Tag Archives: Music

km5’s Sp1 Speaker and Mp1 Mixer Give CD Listening a DJ-Style Twist

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There’s something satisfying about choosing a CD, even if most of us have become accustomed to tapping a screen instead. The trouble is finding audio equipment you’d actually want to leave on display. km5’s newly announced Sp1 speaker and Mp1 mixer give its Cp1 CD player some equally minimalist company, letting you listen to favorite albums or try your hand at mixing them.

Both borrow the Cp1’s flat, frame-like format, with black or white finishes that let the pieces sit together without looking like an assortment of unrelated electronics. The Sp1 puts a perforated grille where the player displays its disc, while the Mp1 fills that space with knobs and sliders. They share the same size, but each makes its purpose clear through its front surface.

Designer: km5

The speaker has a few surprises behind that otherwise quiet appearance. A dot-matrix display sits beneath the grille, showing the time and playback information without carving out a separate screen on the front. Physical buttons occupy the top edge alongside a retractable metal antenna. That last detail gives away the Sp1’s other role as an FM radio that doesn’t need to borrow your phone.

Inside are two 1.77-inch full-range drivers and two passive radiators, though their presence alone doesn’t tell us how convincing the bass will be. Bluetooth and microSD playback offer other ways to listen, and you can record radio programs, too. Pairing two Sp1 units provides stereo playback, letting a single speaker become part of a larger arrangement rather than something you’ve outgrown.

The Mp1, meanwhile, invites you to do something with the music beyond pressing play. Its two channels have separate level sliders, with a crossfader below for blending between sources. Three-band EQ controls adjust the bass, midrange, and treble, while filters change the sound further. Loop buttons repeat sections of a track, giving a favorite passage permission to stick around a little longer.

Two Bluetooth inputs let the mixer receive music from sources such as a Cp1 and a smartphone, then send the combined sound wirelessly to a compatible speaker. You aren’t required to own an entire matching set, thankfully. Line inputs and outputs also accommodate wired connections, though the published information doesn’t establish how much delay the completely wireless arrangement introduces when you’re trying to mix.

Built-in batteries make it easier to move the arrangement away from a desk, with km5 quoting approximately 12 hours for the speaker and six for the mixer. Optional wall-mount accessories offer another way to free up a surface. The mixer can even be operated on the wall, an unusual invitation to get up from the sofa and fiddle with the music yourself.

Preorders are scheduled to open on November 16, 2026, with km5 expecting shipments in February 2027 or later, though pricing remains unconfirmed. There’s also a practical limit to that portable party setup. The speaker’s quoted battery life is twice the mixer’s, so it might be ready for another album when your DJ booth is looking for a charger.

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Daft Punk’s iconic Coachella pyramid stage is becoming an official LEGO set in 2027

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Daft Punk’s debut album Homework turns 30 on January 20, 2027, and the robots have picked a pretty good year to show up in LEGO form. That record gave us “Da Funk,” “Revolution 909,” and “Around the World,” a song that repeats its own title 144 times and somehow never gets old. Building something out of one element over and over is pretty much LEGO’s whole thing, so the match was always sitting there. On October 22, LEGO and Daft Punk finally made it official with a brand new partnership. Its first product is a set based on the pyramid stage that glowed over the duo’s Alive tour, arriving in 2027.

The set traces back to Patrick Harboun, a Luxembourgish builder who grew up playing Homework on his Walkman. In 2020, he and his then 8-year-old son built a brick version of the pyramid during lockdown, and it won the Grand Prize in LEGO Ideas’ Music to Our Ears challenge. A box set didn’t follow, so they resubmitted it in 2024, hit 10,000 supporters in 2025, and spent about a year in LEGO’s review Parking Lot. That wait ended this week, and LEGO’s designers are now reworking the fan build into a retail set. I’ve been rooting for this box since I first saw the MOC in 2024, so forgive me for feeling a little smug.

Designers: Patrick Harboun (Robotrock) & LEGO Design Team

The real pyramid debuted on April 29, 2006, inside Coachella’s Sahara Tent, a space built for 10,000 people that roughly 40,000 tried to squeeze into. Martin Phillips of the LA production company Bionic League designed it, taking cues from the “Technologic” music video he had also worked on. The funny part is that Phillips used no bespoke technology at all, building the towering structure from off-the-shelf Barco OLite LED panels. Standard parts, clever assembly, legendary result, which honestly sounds like a LEGO tagline. The pyramid then toured the world as Alive 2006/2007, and the Grammy-winning Alive 2007 album was recorded under it at Paris-Bercy in June 2007.

