Tag Archives: Music

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

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

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

Designer: Skullcandy and Jae Tips

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

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

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

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Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory Turns 26 and this LEGO Brickset Pays the Perfect Tribute

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There is a generation of people for whom Hybrid Theory was the first album that felt like it was speaking directly to them. Released in October 2000, it arrived at that particular moment in adolescence when you needed music to be loud and honest and a little bit angry, and Linkin Park delivered all three in a single package. “Crawling,” “Papercut,” “One Step Closer,” “In the End,” four of the twelve tracks became radio staples, which is a hit rate almost nobody achieves on a debut record. The album went Diamond in the US and sold 27 million copies globally, which means a lot of people apparently had that same feeling.

LEGO builder Zihnisinir_61 is clearly among them. His LEGO Ideas submission recreates the album’s cover art as a freestanding 3D display piece, with the Winged Herald soldier front and center, wings spread, flag held high, backed by a grey paneled wall with the Linkin Park name raised in chunky extruded lettering. With the 26th anniversary of the album approaching, the timing feels right, and the build feels personal in the way the best fan-made creations always do.

Designer: Zihnisinir_61

Here’s something a lot of LP fans don’t know. Mike Shinoda designed the artwork himself, and the Winged Herald was a deliberate visual metaphor: the armored, battle-worn body representing the album’s hard edges, and the fragile dragonfly wings representing its softer, more vulnerable core. Chester Bennington described the soldier as the visual equivalent of what Linkin Park was doing sonically, blending aggression and tenderness into something genuinely new. That the band had to fight their own label president to even release the record, with Chester recalling they were “literally the last item on the priority list, below even getting the toilets cleaned,” makes the Herald’s defiant stance feel even more apt in retrospect.

Zihnisinir_61 captures all of that in brick form with real conviction. The Herald figure is built in dark red with articulated white wings that fan out from the torso using layered plates and angled elements, and the flag atop the staff is constructed from a latticed cluster of red bricks that actually reads as a tattered, wind-caught banner rather than a flat rectangular tile. My favorite detail, though, is the lettering. The “Linkin Park” text is built in 3D-extruded dark grey bricks, standing proud off the backing panel using SNOT (Studs Not On Top) techniques that give each letter genuine depth and shadow. It nails the stencil-graffiti aesthetic of the original without resorting to stickers or printed tiles. The “Hybrid Theory” text along the lower section is handled with the same care, rendered in clean printed-style lettering that anchors the composition.

The overall color palette, cool greys for the backdrop, dark red for the Herald, white for the wings, sticks faithfully to the source material while translating naturally into LEGO’s parts library. The build reads immediately from across a room, which is exactly what good album art does.

The MOC is currently gathering votes on the LEGO Ideas platform, where fan submissions need 10,000 supporters to trigger an official review by LEGO’s internal team and a shot at becoming a real retail set. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page here to cast your vote.

The post Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory Turns 26 and this LEGO Brickset Pays the Perfect Tribute first appeared on Yanko Design.

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

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

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

Designer: Fosi Audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designer: Telepathic Instruments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designer: Kenji Abe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This 28mm Turntable Is Fully Automatic and Glows Softly Like Mood Lighting

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Vinyl is having a moment that shows no signs of ending. Record sales have been climbing for over a decade, and turntables have found their way into living rooms, bedrooms, and home offices worldwide. The problem is that many still look like they did 30 years ago, big, chunky, and designed to occupy their own dedicated corner. For anyone keeping their space tidy and intentional, that’s a real trade-off.

The CoolGeek TS-01 tries to address that without asking you to compromise on either front. Its ultra-slim body measures just 28mm thick, sitting low and clean on virtually any surface you’d want to put it on. It doesn’t look like it’s trying hard to be noticed, which is exactly the point. It’s a turntable designed to feel like a natural extension of the room rather than an intrusion.

Designer: CoolGeek

Click Here to Buy Now: $219 $299 (26% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $152,000.

Part of what makes the TS-01 so comfortable to live with is how little it actually demands of you. It’s fully automatic, so the tonearm drops, plays, and returns on its own from start to finish. For anyone who’s been put off vinyl by manual cueing or the constant worry of a needle dragging across a quiet groove, that’s a genuinely significant shift in how the whole ritual feels.

There’s also a remote in the box, which might sound like a minor detail but changes things more than you’d expect from a turntable. You can play, pause, fast-forward, or rewind without leaving wherever you happen to be. It’s a small but thoughtful addition, especially when you’re settled in with a book, have guests over, or simply don’t want to get up every time a side ends.

Of course, the audio side isn’t an afterthought. The TS-01 runs on a belt-drive system with an aluminum die-cast platter, and sports a tonearm that’s lighter and yet stronger than the standard arms you’d find on most players in this range. It also ships with an Audio-Technica MM cartridge already fitted, so there’s no fiddly cartridge alignment to deal with out of the box.

