Music lovers are gradually developing a deeper appreciation for in-ear monitors (IEMs) as they explore the world of personal audio. The Chi-Fi market, in particular, has grown into a crowded space filled with brands such as Moondrop, Truthear, Simgot, Kiwi Ears, ThieAudio, and FiiO. At the same time, established names including Sennheiser, Final Audio, Campfire Audio, Meze Audio, and Audio-Technica continue to attract listeners looking for detailed and analytical sound.
One thing I’ve noticed while following the IEM space is how often these products embrace transparent or semi-transparent shell designs. There is something visually appealing about being able to see the components inside, while the distinctive form immediately sets IEMs apart from the everyday wireless earbuds most people use. This design language also happens to align closely with Nothing’s visual identity, making the idea of a Nothing-branded IEM feel like a natural extension of the company’s existing audio lineup.
The concept in question comes from the Nothing Community, where a member shared renders imagining what an IEM designed by Nothing could look like. The idea explores a familiar IEM silhouette, but reinterprets it through the brand’s signature transparent aesthetic and restrained use of color. It is not a radical departure from the designs already seen across the IEM market, but the Nothing treatment gives the concept a distinct character that would likely appeal to fans of the brand.
The renders bring to mind the visual language of Nothing’s earlier audio products, particularly the transparent approach associated with the Ear (1). Instead of hiding the internal components behind an opaque shell, the concept makes them part of the visual experience. A transparent finish could also work particularly well with an IEM, where the intricate internal arrangement is often part of what makes these products interesting to audio enthusiasts.
The community response suggests that the concept has some room for further exploration. One commenter specifically expressed interest in seeing a black and transparent version, while another asked what specifications people would want from such a product. Those reactions highlight an interesting possibility: a Nothing IEM could potentially bridge the gap between the company’s design-focused consumer electronics and the increasingly popular world of enthusiast audio.
For now, this remains a community-created concept rather than an official Nothing product. Still, it is an intriguing exercise in imagining how the company’s transparent design philosophy could translate into a more enthusiast-oriented audio product. With Nothing already established in the personal audio space, the idea of a dedicated wired IEM does not feel entirely out of place.
Everyone is obsessed with making gadgets sleeker, flatter, and more touch sensitive these days. So naturally, Skullcandy looked at that trend and said, nah, let us put a knob on it. The new Crusher 1080 ANC headphones (with sound by Bose) have an honest to goodness rotary dial sitting right on the ear cup, and it might be the single best design decision on the whole product.
Turning that dial controls the Crusher Bass feature, which is Skullcandy’s way of saying we built a subwoofer into your headphones. Twist it one way for a light rumble, twist it the other way and your skull becomes part of the sound system. It is a small, satisfying, slightly ridiculous piece of hardware, and after years of swiping at touch panels that never quite register your finger, it feels like coming up for air.
Bose headphones are great. They are also expensive enough to make you wince a little at checkout. So when Skullcandy rolled up with a pair of headphones that borrow actual Bose tech, including its noise canceling and audio engine, and slapped a $280 price on them, it got my attention fast. That is $170 cheaper than Bose’s own flagship, for tech with the Bose name stamped right on it. Whether the sound quality actually holds up against the real deal is a separate question, but on paper, this is a genuinely aggressive move.
Bose’s fingerprints have their way of showing up everywhere else as well. QuietControl active noise canceling uses six microphones to quiet the outside world, TrueSpatial creates a wider, more speaker like soundstage with head tracking, and the WaveForm audio engine keeps things clear even at high volume. There is also Personal Sound tech from Mimi, which builds a hearing profile tailored to you rather than relying on a generic preset. Toss in Bose-assisted call clarity and custom EQ modes, and Skullcandy is clearly betting that borrowed expertise beats going it alone.
