Tag Archives: Music

A Craftsman Just Turned Dead Car Engines Into One-of-a-Kind Guitars

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I’ve been thinking about this one for days. A Slovenian craftsman named Vlado Plateis is turning discarded car engine heads into fully playable electric guitars, and every time I look at the photos, I still can’t decide if I’m staring at a musical instrument or a sculpture. Maybe that’s exactly the point.

The design logic here is deceptively simple: take the engine head as the body of the guitar, preserve its raw industrial form, and build around it rather than in spite of it. Nothing is polished away, sanded smooth, or disguised. The cast metal arrives with its own surface history of machined edges, bolt holes, and combustion chamber cavities, and all of it stays. The visible scars and geometry of the original part become the visual language of the finished instrument. That restraint is a design decision, and it’s a brave one. Most makers would be tempted to refine. Plateis resists that impulse entirely.

Designer: Vlado Plateis

What makes the objects so visually arresting is the tension between their two identities. The pickups, tuning pegs, and strings are all standard guitar hardware, clean and purposeful. Set against the rough, irregular topography of the engine casting, they create a contrast that reads as almost confrontational. One material is mass-produced and precise. The other is heavy, asymmetrical, and marked by mechanical life. Together, they don’t clash so much as they hold a conversation, and that conversation is what you keep looking at.

Each engine head also brings an entirely different geometry to the design, which means every guitar has a silhouette that could never be repeated. A guitar built from a Toyota Corolla head looks nothing like one built from a Mitsubishi Colt. The donor car determines the form. The bolt pattern, the fin arrangement, the overall mass and proportion are all inherited rather than designed, which paradoxically makes the final object feel more authored, not less. Plateis isn’t imposing a shape. He’s discovering one that was already there.

The weight is part of the design too, and I think it matters more than people initially consider. These are dense, substantial objects. You don’t pick one up and forget what it’s made from. That physicality communicates something about permanence that most contemporary design actively avoids. We’re so conditioned to lightweight, minimal, and frictionless that an object with genuine heft feels almost transgressive. It asks you to be present with it.

I also want to talk about what Plateis doesn’t do, because restraint is underrated in design. He doesn’t paint the metal. He doesn’t add decorative elements that aren’t structurally necessary. He doesn’t try to make the engine head look like something it isn’t. The honesty of the material is the aesthetic. That’s a philosophy rooted in the same tradition as Shaker furniture and Braun electronics, the idea that a thing should look exactly like what it is and nothing more. Applied to a guitar made from automotive scrap, it produces something genuinely unexpected.

Upcycling in design is popular right now, often to the point of feeling performative. Brands slap the word “reclaimed” on something and call it sustainable, but the object itself is forgettable. Plateis sidesteps all of that because the material isn’t incidental to the design. It is the design. Because every engine head has a different geometry, every guitar is structurally and visually unique. You cannot order the same one twice. The scarcity isn’t manufactured. It’s inherent to the process.

As someone who pays close attention to design, I think Plateis Guitars represents something genuinely interesting happening at the intersection of material culture, craft, and form-making. It’s a reminder that the most compelling design doesn’t always come from the biggest studios or the most advanced technology. Sometimes it comes from someone in Slovenia, a scrapped engine head, and a very considered eye for what already exists inside a piece of discarded metal.

Whether or not you play guitar, whether or not you care about cars, these objects deserve your attention. They are proof that constraints can be generative, and that found form, treated with patience and respect, can produce something completely new.

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CRKD Just Built a $135 Guitar Controller Around a Real Gibson Les Paul

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Rhythm games went through a period where they were everywhere, then went quiet, and now they’re back in a way that feels more persistent than the last time. Fortnite Festival brought the genre back to a mainstream audience, Clone Hero and YARG kept a dedicated community alive through the lean years, and Rock Band 4 never really went away. The one thing that has lagged behind the revival is the hardware, with most players making do with aging instruments or basic alternatives that don’t feel particularly inspired.

The CRKD x Gibson Les Paul Olive Drab Pro Edition is a guitar controller that takes the instrument side of that equation seriously. Built on the silhouette of the actual Gibson Les Paul Olive Drab electric guitar and officially licensed by both Gibson and Xbox, it’s designed for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC, with a finish that stands apart from the more conventional options the brand has previously released.