Harboun’s original Daft Punk Concert MOC (My Own Creation, in LEGO-speak) recreates that stage in roughly 2,000 pieces, with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo perched at their console in custom robot helmets. Triangles are famously awkward for a system built on right angles, and Harboun admitted that making all those angles click took some creative problem-solving. His son built the first prototype from bricks lying around the house, and Harboun expanded it digitally from there. The helmets were a gray area at the time, since LEGO had never sold official Daft Punk minifigures. The duo had only appeared in brick form in Pharrell’s LEGO-animated biopic Piece by Piece, which Harboun happily pointed to as a loophole.

My favorite detail, though, is the motorized core, where a spinning box of transparent bricks and a set of dangling lights fake the shifting LED patterns of the real pyramid. That one trick does two jobs. It stands in for the stage’s entire video rig, and it delivers on Harboun’s original goal of simulating what he called LEGO’s upcoming Night Mode. LEGO has said the retail set will differ from the fan submission, so the final details are still anyone’s guess. I’m crossing my fingers that the spinning core survives the trip from MOC to box.

This will be the first physical LEGO Daft Punk set, following the duo’s digital debut as minifigures and a music-reactive pyramid kit in LEGO Fortnite in 2025. LEGO’s Julia Goldin called the partnership “just the beginning of a bigger journey,” with more content and brand experiences promised alongside the set. Price, set number, piece count, minifigures, and regional availability, including the US, are all still unannounced. Daft Punk’s creative director Cédric Hervet described the pyramid as “one of the most recognizable expressions of Daft Punk’s visual world,” so at least everyone agrees on the centerpiece. Thirty years after Homework, the robots finally have some building homework of their own.

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This porcelain Pioneer DJ setup belongs in a museum, not an Ibiza nightclub

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David Guetta just won DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs poll for a record sixth time, and I have a very specific idea for his trophy shelf. Somebody on the internet has turned a Pioneer DJ setup into Korean blue-and-white porcelain, tigers and all. Two decks and a four-channel mixer, glazed bone white and hand-painted (well, AI-painted) in cobalt blue. It looks like something you’d find behind glass at the Met, right before a security guard asks you to step back. It’s also the most Guetta-coded object I’ve seen all year, because a guy who headlines weekly Ibiza residencies deserves a rig that looks as expensive as the bottle service.

The setup comes from creators patchkims and takitani.lab, who posted it as the “Joseon Baekja Prototype,” complete with a “1 of 1, no restock” caption that reads like a sneaker drop. It’s an AI render, so nobody’s shipping it to Guetta’s villa anytime soon. The idea still lands, though. Each jog wheel carries a tiger and a magpie under a pine tree, lifted straight from Korean folk painting, and the screens swap waveforms for misty mountains and waterfalls. Suddenly your DJ gear graduates from booth equipment to living room centerpiece, which is a fun flex for anyone, let alone the world’s No. 1 DJ.

Designers: patchkims & takitani.lab

Kkachi horangi is a genre of Korean folk painting where a deliberately goofy tiger, nicknamed the idiot tiger, plays the aristocratic yangban, and a smug magpie in a pine tree speaks for the common people. Both jog wheels here carry that exact scene, with the cat prowling below and the bird looking unbothered above. The two decks get different tiger poses, so the platters work like a call and response. Joseon painters used the setup to poke fun at the ruling class, and now it sits under the palms of whoever runs the dance floor. That is either delicious irony or very on-brand for a king of the booth.

The screens trade waveforms for misty peaks, a waterfall, a pavilion, and a pair of moons, echoing Irworobongdo, the sun, moon and five peaks painting that stood behind the king’s throne in Joseon palaces. The sun and moon stood for the king and queen, so the painting doubled as a majesty backdrop. A headliner on a raised stage occupies similar real estate, so the throne comparison writes itself. The original sun burned red, and going cobalt turns it into a second moon, which suits a room that wakes up after midnight. Calling a DJ booth a throne room is a stretch, but watch a stadium crowd hang on a Guetta build-up and the royalty comparison stops feeling silly.