The everyday stuff is handled well too. Automatic wear detection pauses your audio the second you take the headphones off, a low latency mode keeps games in sync, and the onboard buttons can be remapped to whatever functions you actually use. Battery life comes in at 60 hours with ANC off and 50 with it on, and a 10 minute charge buys you another 4 hours of playtime. The one number that raises an eyebrow is weight. At just over 13 ounces, these are noticeably heavier than rivals like the Sony XM6 or Bose’s own QuietComfort Ultra, the price you may pay for packing in all that bass hardware.
None of this guarantees the 1080 ANC will beat Bose or Sony at their own game, and we will not know for sure until these are actually strapped to some ears. But Skullcandy is not really trying to win a spec sheet fight here. It is selling a headphone with a genuine identity, one built around a feeling rather than a feature list, with a knob you can grab and twist like it is 1985. In a market full of interchangeable slabs of black plastic, that alone makes the Crusher 1080 ANC worth a second look.
Apple has a playbook for innovation that often involves letting a feature mature elsewhere before adopting it, gift-wrapped, as a profound breakthrough. Widgets appeared on the iPhone long after becoming an Android signature, presented not as a catch-up but as a thoughtful redesign. A calculator app on the iPad took nearly 15 years to become reality. Multitasking came years after Android got it, packaged as Stage Manager. Even the simple act of circling an item to search for it, a trick already familiar on other platforms, is being framed as a new kind of magic. That same playbook is now being run on the AirPods Max 2’s equalizer, a feature that was conspicuously absent when the $549 headphones launched four months ago but has now arrived with the July 14 public beta of iOS 27.
The implementation is classic Apple. The new Equalizer screen is lush and responsive, with an animated waveform that pulses to your music under three simple drag handles: Low, Mid, and High. It feels intuitive, and it looks alive on the screen. This is also a stark contrast to the multi-band or parametric controls that have been standard on flagship headphones from Sony and Bose for years. Just as with Widgets and Stage Manager, Apple has delivered the feature on its own terms and on its own timeline, handing users a beautifully designed tool that prioritizes aesthetic simplicity over the technical depth many owners of a $549 headphone were actually waiting for.
Designer: Apple
That polish, though, also reveals the limit of Apple’s ambition here. Three bands is enough to boost bass, pull back mids, or brighten the top end, but it is still a blunt instrument compared to the multi-band and parametric EQ controls that rivals like Sony and Bose have offered on flagship headphones for years. For casual listeners, that may be perfectly fine. Most people do not want to think in frequencies, Q values, or narrow corrective cuts. They want vocals clearer, bass deeper, and harshness reduced. Apple’s interface serves that audience beautifully.
The problem is that Apple has spent real effort positioning the AirPods Max 2 as a premium audio product for creators, podcasters, and Logic Pro adjacent workflows. In that context, a three-band EQ feels less like a full correction and more like the minimum viable answer to a very public complaint. Reviews at launch repeatedly called out the absence of manual EQ, and this update finally closes that gap. What it does not do is move the AirPods Max 2 into the same conversation as tools built for more serious sound shaping.
That leaves the update in a very Apple place: fashionably late, classically elegant, and strategically simplified. The custom EQ finally gives AirPods Max 2 owners control they should have had from day one, but it also reinforces the company’s longstanding instinct to decide how much control its users really need. For some buyers, this will feel like a thoughtful refinement. For others, especially anyone spending $549 on over-ear headphones with professional aspirations, it may feel like Apple arrived to the party with a beautifully wrapped gift everyone else opened years ago.
Clip-on earbuds were always going to go mainstream; the category just got there in the east first. Huawei’s FreeClip became roughly as ubiquitous as AirPods in Chinese cities, building an installed base for open-ear wearables that Western brands are only now beginning to seriously contest. The appeal is not complicated: a form factor that keeps the ear canal open, lets ambient sound in naturally, and eliminates the sealed pressure that makes conventional in-ears uncomfortable after long sessions. Asia ran that experiment at scale, and the results were settled long before the Western audio press started treating it as a breakthrough.
