure is a three-driver system assembled from the best parts of the broader Model Collection. An 8-inch pulp-paper cone woofer reaches down to 46Hz, a 4-inch pulp-paper midrange handles vocals and instruments with the same clarity that earned Model Five its reputation, and a 1-inch aluminum dome tweeter extends the response to 20,000Hz. Power handling reaches 150 watts, with peaks up to 600 watts.

Not every room sounds the same, which is why KLH carried over its three-position Acoustic Balance Control switch, a feature the brand introduced in the 1960s. It gives listeners a way to adjust the mid and high-frequency character to match their room’s natural acoustics, a practical acknowledgment that the speaker will land in spaces KLH can’t anticipate. Five-way gold-plated binding posts handle connectivity on the back panel.

The visual side of the package is equally considered. KLH’s mid-century modern design language shows up in the knit grilles and wood-veneer cabinetry, available in English Walnut with a Stonewash Knit Grille, Black Ash with a Grey Knit Grille, and White Oak with a Black Knit Grille. The matte black riser stand ships with the speaker, keeping the total out-of-pocket cost honest from the start.

The Model Four arrives in September 2026 through premium audio dealers and directly from KLH Audio, priced at $999.99 per speaker, or $1,999.98 per pair, with a 10-year warranty and the riser stand already included. For anyone who has spent years making peace with bookshelf speakers because larger alternatives demanded a dedicated room, it’s the kind of offer that closes the argument.

The post KLH’s $1,000 Floorstanding Speaker Actually Fits in Your Apartment first appeared on Yanko Design.

This B&O Headphone Concept Fits Only You, Literally, and It’s the Best Idea Audio Has Had in Years

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Bang & Olufsen built its reputation on the idea that audio equipment should be worthy of the spaces it inhabits. Bas Kamp’s ONCE concept takes that idea and sharpens it into something more intimate. A headphone fitted once, precisely, to a single person. A form that carries the geometry of classic over-ear design, two cylindrical drivers, a continuous band, an honest material palette, and updates it with one quietly radical proposition: permanence.

The charging base makes the argument visible. The headphone drapes over a cylindrical puck in a clean arc, sitting on any surface like a considered object rather than a piece of gear waiting to be packed away. Kamp’s concept suggests that the best version of a B&O headphone is one that earns a permanent place in your life, and looks the part doing it.

Designer: Bas Kamp

Most headphones are engineered to fit everyone, which in practice means they fit no one particularly well. Telescoping arms, spring-loaded sliders, and adjustable pivots are all workarounds for a problem the industry has accepted as permanent. Kamp rejects the premise entirely. The wide, uninterrupted band is machined as a single continuous form, and when you first receive the headphone, you set it once using the included precision tool, tightening the iconic B&O signature dot that connects band to aluminium cylinder through a refined screw thread. From that calibration forward, the fit is yours alone.

The visual language pulls directly from B&O’s deepest design DNA. The arc, the band, the cylinder, these are the honest architectural elements that defined the great headphones of the twentieth century, and Kamp makes no attempt to disguise or reinvent them. Two cylindrical drivers sit at either end of the continuous band, their outer faces rendered in concentric circles that give the ear cups an almost mechanical, watchlike presence. Where the headphone meets skin, genuine leather handles the contact, soft and warm against the geometry of the machined aluminium. The restraint is total and deliberate.

A cylindrical puck holds the headphone in a sculptural arc that reads, from certain angles, uncannily like a hunching table lamp, the band curving down toward the base with the ear cup hanging at the end of the arc. It is an accidental elegance that makes the resting state of the object as compelling as the wearing state, which is exactly the kind of considered design thinking B&O has always demanded of the objects bearing its name.

ONCE also integrates a real-time AI translation feature, activated by a single press of the dot, delivering conversational translation directly through the drivers. For a concept built around permanence and personal calibration, it is a quietly forward-looking addition, proof that Kamp’s vision for B&O reaches comfortably into the next decade of what a headphone can do.

The post This B&O Headphone Concept Fits Only You, Literally, and It’s the Best Idea Audio Has Had in Years first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Sound Blaster AE-X gives your PC a dedicated audio upgrade that onboard sound can’t match

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Onboard motherboard audio has improved considerably over the past decade, to the point where most users don’t notice a gap. That’s true enough for casual listening, but it starts to fall apart when you plug in a pair of planar magnetic or high-impedance studio headphones that demand more than a motherboard header can cleanly deliver. The signal gets muddier, the background noise creeps up, and the detail you paid for in those headphones quietly disappears.

