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The Love is the latest weird turntable that wants to bring vinyl into the digital age

The Love is the latest weird turntable that wants to bring vinyl into the digital age

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Another day, another crazy turntable concept

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Vinyl’s resurgence in popularity means more companies are coming up with new and different ways to play back all those newly purchased records. Which means we get devices like Love, which puts a new spin on the turntable concept by packing the entirety of the hardware of the device into what is essentially a giant, spinning tonearm.

Billing itself as “the first intelligent turntable,” Love is a turntable that connects to your phone and speakers through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The company is making some pretty big promises for Love’s capabilities: it claims to be able to offer modern music conveniences like play / pause controls, skipping tracks, repeating songs, along with volume controls and displaying album art. The Love also has no integrated speaker — any audio output has to be done over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or a connected 3.5mm or RCA audio cable, although it’s not currently clear how you’d plug a cable into the spinning Love. Coincidentally, those output methods are also the only specs we have for the device.

To actually play music, you place a record on top of a base (two are included), and then put the Love over the record. It then “scans the vinyl” to obtain song information and number of tracks, before playing it back (through a standard stylus on the bottom of the device). It’s an idea that in many ways is similar to the RokBlok, which also is pitched as an easily portable record player.

The Love has a serious design pedigree in the form of Yves Béhar, who helped design the device. As for availability, Love is being sold through a Kickstarter campaign sometime in the near future. That campaign is scheduled to launch in 20 days, according to the site, which allows interested buyers to sign up for a launch notification. No pricing or retail information beyond that has been announced, however.

Correction: The Love will be sold on Kickstarter, not through Coming Soon Tech, as this article originally said.