Fans of kitsch plastic gewgaws might find this Stitch radio and CD player from Runat so far up their street it’s parked in their garage. Modelled on the Disney alien from the 2002 movie Lilo and Stitch, and most probably a tie-in for the upcoming anime series Stitch! it looks awesome with its mouth open—as you can see below.
Yamaha’s CD-S2000 and A-S2000 audiophile CD combo has been announced for the discerning Australian. It’s a masterpiece of retro design and pristine, two channel sound.
I’ve listened to it, and it sounds pretty damned good. There’s a full range of sound that you don’t often get from a setup without a subwoofer. It looks fantastic, and smells pretty awesome too. If it weren’t so heavy, it could almost be considered pantsworthy.
But part of me wonders exactly how much of a market there is for this type of product in the day and age of the iPod. Considering that the A-S2000 has an RRP of $2,999 and the CD-S2000 costs $2,599, would you be happy to spend more than five grand on a CD setup?
Sure, it does play back SACDs too, and you can opt to go for one or the other and not the combo, but in today’s market of declining CD sales and digital downloads, is a high-end CD player obsolete? When a 160GB iPod sets you back $479 and lets you store a large music collection in lossless, I know where my money would be headed (if I had money to spend, that is).
[Yamaha]
We know that gadgets are better when they’re smaller. And obviously the miniaturisation trend is making its way through to high-end audio manufacturers as well, with Arcam releasing this mini version of their Solo CD player.
Retailing for the bargain price of $1598 (without speakers) the Arcam Solo Mini packs in a CD player (which plays back MP3 discs as well), AM/FM or FM/DAB tuners, integrated iPod control through their optional extra rLead/rDock peripheral, six additional RCA inputs, a front USB port and a remote control. It also boasts 2 x 25 Watts per Channel linear amplifiers inside, making it plenty loud for pissing off neighbours.
Being Arcam, it probably has really impressive sound quality, but for a device that spends so much time playing back compressed music (from its list of features above), it does seem a tad expensive. Of course, the full size version costs $2498, so I guess we really shouldn’t complain. Or maybe we should complain twice as much… whichever suits you best.
The Light CD Tower by Kwang Hoo Lee was inspired by the fact that people spend an ever-increasing amount of time sitting in front of their computers. In the end, he came up with a design that merged a lamp and a CD holder into one sweet looking practical device. Unfortunately, the design is not without its flaws. For one thing, the lamp would be rendered useless when filled with CDs, the device is battery powered (why not USB?) and CDs are on the fast track to obsolecence. Still, not a bad concept piece from a design perspective. [Designboom via Gearfuse via DVICE] More »
Kenwood has brought out three slimline iPod-compatible audio players that can connect to your computer via USB. There’s a CD player that plays CDs and CD-R/RW also an AM/FM radio and it supports WMA as well as MP3s. Full specs of the CLK – 5i-S / W and CLK-7i-S are below. More »
Japanese audio company Teac is letting you have it up against the wall next week, with the release of the MC-DX32i iPod dock, AM/FM tuner and CD/CD-R/RW player. Expected to cost around 30,000¥, ($307) the flat-panel system comes with all the gear you need to wall-mount it. Specs are below. More »
These Metaphys designs were shown off last month at the 100% Design Tokyo Show, but they’re cool enough that we wanted to show you anyway. The Japanese brand Metaphys, which is lead by designer Chiaki Murata, puts out cool stuff like the Lunacalente CD player shown above, as well as the flip-open toothbrush and the flip-open calculator shown after the jump. Although the latter two aren’t going to make us drop our Sonicares and our TI-82s, the magazine rack and the fan do look futuristically sexy. It isn’t often that mundane gadgets become objects of arousal. [Dezeen] More »
Seriously, do I really need a CD player on top of a mini fridge? Is it that much harder to bring out a boombox or an iPod speaker dock? If I were living in 1998, I might be impressed by the mini plug line out, because I could hook up my shiny new minidisc player to it. But that’s still pretty questionable. If I were going to kick down $300, it wouldn’t be on this. Luckily, only the UK has to deal with this monstrosity. [Gadget Box via Crave] More »