Creative’s Sound Blaster AE-X is a PCIe 3.0 sound card designed for exactly that gap. It slots into a spare PCIe x1 slot and takes audio processing entirely away from the motherboard, handling playback through a dedicated ESS ES9039Q2M dual-channel DAC with HyperStream IV architecture. The claimed signal-to-noise ratio sits at 130 dB, which actually edges out Creative’s own flagship AE-9 on paper, and the card supports direct DSD256 decoding alongside standard 32-bit / 384 kHz PCM playback.

Designer: Creative

The headphone amplification story is where a lot of people buying dedicated sound cards will actually feel the difference. The AE-X integrates Creative’s X-amp discrete amplifier architecture and is rated to drive headphones up to 600 ohms. That covers even the most demanding studio and audiophile headphones that tend to sound underpowered and thin when running off integrated audio. The amp handles each channel cleanly without the crosstalk and noise floor that shared circuits on a motherboard typically introduce.

Connectivity covers the main bases: two 3.5 mm audio jacks, optical S/PDIF input and output, a digital coaxial output, and a pair of analog RCA phono outputs for connecting to external speakers or amplifiers. ASIO 2.3 compatibility adds low-latency operation for anyone recording, monitoring, or producing music rather than just playing it back. That same compatibility makes the AE-X a credible option for home studio setups that need clean round-trip audio.

The gaming side gets attention, too. Scout Mode enhances positional audio cues during gameplay, sharpening the directional information that makes it easier to track footsteps and environmental sounds in competitive titles. AutoEQ headphone calibration and customizable sound profiles are managed through the Creative Nexus app, so the card adapts to different headphones without requiring any manual EQ work. The same setup that handles a late-night music session can switch over to a competitive shooter without touching anything.

Pricing puts the AE-X at just under €190 in Europe and $179.99 in the US. That positions it well below the AE-9 while technically bettering it on the spec sheet across SNR and DSD support. For someone already invested in quality headphones or external speakers, a dedicated sound card at this price range stops being a luxury and starts looking like the obvious next step.

Motherboard audio makers have narrowed the gap significantly, but they’ve never closed it entirely. The Sound Blaster AE-X makes a clear argument that the ceiling for dedicated PCIe audio hardware has been raised again, and the ask for getting there hasn’t changed much. For anyone running 300-ohm headphones off a header that was never designed for them, the difference is immediate.

The post The Sound Blaster AE-X gives your PC a dedicated audio upgrade that onboard sound can’t match first appeared on Yanko Design.

Love Hultén Built a Pink Floyd Prism Guitar You Can Actually Play

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The equilateral triangle is one of the most psychologically loaded forms in Western visual culture. It appears on currency, on occult diagrams, on the cover of the best-selling rock album of all time, and now, with precise white planes and amber jewel controls, on the body of a custom synthesizer guitar made by Swedish instrument designer Love Hultén. The Magicos-2, unveiled in late 2025, carries that shape with full awareness of its freight. Hultén has built Darth Vader synths, bonsai MIDI sculptures, NES-inspired keyboards, and a circular Game Boy for clients over the years, and we have covered the lot of them here at YD. Each one takes a form that feels conceptually wrong for an instrument and makes it feel inevitable. This one takes the prism from The Dark Side of the Moon and turns it into something you can actually play.

Commissioned by a private client and described by Hultén himself as a “triangular oddity born from deranged imagination and psychedelic fandom,” the Magicos-2 is a double-necked instrument housing a 1010music Tangerine module on one arm and a Lemondrop on the other. The detachable base unit, a trapezoidal slab that sits below the main body and separates cleanly for transport, contains the effects chain: Walrus Audio Lore for reverse reverb and ethereal drones, Collision Devices TARs for fuzz and distortion. A rose quartz crystal pyramid sits at the center of that base, lit from within. Hultén calls it the crystalline emitter, and at this point, questioning the nomenclature feels beside the point.

Designer: Love Hultén

Alexis Mardas, better known as Magic Alex, was the Beatles’ in-house electronics wizard during the Apple Corps years, a man who promised John Lennon wallpaper that played music, a force field for the house, and an amplifier that would go to a million. Almost none of it worked. What he left behind was the irresistible idea of a device that operates somewhere between real technology and pure mythology, an object whose presence in a room changes the room’s frequency before it ever produces a sound. Hultén name-drops Mardas directly in the Magicos-2’s description, and the invocation lands. This instrument carries that same energy: technically rigorous, visually hallucinatory, and spiritually somewhere between a laboratory prototype and a sacred relic.

