Tag Archives: Audio

Vollebak’s New Sonic Jacket Fires 180 Speakers Into Your Body

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If you’ve ever stood too close to a speaker at a concert and felt the bass move through your chest, you already understand the basic premise of Vollebak’s latest creation, even if just barely. The Sonic Jacket doesn’t pump sound into a room. It pumps it directly into you.

Vollebak, the experimental clothing brand founded in 2015 by twin brothers Nick and Steve Tidball, has built a jacket lined with 180 inward-facing speakers. Each one is 32mm in diameter and 10mm deep, laser-cut into the fabric across the body, arms, and hood. The speakers fire frequencies ranging from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz straight into the wearer’s body. Not at your ears. Through your skin, your bones, your tissue. The brand’s own description puts it plainly: “You don’t listen to this jacket. You feel it.”

Designer: Vollebak

I’ll be honest. My first instinct was skepticism. Frequency therapy and sound healing have a way of sitting at the awkward intersection of legitimate science and wellness marketing, and it can be hard to tell which side of that line you’re on at any given moment. But the more I dug into what Vollebak actually built here, the harder it became to dismiss.

The jacket was engineered by FBFX, a London-based special effects studio with 30 years behind them and credits that include Gladiator, Dune, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary. These are people who build functional spacesuits worn by real actors in demanding production environments. They brought that same precision to the problem of turning a jacket into a distributed speaker system. The wiring is intentionally left visible, all yellow and exposed, because FBFX co-founder Grant Pearmain’s position is straightforward: it looks like a science experiment because that’s exactly what it is.

Control is handled through a unit fitted with an MP3 player preloaded with 10 frequencies, a physical dial for fine-tuning, and a Micro SD card slot that can hold up to 1,000 personalized frequencies. A Bluetooth app is in development. For lower frequencies, where speakers risk overheating, the jacket works around the problem by playing two slightly different tones simultaneously. The body registers the gap between them rather than the tones themselves, and that gap is where the lowest frequencies live.

Nick Tidball’s language around the whole project is part visionary, part slightly unhinged, which is exactly what makes Vollebak so compelling as a brand to follow. He talks about the earth resonating at a frequency, about his cat’s purr, about the fact that we are not solid beings but collections of particles with space between them where sound can travel. “Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God,” the brand writes on its site. Bold copy, sure. But it’s genuinely hard to argue that sound and frequency don’t do something to us. Every religious tradition figured that out thousands of years ago, from drumming around fires to chanting in stone chambers.

The Sonic Jacket is currently a prototype, tested on only a handful of people. Tidball himself did a 30-minute session and described the initial effects as “kind of astonishing.” That’s a small sample size and a subjective account, so I’d take the results with appropriate caution. But the ambition here isn’t really in question.

What Vollebak is doing, jacket by jacket, is expanding the definition of what clothing is for. They’ve done it with graphene that behaves like a radiator, with near-indestructible Dyneema, and with a jacket made from 250,000 pieces of laser-cut American walnut. The Sonic Jacket feels like the most speculative thing they’ve attempted so far, and that’s saying something. It’s not a wellness gadget in a tech form factor. It’s a wearable environment designed to shift your nervous system.

Whether the science catches up to the ambition remains to be seen. But that’s always been part of Vollebak’s proposition. They make things that probably shouldn’t exist yet, and then figure out if they should. The Sonic Jacket is the most interesting thing I’ve seen come out of the wearable tech space in a long time, and I’m not even sure it counts as wearable tech. It might just be the future of how we think about clothing altogether.

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Fosi’s $150 Headphone Amp Snaps to Your iPhone Instead of Dangling

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The dongle DAC has become a familiar but awkward sight plugged into the bottom of a smartphone, a small reminder that the headphone jack didn’t disappear quietly. Portable audio has come a long way in sound quality, but the form factor hasn’t kept pace. Most of these tiny dongles hang loose from the charging port, tugging at cables and generally getting in the way of an otherwise pleasant listening session.

Fosi Audio’s MD3 MagDac tries to solve this with a fundamentally different approach to portability. Instead of hanging from a charging port, it snaps magnetically to the back of a MagSafe-compatible smartphone using 16 N52 magnets, sitting flush against the device like a compact audio module. The result is a pocket-sized DAC and headphone amplifier that actually looks like it belongs there, not like an afterthought.

