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While we tend to see a lot of shiny plastic bits in our electronics these days, and colorful LEDs. What if, instead, you wanted a bit of “retro modern” styling in your devices, say, in a bluetooth speaker that packs some other capabilities? That’s what the Retio radio speaker is offering.
As you can plainly see, Retio features everyone’s favorite old-school numeric display system, Nixie Tubes. These have shown up in clocks most recently, and we do have clock functions here. The larger issue with nixie tubes tends to be power delivery, given the 170V the tubes normally require. Rather than a 12V wall wart, they’ve instead put a 6800mAh battery inside the casing that can be charged up with a standard (these days) 5V USB port.
With power sorted, then it’s matter of what you’re powering. The Nixie tubes, of course, as well as backlights they’ve tucked in behind the tubes. Past that, the Retio can function as a 10W bluetooth speaker, or as a radio, or as a wired speaker, or as an alarm clock. In other words, quite a bit more functionality built into this walnut beauty than your standard bluetooth speaker.
The campaign for the Retio is running now, with things closing out on April 7th. Earlybird pricing starts at $299 (the expected MSRP is $399). While that’s a bit more than most have paid for bluetooth speakers, it’s obviously caught a lot of eyes, as they are way, way over their funding goal. campaign page / retio.co
Specs from Retio