The Tangerine and Lemondrop, both 1010music modules, sit one per neck, each a dense and malleable synthesis engine with its own voice and parameter set. Having two discrete sound sources mounted symmetrically on the triangular body means the player can run parallel sonic worlds simultaneously, layering Mellotron-style string leads against drones, or pushing both into the Lore’s reverse reverb to create the kind of sustained wash that makes people stop and stare at the ceiling. The fretboard grids running along each white arm read visually as pure geometry, equal parts instrument neck and architectural elevation drawing. Two necks, two engines, one triangular chassis: the form follows the function with a directness that most instrument designers would kill for.

Walrus Audio’s Lore pedal handles the reverse delay and ethereal glow, celebrated among ambient and drone players for its ability to turn almost any input into a sustained, backward-breathing atmosphere. Collision Devices’ TARs sits alongside it, adding the fuzz and harmonic density that filters the whole signal into what Hultén memorably describes as a carpet of sonic moss. The base connects to the triangular body via a clean physical joint visible as a horizontal seam in the silhouette, detaching entirely for transport or for reconfiguring the signal chain. That modularity reinforces the instrument’s identity as a system rather than a single object, which matters practically when you are carrying something shaped like a pyramid to a gig.

The nine amber teardrop controls embedded in the triangular face, warm brown and orange against the flat white surface, are the one moment of color in the whole instrument, and they carry the weight of that responsibility well. They read like something between a control panel and a constellation. The crystal pyramid in the base glows softly beneath them. The chakras, per Hultén, are aligned. I believe him.

The post Love Hultén Built a Pink Floyd Prism Guitar You Can Actually Play first appeared on Yanko Design.

Yamaha Just Bought a Fish and Made It Into an Amplifier

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Somewhere between a fish market and Milan Design Week, a guitar amplifier became an animal. Yamaha’s HERRING, a concept piece by designer Koji Notomi, is based on the brand’s THR5 guitar amplifier, and it is one of those rare design projects where the idea is so clean, so quietly witty, that you almost feel like you missed something obvious the first time you looked at it. The joke, once you see it, is impossible to unsee.

The starting point was a question that most people never think to ask: where do design terms actually come from? The herringbone pattern is everywhere. You have seen it on jackets, hardwood floors, speaker grilles, and kitchen tiles. It is one of those visual shorthand patterns that has been repeated so many times it has practically lost its name. Notomi looked at it and wondered what would happen if you took that name literally. If a herringbone pattern is supposed to look like a fish’s skeleton, then why not make it actually look like one?

Designer: Koji Notomi

The answer became the front face of this amplifier. Notomi reportedly went to a fish market, bought a herring, dissected it, and drew its skeletal structure by hand before translating it into the final design. That part matters more than it might seem. It would have been easy to scan a reference image and apply it digitally, but the act of going to a market, handling the actual thing, and sketching it out by hand gives HERRING a different quality. You can feel the specificity in the final piece. The skeleton on the grille is not a decorative motif borrowed loosely from nature. It is anatomically observed, then mirrored and composed into something that functions simultaneously as a speaker cover, a relief sculpture, and a quiet act of homage to the fish it literally came from.

The knobs take the concept even further. In guitar culture, amplifier knobs with a pointed tip are commonly called “chicken-head” knobs. Notomi ran with that too. On HERRING, those knobs are exaggerated into sculptural bird-head forms that perch along the top of the amp like a row of tiny, knowing sentinels. Seen individually, they read as quirky hardware. Seen as a group, they complete the comedy of the whole piece without overpowering it.

That restraint is what makes HERRING work. It is a concept built on wordplay and zoological etymology, and it could have very easily tipped into novelty. It did not. The piece holds together because Notomi treated the humour as the entry point, not the destination. Visitors at Milan reportedly laughed when they noticed it, but quietly, the way you do when you feel like you have been let in on something rather than shown something.

There is also a broader observation baked into this project that I find genuinely interesting. Design language is full of terms borrowed from the natural world. Herringbone, chicken-head, dovetail, honeycomb, butterfly joint. We use these words constantly, and most of us stopped noticing the images inside them a long time ago. These names stuck because they once captured a visual truth, but over time the metaphor fades and the term becomes pure vocabulary. HERRING reverses that process, pulling the name back through its own etymology until the thing named and the thing itself become the same object. It is a rare kind of conceptual clarity, and it takes genuine intellectual curiosity to arrive there.