Designer: Fosi Audio

The design doesn’t stop at clever attachment. The MD3 is precision-machined from 6063 aluminum alloy with a sandblasted anodized finish, available in silver or black, both with orange leather on the magnetic back. At just 50g and 12m thick, it slides in and out of a pocket without protest. What you’ll notice first, though, is the 1.28-inch circular LCD display on the back.

That screen handles volume in 100 steps, shows audio information, and rotates its orientation depending on how you’re holding the device. There’s also a Vista Button that opens a personal photo album, a small but unexpectedly human touch for a piece of audio hardware. A dedicated Ease Button and physical navigation controls keep everything accessible without ever needing to tap your phone’s screen.

For the audio itself, Fosi didn’t compromise on components. The MD3 uses the ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M DAC chip paired with four ES9603Q amplifier chips in a true balanced circuit, supporting PCM up to 32-bit/384kHz and native DSD256. Total harmonic distortion and noise sit at just 0.00075%, and the noise floor drops to 1.7 μV. For most IEMs and portable headphones, those figures translate to noticeably cleaner, more resolving sound.

The MD3 offers both a 3.5mm single-ended output and a 4.4mm balanced output, delivering up to 180 mW through the latter, enough for headphones ranging from 16 to 300 ohms. An aluminum alloy shielding plate sits between the magnets and the audio circuitry to prevent interference from coloring the signal, a careful engineering detail that keeps the magnetic attachment trick from undermining the whole point of the device.

Dual USB-C ports handle both audio and charging simultaneously, so you’re not forced to choose between listening and keeping your phone powered. The top port handles audio decoding and charging, while the bottom manages audio decoding and firmware updates. There’s also a volume memory feature, so the MD3 picks up at the same level every time you connect it, without having to reset anything.

The wired audio revival has been building for a while, drawing listeners who want something more intentional than Bluetooth. A magnetic DAC that attaches to the back of your phone without cables or cases seems like a sensible next step in making that experience practical. Fosi has been laying the groundwork quietly, and at $149.99, the MD3 might just be the portable amp that finally stays out of the drawer.

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Wilson Benesch’s $130,000 Greenwich turntable arrives at HIGH END Vienna this June for audiophiles seeking sonic perfection

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For more than four decades, the global high-end audio industry revolved around one annual ritual in Munich. Every May engineers, and audiophiles gathered at HIGH END Munich to witness the future of analog playback. In 2026, that tradition changes dramatically as the show relocates to the Austria Center Vienna for its first-ever Austrian edition, running from June 4–7.

Among the most anticipated debuts at the event is the Greenwich Turntable, a carbon-composite flagship deck from British manufacturer Wilson Benesch. After an initial preview at Audio Show Deluxe in the UK and a showcase at AXPONA in April, Vienna will host the record player’s first major European public appearance.

Designer: Wilson Benesch

HIGH END Vienna 2026 is more than a venue change; it is effectively a stress test for the future of ultra-premium audio. Munich had become synonymous with the global hi-fi industry, and moving the world’s most influential audio exhibition to Vienna introduces uncertainty about audience reach and the broader economics of high-end analog playback. Wilson Benesch appears ready to embrace that moment as the company has confirmed that the Greenwich Turntable will make its European debut during the exhibition, giving visitors their first opportunity to experience the new GMT platform in a live listening environment outside earlier preview events.

Rather than launching a retro-inspired belt-drive deck, Wilson Benesch is doubling down on advanced engineering and modular architecture. That approach aligns with the increasingly technical direction of ultra-high-end vinyl playback, where innovation now competes as aggressively as nostalgia.

Carbon-Composite Engineering Meets Modular Analog Design

Wilson Benesch has long been associated with carbon-fiber construction and advanced composite materials, and the Greenwich continues that philosophy. The turntable becomes the foundation model within the company’s GMT Collection, sitting below the Prime Meridian and GMT One systems while sharing the same ALPHA–OMEGA drive architecture.

At the center of the design is the patent-pending OMEGA Direct Drive motor, which is a massive 15-inch slotless synchronous motor developed in collaboration with academic engineering partners. Wilson Benesch claims the architecture minimizes torque ripple, eliminates cogging, and removes lateral bearing forces entirely. This allows the bearing to operate under purely axial conditions for lower vibration and quieter playback.