Joseon Korea made white its signature after the green celadon era of Goryeo, and cobalt-painted porcelain sat at the top of the pile. The pigment was rare and imported from China, so when supply dried up, court kilns improvised with iron-brown, and some banquet wares wore painted imitations of blue-and-white called gahwa, literally fake painting. A porcelain Pioneer rig conjured by AI is a 2026 gahwa, a convincing stand-in for an object nobody has actually fired in a kiln. I’m weirdly fine with that, because the Joseon court got there first. Meanwhile, Christie’s has estimated a genuine 15th-century cobalt jar at roughly $2 million to $3 million, so the real thing sets the bar high.

The real-world version of this lineup runs two AlphaTheta CDJ-3000X players at $2,999 each plus a Pioneer DJ DJM-A9 mixer at $2,899, roughly $8,900 in the US. The render looks closer to the older CDJ-2000NXS2 generation, disc slots and all. Pioneer did sell a limited white CDJ-2000NXS2-W run in 2017, so colorway flexes are old news for the brand. I imagine if such a product were to exist, it would probably cost in the hundreds of thousands. That being said, I’m sure an enthusiastic deejay with money to throw could acquire this for their den. Guetta, SHM, heck even Shaq… I’m looking at y’all.

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This 2,680-piece LEGO AKAI tape deck is my kind of analog nostalgia

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Owning a reel-to-reel deck in the 1970s meant owning a piece of furniture you could not move alone. The Akai PRO-1000 came in two boxes, with published specs putting the drive unit at about 62 pounds and the amplifier at about 22. That is roughly 85 pounds of hi-fi, which explains why one UK dealer listing recommends collecting in person or booking a pallet. People bought these anyway, because a machine with two huge spinning reels announced to every guest that you took music seriously. Nobody ever put a reel-to-reel in a closet. Now there is a version you could carry to the couch without calling a friend, made of 2,680 LEGO parts.

That version is the AKAI PRO 1000 Open Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck, a LEGO Ideas project from Zo Lee that has already picked up a Staff Pick badge. The original was a semi-professional machine from the late 1970s that sold mainly in the US, Canada, and Japan, with a 1977 US price of $1,995. Its two boxes were joined by three cables, so owners could park them side by side or stack them, and the LEGO version takes the stacked route. At about 17 inches tall, 11 wide, and 6.3 deep (43 x 29 x 16 cm), it is a compact take on an original roughly 19 inches across. Finally, a hi-fi flex that does not need a pallet.

Designer: Zo Lee

Here is the party trick: the thing moves. A motor turns the reels, the VU meters swing along with them, and the big knobs rotate under your fingers. A removable grid on top lifts off to hold a LEGO battery, so the deck can sit anywhere on the shelf without hunting for a wall outlet. The reels were the first thing every guest stared at on the real machine, so making them the star of the show is exactly right. Powering it up is its own small concert, minus the music.

Zo Lee describes the build as extremely difficult, and the list of headaches reads like a boss fight. The odd quarter-distance spacing between tiles, the big reels with all those cutout windows, and an internal frame that has to hold the outer casing each took plenty of brainstorming. Getting that same frame to drive the reels and meters took lots more attempts, per the creator. The payoff shows in the renders: gray reels with dark red cutouts, black knobs with colored pointers, tiny transport labels like CUE, PAUSE, and REC, and a tape counter parked on 977. From a few feet away, the front panel reads like actual hardware, which is the whole point of a shrunken replica.

My favorite detail, though, is the pair of VU meters, which Zo Lee says swing in sync with the reels, but asymmetrically. I am guessing the same motor drives both, which would mean the needles twitch like they are reacting to a song instead of marching in lockstep. That one choice fakes live audio, hides a mechanism behind two amber faces, and probably saves the builder a second motor. It also slots the deck into a neat lineage of LEGO Ideas audio gear, next to Tomasso Builds’ Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable and Headlight Bricks’ Sony Walkman. Reel-to-reel is the format that came before the Walkman’s cassette, and it has the most dramatic moving parts of the lot.

The deck currently sits at 527 supporters on LEGO Ideas, with the next milestone at 1K and 396 days left to get there. Ideas works like this: fans submit builds, supporters pile up, and LEGO reviews the ones that reach the threshold. The Staff Pick badge is a nice head start, but the votes have to come from people like you, so head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote. Every supporter helps push this toward an actual box. Get it there and you can finally own a reel-to-reel deck without recruiting three friends and a hand truck.