Designer: CRKD x Gibson

The two hardware decisions that define the playing experience are the EZ Glide mechanical fret buttons and the Hall Effect strum bar. The fret buttons use mechanical switches rather than the rubber membranes found in standard guitar controllers, giving each press a tactile click that registers precisely and consistently. The strum bar relies on Hall Effect technology rather than physical contacts, which means it doesn’t degrade with repeated use, and its sensitivity and actuation points can be dialed in through the CRKD app.

That companion app also handles everything the previous model’s physical 9-mode dial used to cover. CRKD removed that dial from the Olive Drab Pro Edition after extended playtesting found it added friction to getting started. Game presets, button remapping, custom profiles, and firmware updates now all live in the app. For players who want the depth, it’s all still there, and for those who just want to plug in and play, nothing stands in the way.

Connectivity covers three modes: wired via USB-C, low-latency 2.4 GHz wireless through the included USB dongle, and Bluetooth. The package also comes with a shoulder strap and a removable rechargeable battery. Rapid polling technology keeps response times tight across all connection methods, which matters considerably once you’re trying to hit precise timing windows in harder difficulty tiers.

The Olive Drab colorway is worth noting as more than just an aesthetic decision. CRKD has positioned this release as the first in an evolving line of Pro Edition controllers, setting up the platform for Stage Tour, its upcoming rhythm game, which the hardware will also support. It’s a calculated move to give players both a current controller that works across today’s library and a stake in whatever the next chapter of rhythm gaming looks like.

Production is limited to a single batch, priced at $134.99 USD, €149.99, or £129.99 depending on region. Compatible games include Fortnite Festival, Rock Band 4, Clone Hero, YARG, and the upcoming Stage Tour. CRKD has confirmed this is strictly a one-run release, shipping now while stock holds. For anyone who’s been waiting for a guitar controller worth taking seriously, this is about as deliberate a design statement as the category has produced.

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Olivia Rodrigo’s New LEGO Collection Hides Loads of Easter Eggs, Just Like Her Music Videos

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Heartbreak made Olivia Rodrigo famous, then rage made her interesting. SOUR arrived as a teenage gut-punch of betrayal and longing, all trembling ballads and bedroom devastation. GUTS answered it two years later with distortion pedals and a sneer, the sound of someone who had cried enough and picked up an electric guitar instead. The whiplash between those two modes is the most compelling thing about her, and any tribute worth its salt has to hold both at once.

The new LEGO Editions Olivia Rodrigo collection gets that completely. Across five collectible sets, the range swings from soft to loud and back again, and the flagship Dual Guitar build (43031) literally splits the difference, fusing an acoustic and an electric into one 1,228-piece object that opens to reveal hidden stage scenes inside. It is a collection that understood the assignment was always about duality, right down to the minifigures and their two faces. And like the best Rodrigo music videos, every set is salted with easter eggs you are meant to hunt down, the kind of buried references the Livies will be freeze-framing and cataloguing for weeks.

Designer: LEGO Group (Amy Corbett – Senior Design Manager)

That duality is a genuine milestone too, because Rodrigo becomes the first musician in history to receive multiple dedicated LEGO sets in one go, arriving with five new minifigures modeled on her most recognizable stage looks. The detail I keep grinning at is that every one of those minifigs carries two different facial expressions, so you can flip a single character between the wide-eyed ballad version and the snarling festival version depending on which Olivia the scene calls for. Amy Corbett led the design direction and worked directly with Rodrigo to refine each element, and that collaboration shows in how much of the collection is built around slow discovery rather than instant payoff.

The clearest proof of that is a clever piece of industrial sleight-of-hand in the LEGO Botanicals Flower Bouquet (11507). Rodrigo is the first partner LEGO has ever let personalize one of its Botanicals sets, and rather than a generic posy, the 400-piece arrangement is built around a striking purple flower assembled out of electric guitars, with further floral nods to her Filipino heritage threaded through the petals. It is the kind of part-repurposing that makes a designer grin, taking an instrument silhouette and coaxing it into a botanical form. Look closely and you will find a tiny visitor buzzing around the stems, which is exactly the sort of easter egg the Livies will lose their minds over.

The Concert Moon (43029) is the showstopper for me, a 670-piece recreation of that viral GUTS tour moment where Olivia drifts above the crowd on a giant glowing moon. What elevates it past a static diorama is the engineering tucked behind the spectacle, with hidden drawers and picture holders worked into the body of the thing, so the prop that floated over a stadium doubles as a tiny functional curio on your shelf.

