TDK Boombox Store: Kin. Price: 3900-4900rmb TDK released these boomboxes a couple of years ago and now they’re available in China. They’re a glorified speaker system for iPods and phones and stuff. The USP? They look amazing. That's it. They just look amazing. TDK does two versions, a three-speaker (4900rmb) and a two-speaker (3900rmb). Both have a pair of six-inch 10-watt direct-drive cones, but the larger one has a sub-woofer in the middle. The smaller one also comes with a leather shoulder strap, whereas the larger one has a fixed wooden handle. We tested the smaller one. TDK have gone for looks above all else here. The unit is veneered with glossy piano glass acrylic with chunky retro dials that control volume and a couple of EQ options. The dials come in that off-silver color the industry likes to call “champagne”. The buttons are all touchscreen and invisible. No recess. Not even a little square round where your finger’s meant to go. The whole design of the thing screams “get your filthy hands off me unless you know what you’re doing”. That said, there’s very little functionality built in. You can’t control your iPod, skip tracks, you can’t even pause tracks on the machine using the machine. For all that you have to go back to your iPod or whatever the source of the music is. Touchscreen buttons also click through that source – radio (FM and AM dudes, you know you’re going to use that), USB or minijack input. There’s also a fat jack input so you could plug a guitar in there, you know, for when you want to take your music down onto the streets, man. One quirky feature: you can mix inputs, so you could plug a mic in and sing over a track that’s playing off an MP3 player. The balance between inputs is adjustable. How does it sound? Really loud. Very fat. Way loud enough for the home, even a huge home. Big enough for a house party. In fact, at low volumes it’s almost too bassy, but that just gives you a chance to fiddle with the EQ. The display’s really nice. So, loud, extremely powerful and looks amazing. But expensive. And there are some other issues with it. It’s heavy. Even without batteries in it (more on that below), the small one weighs in at almost 17 pounds. That’s not the most portable weight. Not a weight that made me want to pop it on my shoulder and take a stroll down Electric Avenue. And why no iPod dock? You have to plug in via a cable, which makes it even less portable and sort of hampers boombox aesthetic. Best would be if they could have included a dock that held your iPod inside the unit. How about this for an idea: make it look like the tape cassette part of the boombox. Pop your ipod in like it’s a cassette and it jacks into the mainframe. Nice idea, right? TDK, you can have that one for free. Even better, they could have equipped this to play via Bluetooth. Philips makes Bluetooth speakers for less than 50USD, so that’s pretty affordable technology by now. Ah, wait a minute, TDK has recently released a wireless one that plays via Bluetooth, but it's not available in China yet. Bah... One other gripe –- it’s not rechargeable. Maybe this just needs too much power to work from a rechargeable battery, but considering the whole point of this, the whole design is based around its portability, it sucks that you have to plug the thing in. OK, you don’t HAVE to. You can run it off batteries, but it requires 10 D-sized batteries –- the big ones you put in a torch. And that’s only going to make this even heavier. So, despite the way it looks, this is not really portable. Even the small one. So buy it to look and sound amazing at home, not to sit on a stoop, pop a hydrant and re-invent hip hop. Kin has both sizes in stock now, but in limited numbers. Full map and details to the shop here.