The ALPHA Drive control system manages speed stability using quartz-referenced Class A electronics and supports playback at 33, 45, and 78 RPM. A dedicated control app also allows fine-grained speed adjustments and optional vertical tracking-angle controls with nanometer-scale precision.

Visually, the Greenwich reflects the sculptural design language Wilson Benesch has developed across its high-end systems. The exposed motor architecture, glass upper surface, metallic accents, and carbon-fiber integration create a turntable that looks closer to industrial art than conventional hi-fi equipment.

Between Aspiration And Accessibility

Calling the Greenwich “entry-level” requires context, as the turntable alone is priced at approximately £82,000 ($130,000), placing it firmly in the ultra-luxury category. Yet within the GMT hierarchy, it serves as the gateway into Wilson Benesch’s modular analog ecosystem. Buyers can later upgrade to the Prime Meridian or GMT One while retaining the same core drive platform. That modular strategy differentiates the Greenwich from more traditional audiophile competitors such as Rega or Technics, whose turntables typically exist as standalone products rather than evolving systems.

The Vienna debut will also position the Greenwich in a broader industry conversation. While other brands are expected to reveal new analog products during the show, Wilson Benesch’s deck arrives as a symbolic centerpiece for HIGH END Vienna’s first chapter.

 

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Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker Co-Designed a Synth So Good It’s Now a Collector’s Item

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Transparency in tech has followed the classic arc of any design trend: radical, then referential, then mainstream, then meaningful. Nothing made it radical. Dozens of imitators made it referential. Beats and Casetify brought it mainstream. The interesting question now is which products use it meaningfully, where the visible internals are genuinely worth seeing, and the form of the object actually benefits from the revelation. A cheap Bluetooth speaker with a clear shell is just a clear shell. An instrument with carefully designed internal geometry, a speaker assembly, a green PCB, and ribbon cables threading between custom-designed synth hardware is something else.

That distinction is what makes the Clear Orchid: Arctic worth drooling over. Telepathic Instruments, the company Kevin Parker of Tame Impala co-founded with Ignacio Germade and a small team of music technology obsessives, has announced the fifth drop in its Orchid hardware line: a fully transparent, teal-based limited edition capped at 3,000 units worldwide, available May 11. The Orchid earned its place on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 list on the back of a chord-first synthesis system that separates root note, chord type, and voicing into independent controls. The Arctic edition puts all of that hardware on display and makes a visual argument that the guts of a well-designed instrument are as compelling as its sound.

Designer: Telepathic Instruments

If you haven’t encountered the Orchid before, the short version is this: where every other synthesizer on the market is built around individual notes, Orchid is built around chords. Press a key and you trigger a full harmonic voicing. Your left hand works a matrix of chord-type buttons, labeled Dim, Min, Maj, Sus, M7, 9, and a few others, while your right hand handles the keys and a large Chord Voicing encoder adjusts how those chords sit across the register. A patent-pending voicing system repositions harmonies across the equivalent of a full piano keyboard’s worth of range, far beyond what the compact one-octave keybed physically suggests. Three synthesis engines, a virtual analogue subtractive, FM, and a vintage reed piano emulation modeled on 1960s electric pianos by renowned German developer Stefan Stenzel, give the harmonic system genuine sonic depth rather than the thin, preset-cycling feel that plagues most beginner-friendly instruments. When we first covered the Orchid at launch, we described it as an “ideas machine,” a device for capturing musical intuition without requiring the theory background to justify it. That description still holds, and the Arctic edition makes it literal: you can see exactly where the ideas come from.

The transparent shell pulls double duty as both aesthetic statement and honest product communication. Look through the Arctic’s polycarbonate top and you see a green PCB laid out with visible intention, speaker grilles framed by the internal chassis, ribbon cables routed with the kind of care that only matters if someone will eventually see them. The teal-tinted base, slightly darker than the clear top, creates a subtle two-tone layering that stops the whole thing from reading as a prototype or an engineering sample. The yellow Sound, Perform, and FX knobs pop hard against the dark control surface above, the single red Bass button reads like a deliberate punctuation mark, and the OLED display at the center of the panel glows with Orchid’s skull mascot logo in a way that feels genuinely characterful rather than decorative. Telepathic Instruments clearly understood that a transparent enclosure raises the design bar: every component becomes load-bearing visually, and the Arctic clears that bar without much visible effort.