Sennheiser enters the conversation on July 23 with the Accentum Clip, a product priced at £149 that brings Bluetooth 6.0, LDAC support, IP54 protection, and 36-hour total battery life to a category where Bose has been setting the reference point at a higher price. The launch covers the UK, EU, and Canada. For US consumers, the Accentum Clip joins a lengthening list of globally significant products that simply will not be available at their local retailer, a pattern this publication has been tracking across categories as diverse as electric vehicles, smartphones, and now, apparently, open-ear audio.
Designer: Sennheiser
The Accentum Clip earbuds promise nine hours of playback on a single charge, with the case providing a total of 36 hours. This is a deliberate and significant advantage over the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, which offer around 7.5 hours per charge and a total of 27 hours with their case. In a category built for all-day wear, that extra nine hours is a direct appeal to users who want to leave the charging cable at home.
The Accentum Clip uses a 12mm dynamic driver, but the more interesting detail is its support for the LDAC codec. Including a high-bitrate codec like LDAC is a bold choice for an open-ear design, which by its nature lets sound escape and ambient noise in. It signals a confidence in the driver’s ability to deliver a detailed audio experience, even if it is not a closed, isolating one. Paired with Bluetooth 6.0, which promises more stable multipoint connections, the package is technically robust for commuters and office workers who need to switch between devices seamlessly.
Sennheiser opted for a flexible silicone bridge to connect the driver unit and the battery component, quite like Bose’s offering. At 6.8 grams per bud, the design focuses on a gentle, secure clamping force that distributes weight evenly around the ear’s cartilage. The goal is a “barely there” feeling that encourages leaving them on for hours, which aligns perfectly with the product’s impressive battery life. The IP54 rating for dust and splash resistance makes them durable enough for workouts, even if they are not explicitly marketed as fitness gear.
These engineering choices culminate in a fairly reasonable price tag. At £149 or €179 (around $200 USD), the Accentum Clip is positioned aggressively beneath the Bose Ultra Open, which launched at $299. Sennheiser is not trying to create a new category; it is trying to win the one Bose popularized by being a better value on paper. It is a classic challenger strategy: arrive a little late to the party, but bring a better spec sheet and a more accessible price. For European and Canadian buyers, the choice between the two just became much more interesting.
Which brings us back to that curious launch map. The decision to omit the United States, the world’s largest single market for high-end audio, feels a lot like a symptom of a broader shift in the tech industry. Whether due to the complexities of FCC certification, a desire to test the product in smaller markets first, or the simple fact that the US is becoming a harder place for global brands to operate, the absence is loud.
Wireless gaming headsets have carried a quiet contradiction since they first appeared. Cutting the cable was supposed to mean more freedom, but the moment the battery dropped, you were plugging back in anyway, tethered to a wall or a charging dock and waiting. The industry’s answer has been to push battery life further with each generation, but even a 60- or 70-hour headset runs flat eventually, usually in the middle of something.
Glorious took a different angle with the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay. Rather than chasing a single larger battery, the headset ships with two hot-swappable 85-hour battery packs and an internal Guardian Battery reserve that bridges the gap during the moment of the swap. The result is a headset that, in practical terms, never actually stops playing, because by the time one pack drains, the other is already charged and ready.
The system works through a dual-purpose charging base that also serves as the 2.4 GHz wireless dongle. One battery sits in the headset while the other charges on the base. When the depleted pack comes out and the charged one slots in, the Guardian Battery, which can run the headset independently for about 3 hours, has already kept audio uninterrupted through the swap. There’s no pause in sound and no drop in connection.
Combined, the two packs add up to more than 170 hours of capacity. For any kind of extended session, a long run at a tournament, a weekend of back-to-back play, or everyday use where charging gets forgotten, the swap-based approach removes the anxiety from the equation entirely. Swap the battery, put the depleted one on the dock, and carry on without another thought about it.
The headset is built around 40mm custom-tuned drivers angled to improve clarity and stereo imaging, covering a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz. The detachable boom microphone is noise-cancelling, and the ear cups use memory foam padding over a suspension headband that distributes the 360g weight across the top of the head. Connectivity covers both 2.4 GHz wireless for low-latency gaming and Bluetooth 5.4 for everything else, switchable with one button press.