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You now pair your old iPod with AirPods thanks to this Motherboard swap

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When Jobs pitched the iTunes Music Store to studio execs, he pointed at Napster as the model. Napster won because it was easy, so Jobs set out to build something just as easy that was also legal. The result was a marketplace for individual tracks, or ‘singles,’ which pretty much rewired the audio business, and the iPod (already on shelves since 2001) became the pocket for it. More than two decades later, the iPod is making a comeback. Sure, the retro wave is real, and a new generation wants music without TikTok notifications, but that same crowd also wants to live through an era when music could be owned, stored, and played offline.

The catch is that an iPod plays audio just fine (if you can find a working one), but it can’t talk to Apple’s own AirPods. Sprout, a new replacement motherboard from London studio Certain Things, fixes that for the iPod 3rd generation, 4th generation, and iPod mini, and AirPods bring their noise cancellation with them. The case, screen, and wheel stay exactly as Apple made them, while USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, and a microSD slot for up to 2TB join the party. That 2TB works out to roughly 500,000 songs, which is a lot of owning. A Crowd Supply campaign is coming, with pricing still TBA.

Designer: Certain Things

Same Body, New Brain, Zero Soldering

Sprout’s board is cut to the shape of Apple’s original, a flex that tells you how much homework went into this. It measures 2.19 x 3.86 x 0.06 inches (55.5 x 98.0 x 1.6mm) on the 3rd and 4th generation, and the mini board is even slimmer. You open the iPod with a screwdriver and a plastic pry tool, lift out the old board, and reconnect the original ribbon cables to the new one. The monochrome LCD is driven natively, so the screen looks like it always did, chunky pixels included. Installed, the whole thing weighs less than the original iPod, which is a sentence nobody expects to write about a mod.

Zac Builds soldered a generic Bluetooth transmitter into an iPod Video’s headphone circuit, which works but asks for steady hands and a tolerance for tiny wires. Boxy Pixel’s kit needs hardly any soldering and keeps Apple’s motherboard in play, but its machined aluminum shell with glass panels costs $155 plus $13 for buttons and switches. The finished iPod also comes out chunkier than the original, which is a fair trade for haptic feedback and wireless charging but a hard sell for purists. Sprout takes the invisible route, where the iPod looks untouched and only the internals know what happened. For anyone who loved how these things looked in the early 2000s, that keeps the nostalgia fully intact.

Bluetooth, a Proper DAC, and Two Flavors of Sprout

Bluetooth is the headline, and it lets AirPods and any other wireless headphones or speakers pair with an iPod 3G, 4G, or mini. Wired listeners get a CS43131-class DAC from Cirrus Logic, the chip that turns digital audio into the analog signal your headphones play, feeding the original 3.5mm jack. Files drag and drop over USB-C in MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, or Opus, so iTunes never gets invited to the party. The 3rd and 4th generation boards target 40 hours of continuous Bluetooth playback on a 2,500mAh cell, a full workweek of desk listening between charges. The mini aims for 20 hours on a 1,200mAh cell, and a microSD slot up to 2TB retires the aging hard drive.

Sprout Pico runs on a Raspberry Pi RP2350, a small microcontroller that wakes instantly, and plays your own library and Wi-Fi podcast downloads on all three iPods. Sprout Pi, offered for the 3rd and 4th generation, adds a Compute Module Zero, a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, for Spotify, Apple Music, AirPlay, and custom apps. The studio calls the streaming features working proofs of concept as of September 2026, so launch features may differ. The firmware is written from scratch and adds Cover Flow, a 2007 Apple trick, to a monochrome iPod, alongside Podcasts and Search. On Sprout Pi, a Linux computer hides underneath, and demo clips labeled apps show a classic Mac and a PlayStation.

Open Source Gives Sprout Legs

Schematics, board layouts, and the bill of materials (the full parts list) will be released under CERN-OHL-S v2, while firmware lands under MPL-2.0 and documentation under CC BY 4.0. That documentation includes reverse-engineering notes on the iPod’s display, click wheel, and headphone connectors, so the next tinkerer starts with a map. All of it is due on GitHub before the campaign ends, so anyone can poke at it. Guy Dupont’s 2021 sPot is the obvious ancestor, a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside a 4th generation iPod that streamed Spotify but kept only the case and click wheel. Sprout keeps the original monochrome screen and a working headphone jack, which turns a clever one-off into a repeatable design.