The Dual Guitar (43031) earns its flagship billing the longer you sit with it, because the headline trick from up top, an acoustic and an electric fused into one 1,228-piece instrument, turns out to be only half of it. The body opens to reveal hidden stage scenes, backstage details, and secret storage compartments waiting to be decoded, one side soft and dreamy, the other ready to make some noise. From there the range dials down with the Vinyl (43028), which compresses her career into a 360-piece brick-built record display salted with callbacks and fresh clues hinting at what is still to come. And the Secret Storage (43030) closes things out, gathering her signature symbols into one 1,085-piece collectible, the red festival-tour guitar, the GUTS megaphone, a notebook pulled from those handwritten SOUR lyric books, each prop hiding a compartment that keeps it doing double duty.

So much of this collection is mechanism disguised as merchandise. A pop-star tie-in could so easily have been five pretty busts and a logo, but Corbett and her team kept asking what each object could do, which is why you get faces that swap, drawers that slide, guitars that open, and a moon that hides its own secrets. Pitched at ages nine to fourteen but plainly aimed at the adult collectors who grew up alongside this music, the sets read as display pieces with a puzzle-box heart.

The collection launches globally on August 1, 2026, at LEGO.com, LEGO stores, and selected retailers, with the Dual Guitar, Concert Moon, and Flower Bouquet already up for pre-order. Prices run from a friendly 34.99 USD for the Vinyl to 119.99 USD for the Dual Guitar, which feels fair for what is essentially a working brick instrument. If I had one wish, it would be a single playable string on that Dual Guitar, some tiny Technic mechanism that lets it twang just once. Give me that, and this goes from a great tie-in to an instant classic.

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The 21.5-Inch Transparent Speaker That Animates Lyrics to Match Your Music

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Most home speakers today have settled into a comfortable invisibility. Whether they’re slim soundbars pushed against a wall or cylindrical mesh towers parked on a bookshelf, the design goal is essentially the same: stay out of the way. They’re meant to be heard and rarely looked at, and even the ones that look interesting rarely offer much to see once the music starts.

MorningBlues has a clear thesis about music, and it has a lot to do with how the things we listen to can also be things worth looking at. Its SonicGlass A1 is a hi-fi speaker built around a transparent glass driver that lets you watch sound in motion as music plays. It’s the kind of object that sits on a shelf the way art does, with intention, and with something to say even before you press play.

Designer: MorningBlues

Click Here to Buy Now: $646 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 16/205 left! Raised over $360,000.

The SonicGlass A1’s front face is a 21.5-inch TFT panel with high-transparency tempered glass, framed in black with over 90% light transmission. The transparent driver sits behind it, fully visible, which is both an acoustic feature and a design statement. There’s no grille hiding anything, no fabric obscuring the view. What you see is the working interior of the speaker, presented like an exhibit rather than concealed like a component.

When a song plays, lyrics appear across the glass surface in motion styles drawn from the track’s rhythm, pace, and emotional character. MorningBlues calls this MoodLyric, built on data from hundreds of millions of playbacks to animate text in ways that feel tied to what the song is actually doing. All lyrics are licensed through LyricFind, meaning the display does right by the artists whose words it borrows.

Beyond the lyrics, a feature called SceneSync adds a visual layer that responds to music genres. Pop, hip-hop, R&B, and rock each trigger different visual aesthetics on screen, generated in real time by AI. The idea is that the speaker shouldn’t just play a song; it should match the world the song is coming from. It’s a more cinematic take on the standard music visualizer.

The MorningBlues app lets you upload a personal photo that AI uses to place your face inside a genre-matched music video, displayed on the speaker’s screen. It’s the kind of feature that’s genuinely fun at a gathering, or just for yourself on a slow afternoon. You can also load the speaker with your own photos and videos to use as background content, turning it into a personal display.

When the music stops, the SonicGlass A1 doesn’t go blank. It has ambient display settings that keep it working as a room fixture, with options like ambient backgrounds, dynamic clock faces, and an ASMR sleep mode for winding down at night. That always-on character makes the speaker feel less like a device you switch off and more like something that already belongs in the room.

Pair the A1 with a microphone, and it becomes a home karaoke setup with licensed lyrics scrolling on screen in sync as you sing. The MorningBlues Music Hub 1, a dedicated controller for phone-free playback, rounds out the experience by letting you manage everything from a single tactile device, so your phone doesn’t need to be part of the evening at all. The large glass screen handles the rest.

