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.

Modern gadgets are remarkably small considering everything that they can do (hello, phone that plays Sudoku, streams radio stations and lets us take crystal-clear videos of our bizarre neighbors), but our generation was far from the first to think of miniaturizing stuff. Back in the age of records, the Sound Burger was amazing music lovers with its shockingly tiny size and portability. It was basically a clamp that could fit onto either 45 or 33 1/3 RPM records so you could keep your tunes rolling even when you were on the go. Of course, because it had to be played on a flat surface you had to be basically sitting or standing still while it played…but at least you could switch rooms between records.

The Sound Burger was sold in the early 1980s in Japan, but after it made the jump to the U.S. it was renamed Mister Disc – probably because Audio Technica, the company responsible for the awesome gadget, knew how we brutish Americans would mercilessly make fun of something called a “Sound Burger.” Unfortunately, even the love of rich vinyl sound couldn’t save this player from a sad fate. It was released right around the time that Sony’s Walkman was becoming popular, and given the choice between a cassette player that you could walk around with and a record player that you couldn’t…well, we all know how the story ended for the ill-fated Sound Burger/Mister Disc. Luckily for modern vinyl lovers, they still pop up every now and then on eBay – but they always seems to pull a hefty price.

The post Granddaddy of the iPod? Retro 80s Portable Record Player first appeared on Gajitz.