Moonlit Market’s Classic Connect 2 covers the 5th, 6th, and 7th generation, so the 3rd, 4th, and mini finally get their own project. Sudo, the $249 player betting on a wheel and a library you own, is a new device built to feel old, while Sprout is an old one made to behave new. You supply the iPod (cheaper in these overlooked generations), and no price or ship date has been announced. Launch updates are available through Sprout’s Crowd Supply page, where the project is listed as launching soon. Jobs sold the world on easy, legal music you could own, and the best way to keep that promise now might be an old iPod with a new brain.

 

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Someone Turned the Beats Pill Into a Diglett, and Now the Official Pikachu Version Looks Boring

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Pokémon turned 30 this year, and every brand with a product page seems to want a slice of the cake. Polaroid’s Pokémon cameras and the Fitbit Air Pokémon Sleep edition came first, and now Beats has joined in with a Pill. The speaker launched October 15 at $149.99 with Pikachu and Mimikyu across the grille, a gray body, and a Poké Ball charm on a matching lanyard. It’s a perfectly nice object. I’ll confess, though, that I looked at that gray capsule and thought a better Pokémon was sitting right there.

Courtyard.io shared a concept that makes the case, and it turns the Pill into Diglett. The brown grille wears glossy black eyes and a raised pink nose, and the whole thing rises out of a sculpted pile of gray rocks like it just popped out of a tunnel. A second render stacks three Pills into a Dugtrio on one shared mound. Diglett has been a capsule with a face since 1996, so this is the rare mashup where nobody has to squint. Consider this my case that the Pill’s best Pokémon was Gen 1 all along.

Designer: Courtyard_io

Diglett already has the Pill’s silhouette

Diglett is a head on a mound, which makes it a capsule with a face. Courtyard.io’s render keeps the Pill’s rounded cylinder untouched and wraps it in a clay brown grille, so the perforated mesh reads like packed soil. The Beats “b” sits low on the body in copper, just above the rocks, and the three-quarter shot shows the lighter tan side band running down the edge like a seam in the dirt. Nothing about the form had to bend to fit the character. That almost never happens in a collab, and it is the reason this concept looks so convincing at first glance.

The official Pokémon x Beats Pill takes the opposite route. It keeps a gray body, prints Pikachu and Mimikyu on the grille, and adds a Poké Ball charm, the first charm Beats has ever bundled with a Pill. That is a graphic on a speaker, and a handsome one. Beats has also done character Pills before, a history Apple’s Oliver Schusser cited when the 2024 model launched. A Diglett Pill would simply bring that idea back with a Pokémon attached, which is a much shorter walk than it sounds.

The glossy eyes, the pink nose, and a rock base that doubles as a stand

The grille is matte and finely perforated, while the eyes and nose are glossy, raised pieces that catch the light like a vinyl toy. That sheen difference gives the face a collectible-figure look without a single printed graphic. The rock base adds a third texture, a pebbly gray sculpt that gives the speaker something to stand in and sells the burrow illusion. Courtyard.io embossed its name into one of the boulders, which is a tidy way to sign your work. Every surface has a job, and none of them are shouting.

Picture the real hardware under that mesh. The 2024 Pill claims 24 hours of battery, so a Diglett could play through a full backyard party and still have juice for the next morning’s coffee. Its IP67 rating means dust-tight and able to survive a dunk in about three feet of water for 30 minutes, which suits a Pokémon that lives in dirt. At 680 grams (about 1.5 pounds), it is light enough to carry out to the garden. A speaker that hangs out in the flowerbed makes more sense to me than a gray one with a Poké Ball dangling off it.

The Dugtrio render and what Pokémon collabs could learn from it

The Dugtrio render stacks three Pills on a single rock mound, each with its own startled face and copper “b.” Beats currently pairs two Pills at a time, in Amplify Mode for more volume or Stereo Mode for left and right separation, so the third head would need a firmware update and a little optimism. At the official Pill’s $149.99, three speakers come to $449.97, which is one and a half pairs of the PUMA Suede Pikachu at $300 each. Dugtrio’s whole identity is being three Diglett, which makes it the one Pokémon where buying three speakers feels like a feature. I’d happily make that trade for a bookshelf trio that gets guests asking questions.