The SonicGlass A1 isn’t angling to be the most powerful speaker in the room or the one with the most impressive spec sheet. It’s made for people who think about music the way they think about other things they choose to live with, considering both what those things do and how they look doing it. MorningBlues is asking a direct question: what if your speaker was worth watching?

Click Here to Buy Now: $646 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 16/205 left! Raised over $360,000.

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Jacksonville Built a Music Garden That Grows With Its City

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Most public art arrives fully formed. It gets unveiled, photographed, written about, and then gradually becomes part of the background noise of a city. You stop seeing it the way you stop noticing the paint color in your living room. A Cappella, a new permanent installation along Jacksonville’s riverfront, was designed to resist exactly that fate.

Created by Brooklyn-based studio The Urban Conga and situated within the Jacksonville Riverfront Music Garden along the St. Johns River, A Cappella does something most permanent installations don’t dare to do: it was built to remain unfinished. Not as an artistic statement about incompleteness, but as a genuine structural decision baked into every layer of the project. The installation draws from a collection of 84 songs by more than 60 local artists, spanning an entire century of Jacksonville music from the 1920s all the way to the 2020s. Those songs aren’t decoration. They’re the architecture.

Designer: The Urban Conga

The physical space is carved into the landscape in the shape of a musical note, which already tells you this project takes its metaphors seriously. But what makes it compelling beyond the clever concept is how it’s organized. The installation is divided into four sections that mirror the movements of a symphony: motivation, home, love, and freedom. Each carries its own emotional register, its own atmosphere and pacing. Walking through the space isn’t like looking at a gallery wall. It moves like a piece of music does, with energy and momentum in the early sections giving way to something more contemplative and expansive toward the end. You’re not just reading about the city. You’re moving through its emotional history.

The studio is led by Ryan Swanson and Maeghann Coleman, AIA, NOMA, and The Urban Conga’s whole philosophy centers on what they call “open-ended play” and the idea of building what they describe as playable cities. This isn’t decoration for decoration’s sake. Their work consistently asks what happens when a designed space actually invites people to engage, interact, and contribute rather than simply observe. A Cappella is perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy yet.

The sourcing of the content is the part that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Jacksonville residents themselves identified the songs and lyrics that shaped this installation through an extensive public engagement process, before a single panel was placed. That distinction is easy to gloss over, but it shouldn’t be. A lot of public art about a community is really just art placed near a community. The difference between being consulted and being included is everything, and this project sits firmly on the included side.

The visual design reflects that same openness. Dichroic and reflective panels shift with changing light, meaning the installation looks genuinely different depending on when you arrive. That’s a detail worth noting, because it means repeat visits reward you with something new. The space doesn’t freeze time; it moves with it.

And then there’s the detail that separates A Cappella from most permanent public installations: it’s designed to accommodate new artists over time. As Jacksonville’s music scene evolves, so does the work. New songs can be added. The story doesn’t end with the ribbon cutting. That’s either a very bold design choice or an obvious one, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it’s rare, and it’s right.

We talk a lot about public space and who it belongs to. Too often the answer is technically “everyone” but practically “no one in particular.” A Cappella makes a real argument that a city’s sonic history is worth preserving with the same seriousness as its built one. Jacksonville has contributed more to American music than it usually gets credit for, and having that legacy embedded in the riverfront landscape, available to anyone walking past on any given afternoon, feels like a meaningful act of civic pride rather than a token gesture. Public art can be many things. At its best, it makes you feel like you belong somewhere. A Cappella seems to be aiming for exactly that.

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Enya Just Made a Guitar Anyone Can Play for $199

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Most of us have a complicated relationship with music-making. We admire people who can pick up an instrument and just… play. We’ve maybe even tried it ourselves, signed up for guitar lessons that lasted exactly three weeks, or downloaded an app that promised to teach us a song a day. And then we moved on. Enya Music is betting that the gap between “I wish I could play something” and “I’m actually playing something” isn’t about talent. It’s about friction.

The Cyber-G Pocket is their latest argument for that theory. Folded up, it looks like a chunky, pill-shaped Bluetooth speaker, the kind you’d toss in a bag without thinking about it. Open it out, and it unfolds into a compact, geometric guitar silhouette with 14 chord pads along the neck and a silicone strumming surface where the strings would be. No traditional strings, no frets to press down, no painful fingertip calluses during the learning curve. Just tap a pad, flick across the surface, and the Cyber-G Pocket fills in the rest.