That Bluetooth mode makes the headset practical outside the gaming setup too. Moving from a PC session to a phone call or a commute doesn’t require switching to a different pair of headphones. The same swap-and-go logic applies to any situation where the headset is living on your head for extended stretches, and the battery system works just as well whether you’re at a desk or out the door.
Most hot-swappable headsets at higher price points make the process awkward or require specific docking sequences. Glorious kept it simple enough to execute mid-session without missing a beat, which is ultimately the only version of this feature that actually matters. The GHS Wireless InfinitePlay is priced at $229.99 and comes in black and white. Both battery packs and the charging base are included in the box, so the whole swappable system is ready to go from day one, not sold separately as an add-on down the line.
Dedicated music players gradually faded from use once streaming apps turned every smartphone into an on-demand jukebox. Carrying a separate device for audio began to feel redundant. That attitude has slowly changed. Growing numbers of listeners, tired of notifications and algorithm-driven queues, have started reaching for standalone players again, ones that let music be the only thing competing for their attention.
The Hidizs AP30 Music Boy addresses that growing appetite, though it does so in a way that isn’t easy to overlook. Rather than adopting the clean, minimal aesthetic common to most digital audio players, it draws heavily from the visual language of retro handheld gaming. The result is a device that looks playful and compact but carries serious audio hardware inside.
Physical directional buttons and a 2.0-inch IPS display give the AP30 an immediately tactile quality that touchscreen-only devices often lack. The plastic version weighs just 56g, while the CNC aluminum edition comes in at 80g. A small whale motif on the back adds a quiet nod toward environmental awareness, giving the device one more detail that makes it memorable beyond the spec sheet.
The “wearable” part of the AP30’s pitch has practical implications. It clips to bag straps, hangs from a neck lanyard, or attaches magnetically to the back of a phone via an optional case, keeping it physically accessible during exercise, commutes, or any activity that doesn’t leave a free hand. Storage starts at 128GB built-in and expands to 256GB via a microSD slot.
Behind the gaming console’s exterior is a Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC paired with an RT6863 amplifier, supporting DSD256, PCM at 24-bit/192kHz, and lossless formats including FLAC, WAV, and ALAC. Everyday headphones connect to the 3.5mm single-ended output, while the 4.4mm balanced connection offers meaningfully stronger output for listeners using higher-end in-ear or over-ear monitors, with room to grow as their setup does.
Bluetooth 5.3 with LDAC handles wireless listening without much compromise in audio quality, and the USB-C port doubles as a DAC input for computers and phones. Connect it that way, and the AP30 draws its own power, sparing the host device’s battery. The 1,200mAh cell manages 10 to 12 hours of continuous playback in single-ended mode and charges back to full in about one hour.
HidizsOS, the player’s Linux-based operating system, keeps the interface focused entirely on music rather than apps or streaming services. Customizable EQ presets and switchable digital hardware filters give listeners control over how their music sounds, and a built-in block puzzle game is a fitting Easter egg on a device with this much retro DNA. Both plastic and aluminum editions retail at $129.
There’s no streaming service, no social feed, and no notification waiting to derail the listening session. The AP30 runs on a locally stored library and asks for nothing more than a decent pair of earphones. For anyone who’s ever put a phone on silent just to get an hour of uninterrupted music, it makes a compelling case for carrying two things instead of one.
Health apps and wearables have become remarkably precise at reading the human body. They can tell you how restorative last night’s sleep was, how stressed your body was during a presentation, and whether your recovery is on track after a hard week. What most of them don’t do, at least not in any concrete way, is hand you a tool to act on what they’ve just told you.
That’s the gap MobiFren founder and CEO Juwon Heo set out to address with the HealingFit TWS, a true wireless earbud built to go beyond standard listening. It earned a CES 2026 Innovation Awards recognition in Headphones and Personal Audio, but the more compelling aspect isn’t the accolade. It’s the design thinking underneath it, and what that thinking could mean for the broader world of digital health.