Most of the recent Pokémon collabs work by decoration. Polaroid wrapped a camera in Poké Ball patterns, Fitbit added a sleeping Pikachu label, PUMA bent a Formstrip into a bolt, and Beats printed two characters on a grille, all of it charming and most of it surface treatment. Courtyard.io’s Diglett goes the other direction by letting the object’s own shape do the talking, and the renders live on Courtyard.io’s X page for anyone who wants a closer look. The franchise has had a capsule-shaped character since 1996, and Beats has had a capsule-shaped speaker since 2012, so this introduction was overdue. Pikachu will always sell, but Diglett would get the laugh.

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A Bamboo Music Center Spans Up to 49 Feet Without Columns

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A column in the middle of a music hall means someone has to look around it. That’s a practical problem to solve before worrying about how dramatic the ceiling looks. At the Maestro Ilaiyaraaja Centre for Music Learning and Research in Chennai, India, Ekarth Studio uses bamboo vaults to create spans of up to 49 feet without interior columns. The structure makes room for people to gather, while giving them a roof worth looking up at.

The completed, 10,000-square-foot center at IIT Madras addresses another challenge: bringing music education, research, rehearsal, and recording into one setting. Named for composer Ilaiyaraaja, it belongs to the university’s “Music for All” initiative, whose research interests include acoustics, artificial intelligence, sound synthesis, and instrument design. That’s an unusually broad assignment for a music building. It needs places for focused work, but also room for different disciplines to meet without every encounter becoming a scheduled appointment.

Designer: Ekarth Studio

The roofs give those activities a recognizable home. Ekarth Studio drew their geometry from Bel Patra, the three-part leaf associated with Lord Shiva. Interconnected vaults translate that reference into canopies that rise, dip, and extend over the spaces below. I like that the inspiration has a specific cultural origin. A music center with a curving roof could easily attract a vague explanation about sound waves, but this one has a more deliberate starting point.

Those curves also involve some serious assembly. The studio describes a structural system combining round bamboo culms, bundled splits, and bundled sticks. Flat bamboo splits are gathered together to form the primary spine beams, rather than relying on a single solid member. Arches reach nearly 30 feet high. The useful distinction is that bamboo carries the roof and establishes its shape. Calling it a decorative finish would miss the most interesting decision in the project.

Leaving that construction exposed gives the interiors their character. Ekarth’s material palette includes treated bamboo, lime-based finishes, earthen surfaces, natural-fiber roofing, and handcrafted bamboo weaving. The studio also leaves the bamboo’s connections visible. I’m drawn to buildings that let you follow how they were assembled. Here, the repetition of individual pieces gives the large roof forms a finer scale, so the architecture offers more to examine than its outline from a distance.

The exterior photographs show roof edges sweeping outward above bamboo lattice screens, with trees close to the pavilions. The small, regular openings in those screens contrast with the broad curves overhead. They make the enclosure look less abrupt than a blank wall would. Ekarth’s plan connects classrooms and other spaces with courtyards and shaded outdoor areas, giving the center an architectural relationship with its surroundings that goes beyond putting landscaping around a finished building.

The people who assembled it deserve attention, too. According to the studio’s account, artisans split, bent, bundled, and joined the bamboo primarily with basic carpentry tools, while structural engineering adapted those processes for an institutional building. Ekarth reports an 11-month construction period with limited use of heavy machinery. That timeline is noteworthy, but I’d give equal billing to the craft. Its contribution remains legible in the finished architecture rather than disappearing behind another surface.

A beautiful bamboo structure doesn’t, by itself, establish how well a recording room isolates sound or how comfortable the building stays throughout the year. Those are separate performance questions, and the published project descriptions don’t provide measurements that settle them. The same restraint applies to sustainability. Natural materials and a less machinery-intensive construction process are choices worth discussing, but they aren’t enough to calculate the building’s environmental footprint or long-term maintenance demands.