Designer: Enya Music

To be clear, this is not a guitar. It’s not trying to be. Enya pitches it as a smart music gadget for casual gatherings, campfires, and spontaneous sing-alongs, and that framing matters. If you go in expecting to learn actual guitar technique, you’ll be disappointed. If you go in expecting to have a genuinely good time making music with friends who have no idea what a G chord is, you’ll probably love it.

The hardware is more considered than it looks. Inside are dual 10-watt full-range drivers covering a frequency range from 40Hz to 20kHz, which is a real, capable speaker for a device this size. The 3,250 mAh battery gives you around eight hours of play, and it fully charges in two hours via USB-C. That same port doubles as a digital audio transfer connection if you want to record directly to your phone or computer. There’s also a 3.5mm jack for routing into an amp or headphones. It folds down to 231 x 73 x 95mm, which is, to be fair, not exactly pocket-sized despite the name, but it’s genuinely compact enough to justify the travel pitch.

The Enya Music app is where the real depth lives. From there, you can access sheet music, adjust chord assignments, choose from over 15 tones ranging from acoustic warmth to synth textures, and switch between Sing & Play mode or Solo mode. The built-in drum and bass function means you can hit the Cyber-G logo button and instantly have a backing rhythm synced to your chord playing. For a room full of people who want to feel like a band for twenty minutes, that’s actually a pretty delightful trick.

Enya isn’t new to this space. They’ve been building accessible smart guitars since 2022 with products like the Nexg, and the Cyber-G line has grown into a whole ecosystem with multiple form factors. The Pocket feels like the most socially oriented version yet, designed less for solo practice and more for pulling people together who would otherwise just scroll their phones.

Starting at $199, it sits in that pricing zone where it’s more than an impulse buy but not so far out of reach that it feels precious. You’d use it, you’d leave it on the coffee table, you’d pull it out when friends came over. That’s kind of the point.

Whether or not it qualifies as a “real” instrument is a question worth skipping entirely. Not everything has to earn its place through traditional definitions. The Cyber-G Pocket is genuinely thoughtful design applied to a very human desire: to make something that sounds like music without needing years of practice to get there. That’s not a consolation prize. For most people, that’s exactly what they actually wanted.

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NTS Radio’s New $179 Player Wants You to Stop Choosing

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We spend an embarrassing amount of time choosing what to listen to. You open Spotify, scroll for fifteen minutes, start a playlist you’ve already heard a hundred times, and somehow feel like you’ve made a decision. You haven’t. You’ve just exhausted yourself before the music even started. The Atonemo NTS Radio Player takes a different approach entirely, and I think it might be onto something important.

At first glance, it barely looks like a product. It’s small and flat, almost matchbox-thin, the kind of object that quietly disappears onto a shelf or windowsill without demanding attention. Swedish design company Atonemo built it in collaboration with NTS Radio, the London-born internet radio station founded by Femi Adeyemi in Hackney in 2011. Together, they’ve made something that feels less like a piece of tech and more like a considered position on how we should all be listening to music.

Designer: Atonemo x NTS Radio

The interface is almost aggressively simple. A rotating dial lets you scroll through 16 of NTS’s “Infinite Mixtapes,” each one a continuously running, human-curated stream built around a mood or genre. No artists. No albums. Just a small icon (a sun, a microphone, a smiley face) and whatever’s playing when you land on it. Two large buttons on the device give you direct access to NTS Radio 1 and 2, the station’s two flagship live channels. That’s basically the whole UI. And somehow, that’s enough.

The concept driving the collaboration is “omakase listening,” borrowing the Japanese dining philosophy of trusting the chef to decide what you eat. As the team describes it: “You hand over the decision to someone whose taste you trust, and you get something better than anything you’d have chosen yourself.” It’s a simple premise that most of the streaming industry has completely abandoned in favor of algorithmic personalization and infinite scrollable libraries. The NTS Radio Player bets on the opposite.

On the technical side, Atonemo hasn’t cut corners. The player outputs 24-bit audio at 192kHz through a 3.5mm analogue jack, and it ships with an RCA adapter so it can connect to older amplifiers and vintage hi-fi setups. That feels very intentional. A good chunk of NTS’s audience are people who care deeply about how music sounds, who shop for turntables, collect records, and treat their speakers like furniture. Atonemo’s core Streamplayer is already designed for that crowd, and the NTS Radio Player extends the same idea: give old gear a new life without sacrificing audio quality. It also supports AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz for when you want to step outside the NTS ecosystem entirely.