During normal use, HealingFit TWS functions as a premium pair of true wireless earbuds with Bluetooth 6.0, Hybrid ANC, and five tunable sound modes built on MobiFren’s own MSTS sound tuning system. The shift into wellness mode happens when you attach the Magnetic TES Link, a cable that snaps magnetically onto both earbuds. There’s no separate gadget involved, and no new category of hardware to carry.
TES, or Transcranial Electrical Stimulation, is a non-invasive approach widely studied in neuroscience. HealingFit TWS translates it into a controllable daily routine, running calibrated microcurrents through skin-contact electrodes built into each earbud. The intensity is adjustable across 15 levels, and most people describe the sensation as a subtle, rhythmic pulse. It’s designed to support the nervous system’s natural shift toward rest or focus, not force it there.
Three wellness modes organize the experience. Sleep is the bedtime routine, pairing TES with binaural audio tracks to help you gradually settle for the night. Healing is a shorter session for mid-afternoon or post-work moments when the day has felt relentless. Study is a focus-priming routine to run before anything demanding real concentration. Each mode comes with five dedicated tracks, though you can also layer TES over your own music.
That three-mode framework reads differently from the perspective of a digital health platform. Platforms like Samsung Health, Apple Health, Google Health, and Fitbit have become genuinely capable at detecting sleep quality, stress levels, recovery readiness, and daily activity. They generate scores, flag patterns, and surface recommendations. What they don’t typically offer is a connected, device-level way to act on those signals in the moment they appear.
HealingFit TWS addresses that with an open Bluetooth LE interface that developers and platform teams can connect to without a licensing fee or a proprietary SDK. The technical entry point is UUID 0xBE00, and documentation is publicly available through mobifrenglobal.com. The intent is clear: the earbud becomes the intervention hardware, while the app or platform provides the health context that determines when and which session a user might benefit from.
Think about what that could look like in practice. A sleep app detecting elevated pre-bed stress could suggest a Sleep session. A recovery platform flagging low readiness after a demanding training week could prompt a Healing routine. A focus tool that spots declining concentration before a deadline could surface the Study mode. In each case, the platform has done its analysis. HealingFit TWS handles what comes after.
The core architecture places a TES-generating circuit inside one earbud, with electrodes on the front of each earbud that contact the ear canal, and a TES Link cable that connects both earbuds. Detached, it functions as flagship-grade wireless earbuds; connected, it transforms into a wellness device designed to support sleep, stress relief, focus, and memory.
What makes the TES architecture appealing to hardware teams isn’t just the open API. The circuit that generates TES signals relies on entirely standard, commercially available components, totaling just 18 parts: a dual-transistor chip, one FET, and a set of RLC components. The earbud’s existing charging contacts also serve as the TES link contacts, so no extra contact points or major structural changes are needed.
The design has received formal IP recognition across multiple jurisdictions. The U.S. patent application covering the core architecture has been allowed and is proceeding to registration, with the patent expected to be granted soon. There are also registered patents in Korea and Japan, as well as a published application in Europe. FCC certification was granted on July 1, 2026.
Heo founded MobiFren in February 2002, originally as a contract developer for Samsung Electronics feature phones. The company started building its own Bluetooth audio products in 2005 and brought its first Bluetooth earphones to market in 2006. MobiFren has maintained an ongoing relationship with Samsung through smartphone software verification work ever since. That two-decade grounding in Bluetooth audio is what gives HealingFit TWS its engineering footing.
The choice to build this platform on earbuds specifically is, in that context, a deliberate one. Earbuds are already the personal technology closest to the human body for most of the waking day. They’re phone-paired, habitually worn, and typically owned by the same people most likely to be using a health app. Embedding TES therapy into a device people already carry daily removes most of the adoption barrier entirely.