On top of that, the TS-01 has six selectable lighting modes and a glow vinyl mat, which together do something unexpected for a turntable: they turn it into an ambient object. That might sound more like a lifestyle feature than an audio one, and honestly, it is, but there’s something genuinely pleasant about having your record player cast a soft glow across a room while a side plays out.

Connectivity covers both ends of the spectrum, whichever you prefer. Bluetooth 5.3 lets you pair it with a wireless speaker or headphones without running cables across the room, while the RCA output stays available for anyone already working with an active speaker or a home hi-fi setup. It’s the kind of flexibility that makes the TS-01 easy to fit into a surprisingly wide range of living situations and listening habits.

The TS-01 comes in Black and Light Gray, both neutral enough to blend quietly into most interior palettes. At 2.65kg and 398mm x 350mm x 94 mm, it’s genuinely compact for a full-size turntable. CoolGeek clearly had a certain kind of space in mind, the kind where a record player can sit on a shelf or credenza and look like it was always supposed to be there.

Click Here to Buy Now: $219 $299 (26% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $152,000.

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Casio Just Built a $270 Sampler the SK-1 Always Deserved

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When Casio showed up at NAMM in January with an unannounced sampler, no press rollout, no teaser campaign, people kind of lost their minds a little. It was unexpected in the best way. The music gear community had not been thinking about Casio in that particular conversation, and then suddenly there it was. A boxy, padded, retro-looking device called the SXC-1, sitting quietly in a booth like it had always been there. That kind of entrance says a lot about how confident Casio was in what they brought. It also signals something bigger: Casio is not just trying to stay relevant. They are actively reclaiming territory they actually originated.

For a certain kind of person, whether you are a producer, a music nerd, or a design obsessive, the Casio SK-1 is practically sacred. Released in 1985 for about $100, it was a small plastic sampling keyboard that let you record any sound and play it back across a tiny row of keys. It was deliberately toy-like, and yet it ended up in the hands of experimental musicians, lo-fi producers, and everyone in between. The SK-1 was the gateway into sampling for an entire generation, and its cultural weight has never really gone away.

Designer: Casio

The SXC-1 is Casio’s answer to where that legacy goes next. The aesthetic DNA is still present: the boxy form factor, the emphasis on immediate usability, the sense that this is a tool meant to be picked up and played without a manual. But where the SK-1 was charming in its limitations, the SXC-1 is built for serious work. The specs back that up. It runs on a 16-bit/48kHz sampling engine with 64GB of onboard eMMC storage, supports WAV, MP3, and FLAC files, and gives you up to 15 minutes of total sampling time. A 1.3-inch OLED screen and two large rotary encoders handle the interface, and the 4×4 pad layout gives you 16 pressure-sensitive pads tuned specifically for finger drumming.

It also ships with over 80 sample banks pulled from classic Casio instruments, including the SK-1, SK-5, CZ-101, and MT-40. Those loops are automatically tempo-synced via a beat-sync function, which is a genuinely smart move. It means that even out of the box, with zero setup, you have a ready library of usable, nostalgia-soaked sounds that are immediately production-ready. For content creators or producers who need to move fast, that matters more than most brands realize.

The connectivity is equally well-considered. There is a built-in mic, external analog input, USB audio, headphone output, main output, and dual USB-C ports for data and power. This is clearly built for people who move between environments: bedroom studios, live sets, cafes, wherever the work happens to be. Battery life sits at around two hours, there is a built-in speaker, and the device ships with step sequencing at up to 50 patterns of 8 bars each. Effects are on the leaner side, covering filter, flanger, phaser, and bitcrusher, but that restraint feels intentional rather than cheap.

Casio is marketing the SXC-1 explicitly as a tool for the “Creator Economy,” which is the kind of phrase that usually makes me skeptical. But here it actually fits. Independent artists and producers today are working across formats, platforms, and workflows all at once. They need gear that is fast, flexible, and small enough to live in a backpack. The SXC-1 appears to understand that assignment.

The device is currently available for pre-order on the Casio Japan website at 39,930 yen, with a release date of May 28, 2026. Global pricing has not been confirmed, but estimates put it somewhere between $230 and $300 depending on region.

Whether the SXC-1 lands the way Casio hopes will depend partly on how it feels in hand, which is something specs cannot fully answer. But the design intent is clear and it is smart. Casio looked at what made the SK-1 culturally significant, stripped out the nostalgia bait, and built something that can actually do the job today. That is not a small thing.

The post Casio Just Built a $270 Sampler the SK-1 Always Deserved first appeared on Yanko Design.

Edifier Melo Bar desk speaker turns any setup into a living canvas of sound and light

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Edifier has spent years refining compact audio gear that quietly slips into everyday setups, but the Huazai Melo Bar takes a more expressive turn. The desktop speaker is not just a multimedia utility, but a visual extension of the workspace itself.