Whether HERRING ever becomes a production piece is a separate conversation. As a concept model, it functions perfectly well as a provocation: a reminder that the objects around us carry linguistic history that almost nobody stops to read. Koji Notomi stopped, dissected it quite literally, and built something that rewards the kind of slow attention that most designed objects never invite. It is playful, yes. But it is also a genuinely thoughtful piece of design thinking, and those two things are not in conflict here. If anything, the playfulness is exactly what makes the thinking land.

The post Yamaha Just Bought a Fish and Made It Into an Amplifier first appeared on Yanko Design.

One Speaker, 10 Drivers, 400 Watts: DALI’s Vega Changes the Game

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The audio world has always had a bit of a hoarding problem. Amplifiers, preamps, turntables, towers, subwoofers, cables that cost more than a weekend trip. The traditional hi-fi setup has never been known for its minimalism. It’s a rabbit hole, and a beautiful one at that, but a rabbit hole nonetheless. So when a 43-year-old Danish speaker company decides to put everything into a single box and call it done, it’s worth paying attention. That’s exactly what DALI did with the Vega, and I’ll say upfront: I didn’t expect to be as interested in it as I am.

The Vega is an all-in-one wireless sound system built from the ground up. Drivers, amplification, DSP control, all of it developed in-house. The result is a single unit that sits in your room like a piece of furniture and quietly does the work of an entire rack of equipment. It packs 10 drivers into its slim 683mm-wide enclosure, including ultra-light 25mm soft dome tweeters and bass-midrange drivers arranged back-to-back to minimize cabinet resonance. Total amplification lands at 400 watts across eight channels. For a single speaker, those are serious numbers.

Designer: DALI Speakers

What makes the Vega interesting beyond the specs is how it actually approaches the problem of sound in a room. DALI developed a proprietary technology called Adaptive Stereo Enhancement (ASE), which creates a wide soundstage from a single unit in real time. It’s not a gimmick simulation of stereo. It’s an adaptive system that reads the incoming signal and responds accordingly, without introducing the artificial artifacts that can make these kinds of technologies feel forced. Whether it fully delivers on that promise is something we’ll have to wait until it reaches more listening rooms to confirm, but the approach itself is genuinely thoughtful.

Then there’s the Adaptive Orientation Adjustment (AOA), which automatically optimizes the speaker’s output based on how you’ve placed it. Standing upright on a shelf, mounted flat against a wall in landscape, hung vertically in portrait. The Vega adjusts in real time for each scenario. It even includes an OLED display that rotates with the unit’s orientation. That’s the kind of considered detail that separates a product designed by people who actually care from one that was designed by committee to hit a price point.

And speaking of price points: $4,500 USD is not a casual purchase. I won’t pretend otherwise. But when you start comparing it to the cost of assembling a proper separates setup at equivalent quality, the math starts to look different. A decent amplifier, a quality streamer, a pair of speakers at this level, the cables to connect them all. It adds up fast. The Vega consolidates all of that into one device, one box, one cable to a power outlet.

Aesthetically, DALI made choices I genuinely respect. Real wood veneer in Dark Oak or Natural Oak, anodized aluminium details, custom woven fabric. It looks more like something you’d find in a well-appointed Scandinavian living room than a piece of audio equipment. The volume wheel alone is its own small obsession: glass, acrylic, and anodized aluminium riding on an aerospace-grade ball-bearing mechanism. That’s not a specification; that’s a tactile experience someone designed on purpose.

Connectivity is thorough without being overwhelming. BluOS handles streaming and multi-room audio. HDMI, optical, analogue, USB audio, and Bluetooth cover wired sources. Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and Apple AirPlay 2 round out the wireless side. You can plug in a turntable or connect a TV, and the Vega handles both within the same system.

The Vega launches in select markets in September 2026, with broader availability following in October and November. Whether the hi-fi world embraces it or resists it on principle is a conversation that will be had loudly in forums and listening rooms for months. But the idea at its core, that great sound shouldn’t require great complexity, is one that’s long overdue for a proper answer. DALI’s version of that answer is elegant, ambitious, and a little bit expensive. Most good answers are.