The hardware reflects that audio-first foundation. Alongside the TES system, HealingFit TWS delivers up to 6.5 hours of playback and up to 4.5 hours in TES mode, with Hybrid ANC, three microphones per side, and wear detection for auto-pause when an earbud is removed. Both earbuds and the Magnetic TES Link cable dock in a cylindrical charging case finished in anodized aluminum, designed to carry without fuss.
What Heo is ultimately proposing is a platform category that doesn’t quite have a name yet. His comparison is to how true wireless earbuds, from AirPods to Galaxy Buds, turned personal audio into a mainstream daily habit. The longer ambition is for this patented TES architecture to be adopted into future products from those same companies, giving their health platforms a connected hardware layer for the signals they already detect.
The more compelling case might be for the health platforms themselves. Apple Health, Google Health, Samsung Health, and Fitbit have spent years becoming sophisticated at detecting when something is off: poor sleep, elevated stress, slow recovery. What they don’t yet widely offer is a hardware path from that detection to user-controlled action. HealingFit TWS was built to be exactly that path, and it’s open to anyone willing to test it.
That’s a bold bet, and the category he’s describing doesn’t fully exist yet. But HealingFit TWS makes a credible early case for it, with a patent-allowed architecture, open developer access, and a hardware design that doesn’t ask users to change anything about how they already carry and use earbuds every day.
Bang & Olufsen perfected the idea of audio equipment as art, creating speakers so sculptural and beautiful they demand to be looked at long before they are ever heard. This approach turned hi-fi systems into statement pieces, architectural elements that shape a room’s aesthetic just as much as they fill it with sound. The price for such artistry, however, often places it in the realm of museum-worthy gallery objects. A new design is taking a similar run at that “look at me” audio philosophy, finding its visual hook through an entirely different and arguably more dynamic method, without the five-figure price tag.
The MorningBlues SonicGlass A1 achieves its visual identity through engineered transparency. Instead of relying on exotic woods or polished aluminum, its beauty comes from revealing the inner workings of sound itself. The speaker’s main diaphragm is a sheet of clear glass, letting you watch the physical driver move and vibrate with the music. This turns the hardware into a performance, a living object that makes sound tangible. MorningBlues calls this “Visualized Music” – a vision where sound, lyrics, motion, and visuals become part of one unified experience rather than separate elements. It’s a clever way to create a decorative speaker that feels both technical and artistic, designed for people who appreciate seeing how their favorite things work.
This focus on a meaningful visual is a refreshing change of pace. We are, after all, intensely visual creatures. For decades, speaker companies have tried to give our eyes something to do while we listen, but the solutions have been uniformly uninspired. We’ve been served an endless buffet of dancing digital equalizers and pulsing RGB lights that flash along to the beat. These features feel disconnected from the soul of the music, reducing a complex song to a simple, repetitive light show. The SonicGlass A1 offers something far more compelling because it taps into the most human element of any track: the story.
It’s basically captions for your music, an idea so immediately brilliant it’s a wonder it took this long to happen. Let’s be honest, almost nobody watches movies anymore without subtitles. Between mumbled dialogue and our own fractured attention spans, seeing the words has become essential. The SonicGlass A1 applies that same logic to listening. It uses its 21.5-inch transparent display to make lyrics appear to float in mid-air, animating and shifting with the rhythm and mood of the song. You can finally catch that one line you’ve been mishearing for years or appreciate the poetry of a verse without breaking the spell to look at your phone.
The real magic here is that the display isn’t just a screen sitting behind glass; the glass is the speaker. The entire front panel is an ultra-thin German Schott glass diaphragm, which vibrates to create sound. This panel is moved by a powerful neodymium magnetic system, turning the whole assembly into a transparent driver. It’s a remarkable piece of acoustic engineering that makes the visual effect feel earned, not tacked on. The transparency goes beyond just the surface, revealing the acoustic movement behind every note and creating a direct, physical link between what you hear and what you see.