The Drop 5 release pairs the Arctic with the full launch of Pistil, Orchid’s companion VST plugin, now available on both Mac and Windows. Pistil brings Orchid’s three synthesis engines directly into any DAW, with ten new sounds in the full release, a rebuilt delay engine, and expanded fine parameter control. Existing Orchid owners get it at a discount, and standalone buyers can purchase it for $99 without the hardware. The practical implication is that the Orchid ecosystem has matured considerably since its initial 1,000-unit beta run: 12,000 units across 60 countries, placements at Abbey Road and Rue Boyer, and a featured role on Don Toliver’s Octane. Lewis Capaldi, Janelle Monáe, Fred Durst, Kid Cudi, and Diplo are all documented users. Josh Homme narrates the drop’s accompanying short film, a deadpan skewering of the creativity-guru industrial complex that is, frankly, funnier than most instrument launch content has any right to be.

The Arctic is limited to 3,000 units worldwide, with waitlist members getting priority access at 9 AM PDT for North America and 10 AM CEST for Europe on May 11, and the general public window opening an hour later. The classic Orchid colorway and the orange carry case are back alongside it. Join the waitlist at telepathicinstruments.com.

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This Ceramic Vase Is Actually a Phone Speaker That Needs No Power

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The home has become increasingly cluttered with gadgets that need charging, pairing, and their own dedicated spaces. Even something as simple as playing music from a smartphone often involves a Bluetooth speaker sitting on a shelf, waiting for its battery to drain. There’s been a quiet counter-movement in product design, where objects do their jobs without power and sit in a room the way a vase or a mug would.

Kenji Abe’s ECHO is exactly that kind of object. It’s an analog speaker that amplifies smartphone audio simply by being set on top of the phone, requiring no power, no pairing, and no setup beyond placing it down. The concept takes its cues from wind instruments and seashells, two forms that have been shaping and projecting sound for centuries without the help of electricity.

Designer: Kenji Abe

The inside of ECHO works like a chamber, built to catch the phone’s audio and carry it outward in soft, diffused waves rather than projecting it directly. The geometry draws from the same logic as a cupped hand, but with more control over how sound travels. The result isn’t a dramatic volume boost so much as a room-filling quality that feels warmer than a powered speaker on a desk.

The choice of material makes as much of a statement as the form. Abe uses glazed ceramic, the same material found in vases, mugs, and tableware, giving ECHO a texture and presence that belongs in a home rather than on a tech shelf. It doesn’t look like an accessory. It looks like something that was always there, something that simply happened to be placed near a phone.

That quality matters when the phone is on the kitchen counter and you want music while cooking, or on a desk where you’d rather not have a speaker taking up permanent residence. ECHO doesn’t need to live next to a charging cable or be put away between uses. It sits on the table and becomes part of the room, as unobtrusive as any other ceramic piece nearby.

A guest walking in wouldn’t necessarily clock it as a tech product. That’s partly the point. The glazed surface catches light the way pottery does, and the form is quiet enough to sit beside books or plants without demanding attention. When a phone is slid underneath it, it starts doing its job. When the phone is gone, it just stays there, still looking like it belongs. The same underlying principle runs through the Battery-free Amplifying iSpeakers, where a Duralumin metal enclosure amplifies a smartphone’s audio without any power.

Abe designed ECHO to exist comfortably in a room even when it isn’t doing anything, a goal most speakers never consider. Most audio accessories announce themselves. This one quietly waits, and when a phone is close enough to fill the cavity with sound, the room gets a little warmer and a little fuller without anyone having to reach for a power button.

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Nocturne’s Free App Turns Your Bricked Spotify Car Thing Into Something Better Than the Original

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The open-source community has a long history of doing more with abandoned hardware than the original manufacturers ever did. The PSP got emulators Sony never approved. The Wii got homebrew loaders that ran software Nintendo pretended didn’t exist. The pattern repeats because the hardware is always fine; it’s the corporate support structure around it that evaporates. The Spotify Car Thing joined that lineage in December 2024 when Spotify killed server-side authentication and turned every unit into an expensive knob with a screen attached.

