The sound of the future. Two speakers are officially deader than an Ed Hardy T-shirt…

Yeah, MP3s and their bastard half-brother & sister formats sound like shite compared to the full stereo image vinyl provides, but with the new stunningly beautiful PHONOFONE iPOD SPEAKER (that’s right, “speaker” as in one) at least no one will be paying attention to the actual sound coming out of the speaker. Created individually by hand in Toronto by innovative concept lab SCIENCE AND SONS, each signed and numbered miniature gramophone amplifies iPod sound without external power or batteries by exploiting the virtues of horn acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to up to 55 decibels (roughly the maximum volume of laptop speakers). Crazy as it may sound, upon connecting active earphones to the Phonofone base their trebly buzzing is instantly and profoundly transformed into a warm, rich sound that totally eclipses the low-fi source file. Impossible as it may seem this tiny porcelain unit sounds nearly as loud and rich as a premium iPod dock and only after playing with this little beauty for the better part of an hour during which we fed it a wide variety of input from the Bad Brains to Debussy did we believe it for ourselves. At $850 USD this little beauty is a connoisseur’s plaything, but the looks on the stunned faces of your audiophile buddies at your next party will make it worth every cent. Until it shatters on the floor after said drunk audiophile buddy bumps into it, that is. HAVE A LOOK:

Drop your iPod in the slot and place the earbuds in the amplifier receptacles and you’re kickin out the jams like Thomas Edison!

The obligatory mechanical diagram…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 12:25 am and is filed under Art & Commerce, Cool Shit, News, Next Big Thing, Product Toss, Sound + Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.