The post One Speaker, 10 Drivers, 400 Watts: DALI’s Vega Changes the Game first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hiroshi Fujiwara reinterprets Bang & Olufsen’s iconic designs to redefine living room luxury in liquid black

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Hiroshi Fujiwara has had his influence stamped in multifaceted spheres – Carrera Chronograph x Fragment Limited Edition and the MC20 Cielo Fuoriserie are some impressive examples we came across. The streetwear legend has now teamed up with audio pioneers Bang and Olufsen for a collection that is destined for a minimalist yet classy living room setup.

The designer has long been fascinated by B&O and has desired to collaborate with the high-end Danish audio brand someday. While Hiroshi had installed their Beocenter 2300 integrated sound system at home in 1991, it actually took 35 long years to work on a project with them. That moment is right now, as Hiroshi (under his design studio Fragment Design) has worked on four B&O masterpieces to give them the black finish only achievable by hand.

Designer: Hiroshi Fujiwara x Bang & Olufsen

The famed collection is slated for debut today, with it being shown off until next week inside the Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Thereafter, it’ll be rolled out across Japan from 27 May for display, before eventually being released on 3 June globally and in stores for eager buyers.

Instead of working on a completely new model for the collaborative, the consensus was settled on reworking the Beoplay H100 headphones, Beosound A1 portable speaker, Beosound Shape speaker, and Beosystem 9000c triple pillar CD system. These signature B&O products are slapped with the designer’s signature monochrome aesthetic. Of course, B&O’s artisanal skills come into play as the team of designers lends these brand’s classics anodized, hand-polished finish for that perfect liquid-like high gloss finish.

Beoplay H100 and Beosound A1 3rd Gen Fragment Edition

It doesn’t get any darker than the Beoplay H100 Fragment Edition headphones, as they exude pure class in gloss black anodized skin. This finish is complemented by the black leather headband and cushions for all-day wear comfort. Contrasting the dark is the white Fragment Studio and B&O logos on the outside of each of the earcups. The over-the-ear headphones are priced at a steep $2,400, but that is expected when two big names collaborate.

Then there is the more sober Beosound A1 3rd gen portable Bluetooth speaker priced at $475. Predictably, this one too has the high-gloss finish and the brand’s double lightning logo etched under the grille. According to Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, Bang & Olufsen’s Senior Director of Design, the “artisanal anodization and polishing process” has been implemented for the first time on their portable collection.

Beosound Shape and Beosystem 9000c Fragment Edition

With these two creations, you begin to fathom the gravity of this collaboration. The Beosound Shape is a wall-mounted speaker system that combines flower-shaped driving units to bring sublime sound to the living room. The modular audio system gets the monochrome fabric treatment for the six surrounding petals, and the inner gray unit completes the aesthetic look. Priced at $7,100, this beautiful audio system is one for a minimalist living room setting. Apparently, Fujiwara headed straight to his hotel room after seeing the original Shape speakers and sketched the seven-title flower configuration for his version.

The collector’s piece of the line-up is the Beosystem 9000c Fragment Edition, which defines the amount of skill and expertise put into making it. This is a made-to-order setup that costs a mind-numbing $69,650 and is Japan-exclusive only. It’s in itself a collection as it has the dedicated CD system, Beolab 28 loudspeakers, and the Beoremote One two-way remote. The six-disc 90s CD player is famed for its automatic CD swapping mechanism once the playback is finished on one disc.

The post Hiroshi Fujiwara reinterprets Bang & Olufsen’s iconic designs to redefine living room luxury in liquid black first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hiroshi Fujiwara reinterprets Bang & Olufsen’s iconic designs to redefine living room luxury in liquid black

Posted on by

Hiroshi Fujiwara has had his influence stamped in multifaceted spheres – Carrera Chronograph x Fragment Limited Edition and the MC20 Cielo Fuoriserie are some impressive examples we came across. The streetwear legend has now teamed up with audio pioneers Bang and Olufsen for a collection that is destined for a minimalist yet classy living room setup.

The designer has long been fascinated by B&O and has desired to collaborate with the high-end Danish audio brand someday. While Hiroshi had installed their Beocenter 2300 integrated sound system at home in 1991, it actually took 35 long years to work on a project with them. That moment is right now, as Hiroshi (under his design studio Fragment Design) has worked on four B&O masterpieces to give them the black finish only achievable by hand.

Designer: Hiroshi Fujiwara x Bang & Olufsen

The famed collection is slated for debut today, with it being shown off until next week inside the Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Thereafter, it’ll be rolled out across Japan from 27 May for display, before eventually being released on 3 June globally and in stores for eager buyers.