Nocturne picked up where Spotify dropped off. The project launched in October 2024, anticipating the shutdown, and has shipped four major versions since. V4.0.0, currently in beta with a public release imminent, finally delivers true Bluetooth connectivity without phone tethering, a companion app, and a feature set that makes the original Spotify firmware look like a rough draft.

Developer: Nocturne Team (Brandon Saldan, Dominic Frye, and contributors)

The Car Thing runs a 512MB RAM, 4GB storage Amlogic S905D2 SoC, which is a polite way of saying it has the processing power of a mid-range router from 2015. Early versions of Nocturne required a Raspberry Pi as a co-processor just to get the thing online, which was a heroic workaround but not exactly mainstream-friendly. V3 replaced that with Bluetooth tethering through your phone’s hotspot. V4 cuts the tether entirely, pairing directly via Bluetooth through the new Nocturne Companion app, which requires a Nocturne+ subscription to fund the team’s continued development.

What the photos make immediately clear is how clean the UI actually looks in practice. The now-playing screen pulls album art and renders it as a full bleed gradient background, the same visual logic Spotify used but executed with noticeably more polish in edge cases. The typography is large and glanceable. The playlist browser view is dense but organized, using album thumbnails and track titles in a layout that navigates naturally with the knob. Image 3 shows a subtle ambient lighting effect around the screen border, a rainbow glow that responds to the current track, which is the kind of detail you wouldn’t expect from a community firmware project running on 2021 budget hardware.

The gesture control, OTA updates, Spotify Connect device switcher, podcast support, local file playback, and DJ mode all carried over from V3. The V4 architecture also bakes in full offline functionality, meaning the firmware survives without Spotify’s servers being cooperative, which was precisely the failure mode that bricked every original unit in the first place.

Nocturne’s GitHub currently lists V3.0.0 as the stable release, with V4.0.0 accessible to donors via Discord while the team finishes the public build. If you’ve got a Car Thing in a drawer, the installation guide at usenocturne.com is the next tab you should open.

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This AC Does 5 Jobs at Once and Looks Like Furniture on Your Wall

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The split air conditioner is one of the least loved objects in any home, which is a strange thing to say about something most people couldn’t live without. It works, technically, but it tends to make its presence known in all the wrong ways. The air is too direct, the noise is a constant background irritant, and the plastic box on the wall rarely belongs in any thoughtfully designed interior.

From that frustration comes WellFlow, a concept that reframes what air conditioning is supposed to do for the people living around it. Rather than engineering a better cooling box, the designers built something closer to a wellness device. It’s a concept that received validation through the iF Design Award in 2026 and was first revealed at IFA Berlin 2025.

Designer: Merve Nur Sökmen, Zehra Sarıarslan

The most immediate shift is in how air actually moves. Conventional units push output in one direction, landing directly on whoever is in the room. WellFlow uses four-way diffusion to spread conditioned air from all sides without targeting anyone in particular. Sensors also monitor occupancy and steer airflow accordingly, so the unit quietly adapts to the room rather than expecting the room to tolerate it.

Beyond airflow, the system also handles humidity, air purity, ambient lighting, and sound. A built-in humidifier balances moisture levels rather than leaving the air artificially dry, which is one of the most common complaints about running a conventional unit through the night. Circadian lighting and integrated speakers complete the picture, creating conditions that support sleeping, concentrating, or quietly winding down, depending on what the moment calls for.

All of this adjusts automatically. The system continuously monitors temperature, humidity, and air quality, then fine-tunes its output without any manual input. A baby’s room needs different conditions than a home office or a gym corner, and WellFlow is designed to recognize those differences. Its behavior was shaped through user research spanning new parents, older adults, and people with respiratory sensitivities, groups that conventional air conditioners routinely fail to address.

The physical form is just as deliberate as the behavior. Most air conditioners are conspicuously technical, with plastic housings that fight against any interior aesthetic. WellFlow uses a woven textile front panel with rounded corners and a matte finish, giving it a material quality far more associated with furniture than appliances. An ambient light halo behind the unit softly signals its presence on the wall without demanding any attention.

