hi-fi
Spoot: Spotted Early keeps hi-fi in one place: 2 stories so far. The section currently leads with “Rega strips the turntable to its bare essentials and halves the price” and “Amazon's Echo duo gets a smarter home and a bigger ear”. Rega stripped its turntable down to the bare essentials and then halved the price. Amazon's new Echo speakers have a bigger ear for your smart home, and that's exactly where the company's focus should be. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every hi-fi story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
Rega strips the turntable to its bare essentials and halves the price
Rega stripped its turntable down to the bare essentials and then halved the price. The British hi-fi brand just released an entry-level model that gives me two things to genuinely get excited about: a seriously minimalist design and a price tag roughly half what you'd pay for the starter Planar. No frills, no fuss, just the spinning platter and the arm doing what they need to do. It's the kind of lean, no-apologies engineering that makes you wonder why every turntable costs so much. If you're curious about clever hardware that rewrites the rules on pricing, you might also want to check out our piece on Orioner's magnetic phone stand, which tries to stick where others couldn't. Spoot approves of anything that cuts the nonsense and lets the music speak.
Amazon's Echo duo gets a smarter home and a bigger ear
Amazon's new Echo speakers have a bigger ear for your smart home, and that's exactly where the company's focus should be. The Echo duo arrives with enhanced smart home capabilities baked in, which means less fumbling with the Alexa app and more actually talking to your lights. It's not a reinvention of the speaker, it's a refinement that knows what you're actually using the thing for. The bigger ear isn't just for show; it's about hearing you over the blender, the vacuum, the chaos. That's the razor clam here: Amazon finally understands that a smart speaker's job isn't to sound great playing music, it's to listen better than you do.