Instead of working on a completely new model for the collaborative, the consensus was settled on reworking the Beoplay H100 headphones, Beosound A1 portable speaker, Beosound Shape speaker, and Beosystem 9000c triple pillar CD system. These signature B&O products are slapped with the designer’s signature monochrome aesthetic. Of course, B&O’s artisanal skills come into play as the team of designers lends these brand’s classics anodized, hand-polished finish for that perfect liquid-like high gloss finish.

Beoplay H100 and Beosound A1 3rd Gen Fragment Edition

It doesn’t get any darker than the Beoplay H100 Fragment Edition headphones, as they exude pure class in gloss black anodized skin. This finish is complemented by the black leather headband and cushions for all-day wear comfort. Contrasting the dark is the white Fragment Studio and B&O logos on the outside of each of the earcups. The over-the-ear headphones are priced at a steep $2,400, but that is expected when two big names collaborate.

Then there is the more sober Beosound A1 3rd gen portable Bluetooth speaker priced at $475. Predictably, this one too has the high-gloss finish and the brand’s double lightning logo etched under the grille. According to Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, Bang & Olufsen’s Senior Director of Design, the “artisanal anodization and polishing process” has been implemented for the first time on their portable collection.

Beosound Shape and Beosystem 9000c Fragment Edition

With these two creations, you begin to fathom the gravity of this collaboration. The Beosound Shape is a wall-mounted speaker system that combines flower-shaped driving units to bring sublime sound to the living room. The modular audio system gets the monochrome fabric treatment for the six surrounding petals, and the inner gray unit completes the aesthetic look. Priced at $7,100, this beautiful audio system is one for a minimalist living room setting. Apparently, Fujiwara headed straight to his hotel room after seeing the original Shape speakers and sketched the seven-title flower configuration for his version.

The collector’s piece of the line-up is the Beosystem 9000c Fragment Edition, which defines the amount of skill and expertise put into making it. This is a made-to-order setup that costs a mind-numbing $69,650 and is Japan-exclusive only. It’s in itself a collection as it has the dedicated CD system, Beolab 28 loudspeakers, and the Beoremote One two-way remote. The six-disc 90s CD player is famed for its automatic CD swapping mechanism once the playback is finished on one disc.

The post Hiroshi Fujiwara reinterprets Bang & Olufsen’s iconic designs to redefine living room luxury in liquid black first appeared on Yanko Design.

Jae Tips x Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 headphones relieve classic gel and acrylic Nintendo aesthetics

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Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 headphones are the brand’s flagship pair of cans that have good sound quality and some scope for improvement in the ANC. So what could get overhauled in the headphones market to make them stand out in a highly competitive, punishing space that rewards great design?

For that reason, Bronx-based designer Jae Tips has collaborated with the American audio equipment giant to create a stunning pair of headphones that go well with your 90s-inspired gadgets. Jae is no stranger to the unhinged use of colorful design elements, and this exploration is a bliss for audio fans. For this collab, the theme is highly translucent tech in nostalgic colors for a retro-modern touch and feel.

Designer: Skullcandy and Jae Tips

In the past, the award-winning footwear designer has demonstrated what’s possible if you let your creativity loose. This time around, he brings the signature influence of his customary style to the audio gear industry, and I seriously love the look of it. Given that music lovers hold their audio gear very dear, this pair brings their second love into the mix. Yes, I’m talking about gaming, as this limited edition Crusher ANC 2 headphones adapts the color scheme of the classic Nintendo 64 controllers, and the Super Mario Bros packaging, and fuses it with Jae’s floral motif design style to render a pair of cans.

It’s one thing to go translucent and completely another to fuse it into a form that evokes good old memories. That’s what is special about the see-through emerald shell of the headphones. The ethos bleeds into the custom packaging as well, as the box is heavily inspired by the classic Super Mario Bros title. On the inside, the cans retain their technical superiority with adaptable ANC and Skullcandy’s signature rumbling bass. According to Jae, for this collaboration, he was “inspired by gel and acrylic Nintendo’s and the early Mac computers. My goal was to create something that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else in the marketplace.”

For starters, the Jae Tips x Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 headphones will be available for $260, starting tomorrow in the designer’s hometown. They will eventually float out to other markets in the coming weeks. As we speak, the limited-edition headphones are launching at the exclusive pop-up event at the Chelsea Best Buy in Manhattan. While they don’t come in a sturdy carrying case, the designer floral bag in a matching theme is the perfect way to show off your headphones.

The post Jae Tips x Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 headphones relieve classic gel and acrylic Nintendo aesthetics first appeared on Yanko Design.