#analogue-af-1

#analogue-af-1

The BB-777 takes the core of the GF, right down to the dual-cassette decks, control layout, and speaker specs printed above the subwoofers.

The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.

If you've ever used tools like PhonicMind or LALAL.AI, you know the drill: Upload your MP3. Wait in a queue. Pay for "credits" or high-quality downloads. Your file sits on someone else's server. For musicians, producers, or just karaoke fans, this is slow and privacy-invasive.

The company says it designed Tembo to "enable everyone to create music from the very first touch." Co-founder David Davidov that most instruments take "so long to get to the fun part" and that Musical Beings wanted to "help people experience music as something they do, not just something they listen to."

It's similar to a vinyl record, but the tracks are in a USB drive. It has no moving parts inside, so it's totally digital in how it stores sound. But it has a physical shape users can hold, flip over, look at, and collect, so in a way, the designer is asking: what if digital music had a physical body?

The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you'll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.

Pitch Shifter-910 is based on the iconic Eventide H910 Harmonizer from 1974, an early digital pitchshifter and delay with a very unique character. Arturia does an admirable job preserving its glitchy quirks. Pitch Shifter-910 is not a transparent effect that lets you create natural-sounding harmonies with yourself. Instead, it relishes in its weirdness, delivering chipmunk vocals at the higher ranges. There is also a more modern mode that cleans up some artifacts while preserving what makes the 910 so special.

The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.

Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But at the bottom, there are 16 rubberized pads for triggering samples with crunchy pixelated number labels on them.

For this time around, however, the concept player here stays within the audio listening gear domain; nonetheless, has clear signs of a TE-inspired design. The retro Bluetooth player is a music accessory that's reminiscent of the classic cassette tape player design, but on the inside, it's a modern music player that plays music wired or wireless. The aesthetics are purely for arousing the nostalgic feel of listening to music on a cassette player, while the audio is digitally played via a DAC for high-resolution output.

First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this era of AI tomfoolery. The XL can handle 16 audio tracks simultaneously. In my experience with previous units, this is more than enough for a full song.

Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.

Listening to music has mostly collapsed into phones and streaming apps, buried between notifications and multitasking. Some people still crave a single-purpose device that treats listening as the main event, not background noise. The MP-1 is an independent concept study that asks what a modern Walkman could look like if it borrowed Teenage Engineering's design language, without being affiliated with the company or trying to become an official product at all.

We started from a very silly place,

Chances are this does exactly what you need. It will play your old CDs, your new CDs, your homemade mixtapes, the whole nine yards. You can even listen wirelessly thanks to onboard Bluetooth. It's got a decent battery life that can last you up to six hours, and it uses a USB-C to recharge. We usually have one of those on hand.

Both turntables include one-button automatic playback - which starts the turntable, raises and lowers the tonearm on the vinyl, and returns the tonearm to its resting position once the record ends - a transparent dust cover to keep colored vinyl printings visible as the record plays, and a built-in switchable EQ to select between phono and line-level output. A USB output allows you to convert your vinyl to a digital file and has a three-level output gain selector with low, mid, and high settings. The two turntables also support 96kHz/24-bit wireless aptX Adaptive hi-res Bluetooth audio.