This commitment to engineering extends to the audio quality. Inside the sealed enclosure are dual 4-inch full-range drivers powered by a pair of 80W Class-D amplifiers, delivering clean, room-filling stereo sound. The design prioritizes clarity and a balanced, natural reproduction, ensuring vocals are crisp and instruments feel distinct. It also features three different tuning modes, allowing you to tailor the sound profile to your room or your mood. It’s a system designed to prove that a speaker built around a visual novelty can also be a genuinely capable piece of hi-fi equipment.
While the speaker is a stunning object on its own, its personality is shaped through the MorningBlues smartphone app. This is the creative command center where you control the entire visual experience. The app’s “Lyric Lab” lets you customize the fonts, effects, and animations of the floating lyrics, tailoring them to your exact taste. It’s also where you can access the more futuristic AI features, like generating a music video for a favorite song or using a Face Swap tool to put yourself in the performance. For quieter moments, the app lets you display personal photos and videos or choose from a library of mindful meditation scenes, turning the speaker into a dynamic digital canvas.
If the app is the creative hub, the optional Music Hub is the tactile command deck for your entire audio ecosystem. This physical controller is a serious piece of kit, designed to manage your listening experience with dedicated controls. It features a prominent vocal removal button that instantly preps any song for karaoke. More impressively, it acts as a bridge to your existing audio gear, allowing you to pair the SonicGlass A1 with up to three other Bluetooth speakers from any brand. With its own enhanced audio decoding, the Hub ensures all connected speakers sound their best while giving you a single, elegant interface to control your multi-room setup.
This transforms the speaker from a standalone device into a social centerpiece. The combination of easy vocal removal and synchronized lyrics makes it an incredibly fun and intuitive karaoke machine. It’s an artful object for your daily listening, a conversation-starting decor piece when it’s quiet, and an interactive entertainment system when you have friends over. It’s one of the few devices that feels equally at home providing background music for a quiet evening or being the main event at a party.
The standard retail price for the SonicGlass A1 Lyric Speaker is $999. For its launch, MorningBlues is offering a super early bird price of $649. Several bundles are also available to build out a more complete system. A Stereo Pair of two speakers is offered at $1,299, down from a retail of $1,998. The Smart Audio Bundle, which includes one speaker and the Music Hub controller, is available for $849. For those looking to go all-in on the social features, a Karaoke Special bundle includes the speaker, the Music Hub, and a microphone for $879.
Pop open the case of the FreeClip 2 S and the first thing you notice has nothing to do with earbuds. There is room in there. Real, usable room, enough that Huawei is telling people to drop in a ring or a small pendant alongside the buds themselves. It sounds like a gimmick until you remember how much time people spend fumbling through bags looking for both their earbuds and their jewelry, and how rarely any company bothers to solve two small annoyances with one redesigned object.
Speaking of space, Huawei found room inside the earbuds too, in the form of spatial audio with dynamic head tracking. It is a feature typically reserved for sealed designs that can isolate sound and rebuild a convincing sense of space around it, and pulling it off on an open-ear bud is a genuinely difficult engineering problem, one most competitors have sidestepped rather than solved. That sits alongside dual 10.8mm drivers, an AI NPU handling adaptive sound, tri-mic call noise cancellation, and IP57 water resistance. Priced around 229 euros globally, with a discounted window running through August 21, 2026, the FreeClip 2 S treats itself as jewelry first and tech second, at least in how Huawei wants you to see it, while quietly pushing open-ear audio further than most of its rivals have dared.
Designer: Huawei
The case redesign alone signals a shift in how Huawei thinks about this product category. Gone is the AirPods style shell that defined the original FreeClip 2, replaced by something almost spherical, larger, and finished in a mirrored metallic coating that photographs like a compact rather than a charging dock. Huawei says the new shape offers 20 percent more internal volume, and rather than leave that space empty, the company built a whole marketing angle around filling it with small accessories. The bundled partnership with French costume jewelry brand Les Néréides makes that pitch explicit, pairing the earbuds with an actual piece of jewelry for buyers who opt into the launch bundle. It is an unusual move for an earbuds case, treating it as a personal object rather than a functional afterthought.