A pull-out front filter makes maintenance visible and intuitive, addressing something the design team identified as a recurring trust issue with conventional units. People often aren’t sure when or how to clean their filters, and that uncertainty quietly chips away at confidence in the device. WellFlow removes that ambiguity. For a machine designed around human comfort, even that seemingly small detail ends up mattering quite a lot.

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AI-powered earbuds with built-in camera expand your capabilities in the real world

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Headphones and earbuds have, over the last couple of years, become staples of this fast-paced world for good reason. The little audio gear essentials can do a multitude of tasks with just the push of a tactile button or pinch gesture. They can trigger smart assistant support for a smarter you, and if this concept were to be imagined, they can give you a pair of smart eyes, too.

The idea of a pair of earbuds with integrated cameras is not new, as Emil Lukas imagined, and now another concept reinforces the merit in having a pair of lenses on earbuds. Dubbed Lightwear, the earbuds look something straight out of a sci-fi flick, but underneath, they are a pair of smart assistant earphones that enhance your environmental perception in real time.

Designer: Suosi Design

Touted as the world’s first AI-powered earphones, Lightwear comes with a set of HD camera lenses to expand the sense perception as a vision module to interpret the surroundings and deliver the desired result. One can detail them via voice command about any information required in real time, and the buds respond with a detailed set of instructions or navigation guidance. Having gesture control support, the buds can control the connected home devices remotely using just gesture commands. All the data fed into the smart data system is end-to-end encrypted and stored locally. For enhanced privacy and protection, the sensitive data is automatically cleared on a scheduled cycle.

Compared to Emil’s version, these earbuds have a very downplayed camera presence, which I prefer. They look and feel just like any normal earbud, but have a function that makes them stand out from most pairs of earbuds that have the predictable features. Unlike other AI-powered earbuds, these stand true to their name as they come with the added visual apparatus to put forth better results. The use of AI functions is not limited to the earbuds, since the charging case does the same. This removes the use-case scenario to just when the earbuds are being worn. Loaded with highly sensitive microphones, the AI features can be triggered anytime the user wants. Privacy is also taken care of, as the user can opt to activate the fingerprint unlock module to prevent any unauthorized use.

These have an over-the-ear design, reminiscent of the way IEMs sit flush on the ears. The battery resides in those lobes, and although the designers don’t specifically talk about the usage time, these should last longer than TWS earbuds. Nor is there a specific word about the sound quality, ANC levels, or the app features. But then it’s just a concept centred on the form factor and usability.

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Google’s $99 Gemini Speaker Is About to Land

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The smart speaker category has been quietly stagnating. Go ahead and look around your house. Chances are there’s a Nest Audio or an Amazon Echo gathering dust on a shelf, doing exactly what speakers did in 2018 but with a fresh coat of AI marketing layered on top. It still feels like a tech product, which is to say, it still looks like one. Google seems to have noticed.

The new Google Home Speaker, officially arriving spring 2026 at $99.99 and heading to 19 countries, is not a Nest. That’s the first thing worth saying. Google dropped the Nest name entirely, and the shape that went with it. The speaker is round, compact, and wrapped in a 3D-knitted eco-friendly fabric that reads less like a gadget and more like something you’d find alongside handmade ceramics and artisan candles on a design blog. Google is calling the colorways Berry, Hazel, Jade, and Porcelain. Those aren’t accident names. That’s homeware language, not consumer electronics language.

Designer: Google

That shift matters more than it might seem. The naming tells you exactly who Google is designing for now, and it isn’t the person who organizes their cable management. Porcelain and Hazel are colors a person picks when they’re thinking about how something looks on a bookshelf, not which one has the best specs. Whether the average buyer consciously registers this or not, the vocabulary of the product positions it closer to a Muji lamp than a mesh Wi-Fi node. For a category that has long been aesthetically stranded, that’s a meaningful move.

Underneath the fabric, the hardware story is genuinely interesting. The Google Home Speaker is built around Gemini for Home, which means it isn’t running a legacy assistant clumsily retrofitted with new AI layers. It has custom processing designed specifically for Gemini’s computational demands, meant to make conversations feel faster and more natural. A new light ring gives visual feedback as Gemini listens, thinks, and responds. The speaker also delivers 360-degree sound and supports stereo pairing. At $99, that’s a competitive package, especially compared to what Amazon and Apple are currently offering in the same price range, which hasn’t changed much in years.