Even with those questions open, the design gives me a clear reason to pay attention. The central amphitheater-like gathering space puts rehearsal, performance, and collective learning beneath the same expressive structure. That feels like an appropriate investment for a music center: a memorable room whose defining gesture also keeps its floor open. The ceiling earns its visual complexity by leaving more usable space underneath, where the people and the music belong.

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Retro Song Bird Is the Record Player Game Boy Cartridges Deserved

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Game Boy cartridges usually wait in a drawer until you feel like playing something again. But sometimes it’s the music you miss, not the game. Retro Song Bird gives those little plastic rectangles a different job: slot one into the top of a tabletop player, and it finds the soundtrack for you. No screen, no level to beat, just the tunes you remember.

The idea works because the cartridge remains the thing you choose. Instead of scrolling through a library of files, you pull a favorite from a shelf and plug it in. The prototype’s compact, translucent green housing makes room for a top-mounted slot, a front speaker grille, and simple controls along the side. It behaves a bit like a tiny stereo with chunky albums.

Designer: BJ (Bird Cartel Games) via Retro Dodo

It doesn’t play a stored recording from the cart. Retro Song Bird reads parts of the game’s code and recreates the music using an emulation of the Game Boy sound hardware. Its developer says the system maps more than 1,900 games, though that figure isn’t a tested compatibility list. You can skip between tracks and sound effects without having to play through them.

That makes it suited to the hours when you want a soundtrack but don’t want another screen demanding attention. Let it play through its built-in speaker while you’re working, or connect the stereo line output to your speakers. A melody that once accompanied a difficult boss fight can fill the room on its own, even if you never pick up a controller.

The cartridge slot also turns the player into an archive station. It can back up and restore save data, copy game ROMs, and export music as WAV files. That’s useful if you’ve kept a childhood save that feels too precious to lose. Rather than treating games as sealed collectibles, the design makes it easier to listen to and preserve what’s still inside them.

Musicians can go further. The Game Boy’s four sound channels appear as separate USB audio streams, ready to bring into music software for rearranging or sampling. You could start with a melody you recognize, then hear what happens when the square waves and noise part ways. The same cartridge that entertained you after school becomes a set of sounds to work with.

There’s even room for a wonderfully impractical detour. Insert a Game Boy Camera, connect the device to a computer, and it can serve as a USB webcam at 128×112 pixels, in four shades of gray. Alarm mode can wake you with a cartridge’s music, too. Neither feature is why this box exists, but both show how versatile that slot can be.

For now, Retro Song Bird remains a prototype, with shipping targeted for late 2026 and no listed price. Its mint-green housing may change before release. What makes the idea stick is choosing a cartridge for how it sounds rather than how it plays. A game can take a turn on the stereo without demanding another afternoon in front of a screen.

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Pink Floyd has never gotten a LEGO set. This fan built the one everyone’s been waiting for

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Fifty one years. That’s how long Wish You Were Here has been sitting in the canon, selling something like 20 million copies, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and generally being the album your dad puts on when he wants you to know he had a personality before you were born. In that same window, LEGO has given us a Fender Stratocaster, a Rolling Stones tongue, a Beatles mosaic, an Elvis portrait, and a grand piano that talks to your phone. Pink Floyd? Nothing. Not a brick. The band that basically invented album art as a medium, and LEGO has never once picked up the phone.

Funny enough, we’ve seen this exact gap close before. Back in 2020 we covered a scrappy little fan-made Stratocaster MOC chasing votes on LEGO Ideas, and a year later it was sitting on shelves as an official 1,074-piece retail set. Rustiest_Brick is running the same play now, except instead of a guitar he’s rebuilt the most famous handshake in rock history, one businessman calmly on fire, framed like a museum piece. Early days, sure, but so was the Strat once.

Designer: Rustiest_Brick

Two brick-built figures, roughly BrickHeadz-scale but fully posed and articulated, clasp hands in front of a glossy black tiled wall, one in cool grey, the other in a black suit with a white shirt and skinny tie. Trans-orange and amber flame pieces erupt off his shoulder, back and hat, and because they’re semi-transparent they actually catch light the way real flame photography does, which is a smarter solve than painting fire in brick would ever be. Rustiest_Brick has said he kept both figures deliberately stiff and manufactured looking rather than natural, and honestly, that’s the whole joke of the original photo anyway. Two men performing warmth while one of them burns.