Underneath that redesigned shell, the earbuds themselves got quieter but meaningful updates. Huawei softened the C-bridge by 25 percent and smoothed out the grooves that ran along its surface, chasing a cleaner look and a gentler fit against the ear. The Comfort Bean shape carries over from the original FreeClip 2, still built using data pulled from over 10,000 ear samples worldwide. Each earbud weighs just 5.1 grams, light enough that the open-ear format keeps its core promise of all day wear without the fatigue that sealed buds can cause after a few hours.
Spatial audio remains the headline feature, and for good reason. Dynamic head tracking works best when a sealed fit lets software control exactly what the listener hears, which is why brands like Apple and Sony have largely kept the feature locked to their isolating designs. Huawei pairing it with dual 10.8mm diaphragm drivers and reverse sound wave technology, aimed at cutting down on audio leakage, suggests an attempt to close that gap without sacrificing the open-ear comfort that made the FreeClip line popular in the first place. Whether the tracking feels responsive in real use is something only hands on testing will confirm.
Huawei launched the FreeClip 2 S globally out of Malaysia alongside the Pura 90s series, positioning both as flagship efforts rather than incremental updates. At roughly 221 dollars, the earbuds undercut several open-ear rivals while adding a feature set that reads more like a premium sealed bud’s spec sheet. If the head tracking holds up under real world use, Huawei may have found a way to make open-ear audio feel a lot less like a compromise.
Tiny Vinyl is the industry leader when it comes to, well, you guessed it right, tiny vinyl records. These records can be played on most 33⅓rpm turntables and are pure joy simply for their cute quotient. The company introduced its 4-inch records (one-third the size of a standard vinyl record) last year, which can be played on a standard manual turntable. These records store two songs – one on each side – and the audio community has taken these pocket records pretty seriously. Most of these vinyls are officially licensed by big artists who choose their best two songs to go on the vinyl. The miniature records are highly collectible but can only play on a seemingly bigger platter, so where is the fun in that?
After selling their millionth Tiny Vinyl in just a year, the fans and Target wanted the brand to come up with a versatile and small record player. For this reason, the company has now introduced a dedicated TINY Vinyl Player to play music from those tiny records. No bigger than a shoebox, the turntable is built from the ground up, given its small size. Everything, right from the tone arm and platter to the control panel, was designed from scratch. The only two components from standard component manufacturers are the cartridge and needle.
What we see here is a turntable that’s ultra-portable, specifically designed to play 4-inch vinyls, and definitely a conversation starter. According to co-founders Jesse Mann and Neil Kohler, the shrunk-down turntable opens up the possibility of owning a record player for the music-loving community who otherwise cannot afford to buy the traditional decks. According to Jesse Mann, “These new products give music fans and collectors everything they need to build out their own little Tiny Vinyl universe, a setup as fun and personal as the music they love.”
The only downside, though, is that they can only play the tiny vinyl records, and if we’re all in for the complete album collections, they are a bit of a handful. Another major consideration is the slight compromise in audio quality coming from the small speakers. That said, the duo from Nashville has access to the pro music industry peers, and they’ve used this to build the Tiny Vinyl Turntable for maximum user satisfaction. Once they got past the initial drawings, the next big challenge was to design the built-in speakers and Bluetooth sync. But the biggest of them all was to calibrate the revolutions per minute to 33⅓rpm to play the music at perfect speed.
The portable turntable can stream music to Bluetooth speakers or headphones if the built-in speakers don’t tingle your senses. You could go for the wired option as well for better audio dynamics. Tiny Vinyl has gone a step further by integrating a storage slot beside the platter to hold up to five records of choice. For those planning to expand the collection of Mini Vinyls, there’s also the option of getting the vinyl storage cabinet called Crate, which sits right underneath the turntable. There’s a third accessory in the mix as well, dubbed Frame, which can be used to display four Tiny Vinyl albums on the wall. The Tiny Vinyl Turntable available at Target costs $50, while the Crate and Frame are priced at $20 and $15, respectively. The UK launch is slated for Autumn, so better watch out!