Here’s the angle that gets underplayed in most coverage: Google built this speaker to coexist in an ecosystem that’s already expanding before the device even ships. Walmart’s Onn smart speaker appeared in CSA Matter filings in early May 2026, suggesting a budget tier of Gemini-compatible hardware is on its way. Google confirmed last October that Walmart’s Onn devices would work within Google Home. A $99 Google speaker alongside a cheaper third-party Gemini option creates a layered ecosystem where entry-level users get into the platform and those who want a more refined experience buy the Google-branded version. That’s a smarter market play than Google has made in this category in years.

What makes me take this launch seriously isn’t the hardware alone. Amazon has Alexa, which has gone through its own AI reinvention but still carries the aesthetic baggage of the cylinder era. Apple’s HomePod is excellent and priced accordingly. Sonos is navigating its own turbulent chapter. None of them are shipping something that looks like a river stone, costs $99, and runs a genuinely current large language model. Google, for once, doesn’t have obvious company in that specific lane.

The question I keep sitting with is whether the design conviction will hold once the product is actually in people’s homes. It’s easy to look good in product shots, and the Nest Audio looked great too. But if Google has genuinely committed to positioning this as a home object first and a gadget second, and if the Gemini experience inside it is as conversational as promised, then spring 2026 could mark something worth paying attention to.

The smart speaker had a moment, then it plateaued. A pebble-shaped $99 AI speaker with pastel names and a language model built for conversation might not sound revolutionary. Compared to what’s been sitting on kitchen counters for the last five years, though, it kind of is.

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Bose Just Revived Its Lifestyle Speaker for $299, Minus the Wires

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For most people, getting serious audio at home eventually turns into a tradeoff. Multi-speaker surround setups demand wiring, dedicated gear, and more floor space than a typical room can spare. Smart speakers simplified things, but the best-sounding options tend to carry steep price tags, and the more affordable ones rarely fill a room with the kind of sound that actually does the music justice. That gap has stayed stubbornly open.

Bose thinks it has the answer, and it’s reviving a celebrated name to prove it. The Lifestyle brand, first introduced in 1990 and discontinued in 2022, is back with a collection that treats audio quality and refined design as inseparable. Leading that return is the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, a compact wireless unit wrapped in knit fabric that sits unobtrusively on any shelf while delivering sound that’s anything but understated.

Designer: Bose

The secret to that sound lies in the speaker’s three-driver configuration. Two front-facing drivers handle the direct output, while a third fires upward, bouncing sound off the ceiling to create a sense of height and space that a single forward-pointing speaker simply can’t achieve. Bose calls this TrueSpatial Technology, and it works alongside CleanBass, which uses QuietPort acoustics to produce bass that’s deep, controlled, and free of distortion.

That flexibility extends to how the speaker fits into different setups. On its own, it works as a capable standalone smart speaker. Pair two of them together, and you’ve got a genuine stereo setup. Add the Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar and Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer, also part of the new collection, and it takes on rear-channel duties in what becomes a full 7.1.4 surround system, no wires snaking across the floor required.

Getting music onto it isn’t complicated. The speaker supports Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast, and Spotify Connect, so you can stick with whatever app you already use without adapting to a proprietary system. Bluetooth 5.3 is also on board, and a 3.5mm aux input handles wired sources like a turntable. Alexa+ serves as the built-in voice assistant, with on-device touch controls and a radial volume slider for quick adjustments.

One of the more practical touches is CustomTune, a calibration feature that uses your phone’s microphone to listen to the acoustics of whichever room the speaker is in. It accounts for furniture placement and room size, automatically adjusting the output without requiring any manual tweaking on your end. For even more placement options, an optional wall bracket priced at $69 and a floor stand at $149 are both available separately.

The Lifestyle Ultra Speaker starts at $299 in Black or White Smoke, with the limited-edition Driftwood Sand colorway priced at $349. The full Lifestyle Collection, including the Ultra Soundbar at $1,099 and Ultra Subwoofer at $899, is available to preorder now and ships on May 15. It can start small on a single shelf and gradually take over your entire home audio setup without ever looking like it doesn’t belong.

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