The base doubles as a proper display plinth, with a framed platinum disc bolted to one side, the same George Hardie mechanical handshake logo from the actual 1975 shrink wrap sticker printed on its center label, and a UCS-style plaque up front reading Wish You Were Here. Slide that plaque out, though, and there’s a small trans-blue gem tucked in a hidden compartment behind it. Rustiest_Brick isn’t saying what it’s for outright, but if you know your Floyd lore, that’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond hiding in plain sight, a quiet nod to Syd Barrett folded into a set that’s supposedly just about a handshake. That’s my favorite detail here by a mile, the kind of thing only a genuine fan bothers to hide.

The project just went up on LEGO Ideas and currently sits at 120 supporters, with 425 days on the clock to reach the first 1,000-vote milestone before the real climb to 10,000 even starts. It’s a long road, but the Strat took one too. If you’d like to see Pink Floyd finally get their overdue LEGO moment, you can head over to the Ideas page and cast your vote. Just don’t let the wind change direction on your way there.

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Teenage Engineering meets iPod Shuffle: This music player puts the screen where your eyes actually are

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Sony killed the MiniDisc in 2006 with the MZ-RH1, a recorder so good that people still pay silly money for working ones on eBay. It did something unusual with its display, mounting the OLED on the front edge of the body rather than the top, so you could read it at an angle no other player offered. That edge-mounted screen is a small footnote in audio history, the kind of detail only a handful of collectors ever think about. Florent Porta has been staring at that screen for years, by his own admission, and the MAD-5 is what came out of the staring. It is a square aluminium player with a thin blue ticker running along its front lip, reading out format, sample rate, track number, timecode and song title.

The MZ-RH1 measured 83.8 by 84.4mm, which is to say almost perfectly square, and the MAD-5 lands on the same proportion. That is either a deliberate quote or a very good accident. What Porta has added is a clip, borrowed from the later iPod Shuffles, and the combination solves a problem Apple never bothered with. A clipped-on player shows you its edge, not its face. So put the words there.

Designer: Florent Porta

The third generation Shuffle in 2009 stripped every physical control off the body, leaving a bare power switch, and pushed volume and track changes onto a three-button remote wired into proprietary earbuds. Reviewers hated it, and Apple reversed course within a year, bringing the button ring back on a fourth generation that shrank into something nearly square. Porta borrows the fourth gen’s clip and skips the third gen’s whole premise, which is the correct call. Wrap a screen around the exposed edge of a clipped device and you get the information without a button, an earbud remote, or Apple’s old workaround, a talking menu called VoiceOver that was software standing in for a hardware idea nobody had built yet.

The jog disc on the face nods toward Teenage Engineering’s TP-7, the field recorder we covered when it landed in 2023, whose motorized tape reel actually spins under a brushed motor with ball bearings while you record or scrub through playback. Porta’s disc has no motor behind it, just concentric rings etched into aluminum with arrows for navigation, so the homage is visual rather than mechanical. That is a fair trade in a concept render, but it is worth naming, since a spinning reel earns its charm through motion and this one borrows the charm without it. The engraved spec plate leans aspirational too, and the 1337 mAh battery is the second time Porta has hidden that exact number in a product.

There is no Bluetooth listed anywhere on the body, no balanced output for the higher-end headphone crowd, and nothing marked for expandable storage, all of which current audiophile DAPs from Sony, FiiO and HiBy treat as standard at this level. The stronger idea might not be the ticker screen at all. It is the USB DAC mode, since anyone carrying a laptop already owns half the reason dongle DACs exist, and a player that folds into an audio interface the moment you plug it in solves a real annoyance rather than a cosmetic one. Porta says a desktop dock is next, meant to unlock more I/O once the MAD-5 is home, which quietly admits the ports on this version are thin. That is pretty self-aware for a concept render.

We covered Porta’s last swing at this category back in February, the DAP-1, a maximalist FLAC player built around an OLED touchscreen and a built-in speaker. The MAD-5 is the opposite instinct from the same person eight months later, stripped down to a disc, two buttons and a strip of text. Neither one exists as hardware yet, and a dock that is still just a thought puts no real timeline on anything. But the edge screen is worth remembering regardless of whether this specific object ever ships, because it solves something two decades of clip-on players walked straight past. Sony found the location by accident in 2006. Apple never looked. Porta just put both ideas in the same room.

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