Everything old is new again. Haven’t old people been saying that for decades? We’re seeing increasing numbers of people carrying around Discmans and Walkmans for their retro kitsch value. Designers Rocket & Wine are playing on our weird obsession with obsolete technology with their Rawman 3000 concept.

Given the resurgence of portable CD and cassette players, Rocket & Wine designed three sizes of portable vinyl players. The 7″, 10″, and 12″ models are meant to be carried around so you can enjoy the rich, deep sounds of vinyl while you strut down the street. Along, we assume, with all of the skips and scratches that come with moving a record player around while it’s playing.

The Rawman, if it were in fact a real product, would come with stereo headphones, a USB port, Smartcard, an antenna to enable Bluetooth connection, and a carrying strap. When it’s not being carried around, making you look like the hipsterest hipster ever, it could be plugged into home speakers for a “big, rich sound, that […] only can be compared to a very elaborate and expensive component stereo record player system.”

Although the product is a spoof and will most likely never see production, we can absolutely see someone trying to make this happen. After all, if people are enamored with the inferior sound quality and breakage-prone qualities of the cassette, why not strap on a record player to go for a jog?

The post Time Warp Accessories: Wearable Portable Vinyl Players first appeared on Gajitz.

We love listening to records, but all of that sound system equipment sitting out on the shelf is not exactly pretty. Designer Roy Harpaz came up with a record player design that not only sounds great, but also looks like a piece of modern art.

The vertical record player is egg-shaped with a front made of CNC-cut walnut wood. Inside, very modern components give your prized records the very best treatment. The TOC can play even old and warped records which would ordinarily be unplayable thanks to spherical ball bearings that let the record spin freely.

The front of the player has touchscreen controls, but you can also control playback using the matching remote control. Unlike old record players, the TOC even lets you skip between songs thanks to a special sensor that reads the grooves to find out where the next song begins.

Buttons on the side let you choose between three record sizes and three rotation speeds. The player features standards speaker outputs as well as two USB inputs so you can play your favorite music right from a flash drive, smartphone, or laptop. The TOC is a concept, not a consumer product, but we’ll still be hoping to see it on our shelves sometime in the future.

The post Sexy Sculptural Record Player Combines Analog + Futurism first appeared on Gajitz.

Our shared human culture is largely formed by music. Artist Evan Holm pays homage to all of the musicians who have helped to form this culture with his functional sculpture Submerged Turntable. It is exactly what it sounds like: a turntable is submerged beneath water but still manages to play back a song that can be heard nearly perfectly above the water.

Holm’s vision comes from the idea that one day, every trace of human culture will be crushed and buried beneath the passage of years. The Submerged Turntable is symbolic of the whole of civilization slipping into the black pool of obscurity and loss.

The sculpture isn’t as bleak as that description may sound, however. Holm calls it “optimistic.” Just after the civilization is lost to the deep, dark, unknowable pool of time, a song is pulled back through the veil. This, according to the artist, is his celebration of all music and musicians, and in fact every artist who has helped to form our collective human culture.

The post From the Void: Submerged Turntable Pulls Music From Water first appeared on Gajitz.

There is a rather unusually dedicated contingent of music lovers who maintain the view that no method of music playback will ever match the rich sound of vinyl. Those people typically own fancy record players and complex speaker systems…but not graphic designer Livia Ritthaler. Having no money or space for a traditional record player, she decided to make her own.

Livia’s record player is easily the most minimalist one in the world. It consists of a piece of rolled paper, a plank of wood and a few bits of metal. It runs without power – other than that provided by the user. To listen to a record, you have to crank it by hand. And surprisingly, it sounds pretty good.

The trick to operating the device is to keep the record spinning at a constant rate. The minimalist gramophone is kind of like a lesson in survival for audiophiles. It proves that true music lovers will find a way to get their fix even when the traditional tools aren’t available.

The post Surprisingly Minimalist Gramophone Plays Records by Hand first appeared on Gajitz.

Most of us learned when we were children that a tree’s interior rings can tell a lot about it. But thanks to Bartholomäus Traubeck, we can now not simply look at tree rings – we can also hear them. Traubeck’s Years project is a modified turntable that plays slices of trees just like records.

There’s a lot of complicated stuff in the project, but the rundown is that it uses a loop-based software music sequencer called Ableton Live to turn those lovely tree rings into even lovelier music. Each tree slice has its own unique “song,” letting us listen to the music of nature in a whole new way.

The post Sounds of Age: Record Player Makes Music Out of Tree Rings first appeared on Gajitz.