This is pretty cool.  3Ryan Radios, out of Brooklyn, retrofits old tube radios to play mp3s from your iPod/iPhone!  They have an inventory of old radios to choose from, and once you pick which one you want, you can let them know whether you prefer a built-in dock or an input cord, and two to three weeks later, you receive your custom speakers.

In addition to adding a dose of retro style to your living room, an added feature that I LOVE about these is that they “un-digitize” the sound of your mp3s to produce a warmer vinyl-esque sound.  I personally love the sound of vinyl, and had been considering buying a record player but balking at having to re-purchase my music collection as records, so this is a major plus.

And apparently it’s not just some effect that is applied on top of the sound to make it sound like vinyl.  Their explanation is that it breaks the binary code (used for mp3s) down into analog frequency (used for vinyl) so that it truly is the same type of sound as on vinyl.

What confuses me about this is that I’m pretty sure that’s the process that happens whenever mp3s are played over speakers, but maybe they have a more complicated explanation they just don’t provide on the website.  Or, alternately, maybe this is just the quality of sound tube radio speakers are able to produce, but they would like you to think there is a really high-level process they’ve implemented to create this effect.

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