The design itself is worth sitting with for a moment. The dial immediately calls to mind the iPod’s click wheel, which is probably not accidental. That association carries real weight: there’s something inherently warm and tactile about scrolling through options with your hand rather than your thumb. Physical interaction with music hardware is having a quiet revival right now, riding the same cultural wave that’s kept vinyl sales growing year after year. The NTS Radio Player reads the room.

My honest opinion? The $179 price point is a reasonable ask for what you’re getting, especially if you’re already an NTS listener. For anyone new to the station, this is an unusually elegant entry point into a catalog of music that’s genuinely harder to find elsewhere. NTS has built its entire reputation on programming diverse, underheard work from artists, DJs, and record collectors across more than 60 cities globally. Six million people listen every month, and it still manages to feel like a secret.

So much of modern tech is built to maximize the time you spend choosing, scrolling, and clicking. The Atonemo NTS Radio Player is designed to do exactly the opposite. You plug it in, you turn the dial, and then you just listen. For a lot of people right now, that simplicity might be the most radical feature of all.

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This Brutalist Vinyl Turntable Hides the Tonearm So Well It Feels Like a Massive CD Deck

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For something built to play vinyl, the PP-1 barely behaves like a turntable at all. There’s no tonearm visually staking its claim across the platter, no exposed hardware reminding you this is an analog ritual machine. Instead, it looks like someone took the clean, self-contained logic of a CD player, scaled it up to 12-inch proportions, and cut a perfect circle into a block of aluminum. The result feels less like retro audio gear and more like a playback object from a timeline where physical media never split into “old” and “new.”

That is what makes the PP-1 so compelling from a design standpoint. Most modern record players still rely on nostalgia, warm wood finishes, visible mechanics, and a kind of ceremonial analog theater. This one strips all of that away and replaces it with something colder, flatter, and far more architectural. The record becomes the only familiar visual cue, while the machine itself recedes into a monolithic slab that feels closer to a giant CD deck than a classic turntable. Instead of celebrating vinyl as a vintage artifact, the PP-1 imagines what the format might have looked like if it had evolved with the same minimalist confidence as the best consumer electronics.

Designer: Waiting For Ideas

The record goes in upside down, and from there the PP-1 takes over entirely. A reading mechanism built into the platter operates from beneath the vinyl surface rather than above it, which is how the tonearm vanishes without taking the music with it. A built-in sensor automatically detects whether the record spins at 33 or 45 RPM and adjusts accordingly, eliminating the last manual decision from the process. An integrated phono preamp and headphone amplifier live inside the body, so headphone listening requires nothing additional. The interaction reduces to its absolute minimum: place the record, press one of two small buttons on the face, and listen.

The body itself is milled from a solid block of aluminum, not pressed or assembled from parts, which gives the PP-1 a physical density that conventionally built decks cannot replicate. That mass serves a genuine acoustic purpose, as solid aluminum controls resonance and vibration more effectively than the hollowed wood plinths that most turntables rely on. The PP-1 can also stand and play upright, the record spinning horizontally against a vertical body, and Waiting For Ideas leans into this configuration in their product photography for obvious reasons. In that orientation, the turntable sheds the last visual connection to hi-fi equipment. It looks like a wall piece, a square of brushed metal with a circle cut into it.

Most of the vinyl revival has traded on nostalgia, warm wood finishes, visible cartridges, and retro typography that signals the ritual of analog listening as much as the listening itself. The PP-1 belongs to a different tradition entirely, closer to the restrained, function-forward product language of Dieter Rams at Braun and Bang & Olufsen at its mid-century peak, where the object earns its presence through formal clarity rather than decorative signaling. It launches at €5,800 (roughly $6,050), made to order, placing it in genuine high-end turntable territory alongside decks from Rega, Pro-Ject, and Clearaudio, all of which look considerably more conventional by comparison. Whether audiophiles make peace with the tonearm-free setup is a legitimate debate. The design argument the PP-1 makes is considerably harder to dismiss.

The post This Brutalist Vinyl Turntable Hides the Tonearm So Well It Feels Like a Massive CD Deck 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.

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.