Toast, a YouTuber who turns crazy ideas into real gadgets, decided to master one of the most complex machines in music. He wanted a piano that could be printed at home with a normal 3D printer. No strings or heavy wood frames – just layers of molten plastic that form keys, hammers and resonant tubes. The end result plays actual notes, fits on a desk and doesn’t cost much more than a few rubber bands.
Brady Y. Lin treats the Stradex1 like an old friend; it’s been four years since he originally attempted to create a violin simulator – a box of buttons that created chiptune sounds. Lin, a beginner maker at the time, coaxed square waves out an Arduino, imitating strings with discrete presses that locked pitches into stiff steps. Lin is now halfway through his electrical engineering degree and has turned his aggravation into something playable, portable, and free for anybody to print and assemble.
A cassette tape boombox is a relic of another era in 2025 when music seemingly falls from the sky and earbuds are almost invisible. But We Are Rewind’s GB-001 does more than just revive an old format; the boombox does it with such accuracy that you’ll want to start making new mixtapes or dig out your old ones.
A record player that stands upright, hangs on a wall, or lies flat, all while using light to read vinyl grooves—Miniot’s Wheel 3 feels like it rolled in from a Wes Anderson film. Handmade by a small Dutch family business, the Wheel 3 combines a beautiful design with clever technology that makes you rethink what a record player can do.
Magnetic tape reels, once the foundation of music recording, are now collecting dust in forgotten basement corners, but in the hands of Japan’s Open Reel Ensemble, these relics become something extraordinary: the JIGAKKYU. This trio—Ei Wada, Haruka Yoshida, and Masaru Yoshida—have created an unconventional sound using bamboo bows and magnetic tape .
Paul Davids, a Dutch guitarist, walked into the vast halls of Austria’s Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant three years ago. The plant was built in the 70s, but never operational. However, it had an acoustic wonder: a reverb so big it felt like the notes went on forever. Davids captured this with guitar in hand, and the result was a sound akin to playing in a concrete and steel cathedral. Fast forward to 2025 and that experience has been transformed into the Nucleo Reverb, a pedal made by Italian boutique maker Cornerstone Music Gear.
Photo credit: Porsche | RM Sotheby’s
Dua Lipa, the British pop star behind hits like “Levitating” and “Don’t Start Now,” has a secret passion: cars. She’s co-designed a bespoke Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a beautifully engineered machine that combines Porsche’s precision with Lipa’s style. Up for auction to support her Sunny Hill Foundation, this is a showstopper.
Out of the blue, a band called The Velvet Sundown exploded onto Spotify, racking up close to a million monthly listeners in just a few weeks. Their tunes are being described as a trippy, psychedelic rock. But here’s the kicker: behind those guitar licks and mysterious vocals, there’s a big conundrum—no one’s quite sure if this band is actually real.
Cassette tapes, those chunky ‘80s and ‘90s throwbacks, are sneaking back into the spotlight. Riding the wave of vinyl’s comeback and the allure of tangible media, Maxell’s MXCP-P100 portable cassette player is an interesting blend of old-school aesthetics and new-school tech. This $90 gadget plays your long-forgotten mixtapes and beams their fuzzy charm to Bluetooth headphones, feeling like a time machine you can juice up with a USB-C cable.