The Melo Bar keeps things minimal and compact, yet underneath that restrained form is a fairly considered acoustic setup. It features dual 52mm drivers paired with a symmetrical bass reflex structure, tuned to deliver a balanced spread across frequencies.

Designer: Edifier

Backed by a Class D amplifier pushing 5W continuous output and peaking at 10W, the speaker is designed for near-field listening, where clarity matters more than sheer loudness. DSP tuning helps maintain that balance, ensuring vocals stay crisp while lows don’t overwhelm the mix. What makes this audio accessory feel more dynamic is its ability to adapt to different listening scenarios. Edifier builds in three distinct sound modes: Music, Game, and Movie. Each one is about subtly adjusting the output profile. Music mode leans toward detail and clarity, Game mode emphasizes spatial cues for directional awareness, and Movie mode pushes for a more immersive, room-filling feel.

The speaker also doubles as a communication tool, thanks to a built-in microphone with AEC echo cancellation. It’s a practical touch that turns the Melo Bar into a quick solution for calls and meetings, especially in hybrid work environments where switching devices can feel unnecessary. Where the Melo Bar really breaks away from convention is in its visual customization. The front panel isn’t fixed—instead, it uses a modular design with 10 themed panels and an additional blank option for DIY expression. It’s a small but meaningful shift, allowing the speaker to evolve with the user’s setup rather than remain a static object on the desk.

Paired with this is a full RGB lighting system capable of displaying 16.8 million colors and 15 preset lighting effects. The lighting can be adjusted directly on the unit or through Edifier’s Connect mobile app and TempoHub PC software, giving users flexibility in how much control they want. Connectivity remains straightforward but modern with Bluetooth 6.0 for stable wireless performance with support for A2DP, AVRCP, and HFP profiles, while a USB wired mode handles both power and audio through a single cable. With a wireless range of up to 10 meters, it comfortably covers typical desk-to-room distances without dropouts.

Physical controls are integrated into the design, allowing users to tweak volume, switch modes, and cycle through lighting effects without relying entirely on software. Additional touches like input indicators and a dedicated do-not-disturb mode add to the everyday usability, keeping distractions in check when needed.

The Huazai Melo Bar doesn’t compete on raw power or audiophile credentials, as it leans into something more relevant for today’s desks. A speaker that sounds good, adapts to different tasks, and visually integrates into the space it occupies. Available in Mist White and Night Black, the Melo Bar is priced at 329 Yuan (around $48), making it an accessible entry into a category that’s increasingly blending performance with personality.

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What Streaming Took From Music, Samsung Design Just Gave Back

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Music used to take up space in the most satisfying way. There was a record sleeve to pull from a shelf, a cassette to slot into a deck, a disc to slide into a tray. Each was a small, deliberate act that made listening feel like a choice rather than a background default. Streaming replaced all of that with convenience, and something tactile and visual quietly disappeared along the way.

Samsung Design seems to think that loss is worth addressing. At Milan Design Week 2026, it presented Visual Audio, a collection of music player concepts that reinterpret the forms of LPs, cassettes, and CD players through tailored displays. Rather than smart speakers with screens bolted on, they’re objects designed to make listening visible again, giving digital music a presence that largely disappeared with the vinyl era.

Designer: Samsung Audio

The appeal of analog formats was never really about fidelity. It was about having something to look at while the music played, a record spinning on a platter, tape reels turning inside their housing, a disc glowing in a transparent tray. Each gave listening a visual rhythm you could follow without thinking. Streaming quietly removed all of that, leaving the experience invisible in a way that’s only grown more obvious.

Visual Audio addresses this with objects that are clearly players but also clearly more. One recalls the boxy silhouette of a cassette deck, its screen animating spinning reels as the music plays. Another takes the form of a circular piece that simulates vinyl in motion, with a rotating label at the center. Each has a visual identity tied to the analog format it evokes, and that’s very much the point.

What these objects do differently from regular speakers or streaming devices is make playback legible. When something is playing, you see it happening. The interface isn’t a generic progress bar on an app; it’s a reel turning, a record label spinning, album art presented in a way that matches the physical form of the device. That makes sitting down to listen feel more like an occasion than a habit.

There’s also how these pieces actually live in a room. A speaker that looks like a cassette deck or a miniature turntable doesn’t need to be tucked in a corner; it contributes to the space around it, the way a record collection or a well-placed audio rack once did. Keep one on a desk, and it quietly communicates something about taste and how seriously you take the act of listening.

None of the Visual Audio concepts are headed for retail, and Samsung Design is upfront about that. They’re experiments, open questions about what music players could look like if they treated the emotional intelligence of analog formats as a design priority. The interesting thing is how specific and considered they are for objects not going anywhere near a store, which suggests this line of thinking goes beyond the exhibition itself.

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