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km5’s Sp1 Speaker and Mp1 Mixer Give CD Listening a DJ-Style Twist

There’s something satisfying about choosing a CD, even if most of us have become accustomed to tapping a screen instead. The trouble is finding audio equipment you’d actually want to leave on display. km5’s newly announced Sp1 speaker and Mp1 mixer give its Cp1 CD player some equally minimalist company, letting you listen to favorite albums or try your hand at mixing them.

Both borrow the Cp1’s flat, frame-like format, with black or white finishes that let the pieces sit together without looking like an assortment of unrelated electronics. The Sp1 puts a perforated grille where the player displays its disc, while the Mp1 fills that space with knobs and sliders. They share the same size, but each makes its purpose clear through its front surface.

Designer: km5

The speaker has a few surprises behind that otherwise quiet appearance. A dot-matrix display sits beneath the grille, showing the time and playback information without carving out a separate screen on the front. Physical buttons occupy the top edge alongside a retractable metal antenna. That last detail gives away the Sp1’s other role as an FM radio that doesn’t need to borrow your phone.

Inside are two 1.77-inch full-range drivers and two passive radiators, though their presence alone doesn’t tell us how convincing the bass will be. Bluetooth and microSD playback offer other ways to listen, and you can record radio programs, too. Pairing two Sp1 units provides stereo playback, letting a single speaker become part of a larger arrangement rather than something you’ve outgrown.

The Mp1, meanwhile, invites you to do something with the music beyond pressing play. Its two channels have separate level sliders, with a crossfader below for blending between sources. Three-band EQ controls adjust the bass, midrange, and treble, while filters change the sound further. Loop buttons repeat sections of a track, giving a favorite passage permission to stick around a little longer.

Two Bluetooth inputs let the mixer receive music from sources such as a Cp1 and a smartphone, then send the combined sound wirelessly to a compatible speaker. You aren’t required to own an entire matching set, thankfully. Line inputs and outputs also accommodate wired connections, though the published information doesn’t establish how much delay the completely wireless arrangement introduces when you’re trying to mix.

Built-in batteries make it easier to move the arrangement away from a desk, with km5 quoting approximately 12 hours for the speaker and six for the mixer. Optional wall-mount accessories offer another way to free up a surface. The mixer can even be operated on the wall, an unusual invitation to get up from the sofa and fiddle with the music yourself.

Preorders are scheduled to open on November 16, 2026, with km5 expecting shipments in February 2027 or later, though pricing remains unconfirmed. There’s also a practical limit to that portable party setup. The speaker’s quoted battery life is twice the mixer’s, so it might be ready for another album when your DJ booth is looking for a charger.

The post km5’s Sp1 Speaker and Mp1 Mixer Give CD Listening a DJ-Style Twist first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Apple’s new M6 iMac is faster, not different

Apple’s October has turned into a full-on home makeover. First came HomeView, a $299 smart display for the kitchen with a generous helping of iMac nostalgia baked into its design. Now the iMac itself is back with the M6 chip, which feels a bit like the original star showing up after the spinoff already aired. The two aren’t rivals at all, because a 7-inch hub and a 24-inch desktop live very different lives. They play for the same team, with HomeView running the house while the iMac sits on the desk handling homework, taxes, and the occasional late-night gaming session.

The new iMac skips the M5 generation and goes straight to Apple’s 2nm M6 chip, with two more CPU and GPU cores than before. It starts at $1,499 for the 10-core, two-port model, while $1,699 gets you 12 cores, four Thunderbolt ports, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet living inside the power brick. Apple also swapped in its own N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, which fits neatly with all that smart home energy. Those prices match what the M4 iMac cost after June’s price hike, so the extra cores are basically a free upgrade. Pre-orders open October 28, and the first deliveries land November 6.

Designer: Apple

The iMac skipped M5 and went straight to 2nm

The M6 is built on TSMC’s first-generation 2nm process, swapping the M4’s FinFET transistors for gate-all-around nanosheets that leak less power at these tiny sizes. The $1,499 model gets a 10-core CPU split into two super cores, three performance cores, and five efficiency cores. The $1,699 model bumps that to 12 cores, with two super, four performance, and six efficiency cores. Both get a matching GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every core, plus two 16-core Neural Engines totaling 32 cores. Memory bandwidth climbs from 120GB/s to up to 170GB/s, and the SSD now supports PCIe 5.0 for up to twice the read and write speed.

Apple’s own numbers put the M6 iMac up to 1.5 times faster than the M4 in Microsoft Excel and up to twice as fast for photo editing in Affinity. Ray-traced gaming performance doubles too, which is great news for anyone secretly using the family computer as a gaming rig. The biggest jump is on-device AI, with prompt processing in LM Studio up to five times faster than M4. Apple’s press release even name-drops vibe coding as an iMac use case, a very 2026 thing to say about a computer that comes in pink. If you’re coming from an Intel iMac, Apple claims up to 18 times faster performance, which should feel like time travel.

The Ethernet port lives in the power brick now

The $1,699 model comes with a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port as standard, and the $1,499 model can add one for $30. Apple builds that jack into the power adapter instead of the computer itself. That keeps the iMac’s 11.5mm-thin body free of a chunky network port, and your cable clutter ends up under the desk where it belongs. The previous model used the same brick trick, but it topped out at 1 Gigabit. At 2.5 Gigabit, pulling a giant photo library off a home server should feel a lot less like waiting for a kettle to boil.

Apple’s own N1 wireless chip replaces Broadcom, bringing Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, the low-power mesh network behind a lot of Matter smart home gear. External display support gets generous on the four-port model, which can drive two 6K screens at 60Hz, two 4K screens at 165Hz, or a single 4K panel at 240Hz. It can even run both external displays off a single Thunderbolt port. Everything you see and hear stays the same, from the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display at 500 nits to the 12MP Center Stage camera and six-speaker system. The seven colors carry over too, along with color-matched keyboards and mice that charge over USB-C.

Same $1,499 price, two more cores

The M4 iMac launched at $1,299 back in 2024, then jumped to $1,499 in June when Apple raised prices across the Mac lineup to cope with soaring memory and storage costs. The M6 model keeps that $1,499 starting price, but the base chip now has 10 CPU and GPU cores instead of eight. Compared to yesterday, that’s two extra cores of each for the same money. Compared to two years ago, the cheapest iMac costs $200 more. The four-port model at $1,699 is the one I’d point most people toward, since it bundles Ethernet, more display options, and the full 12-core chip.

If you bought an M4 iMac, enjoy it, because the display, camera, speakers, and design are identical and your browser tabs won’t notice the difference. Families still running an Intel or M1 iMac are the real audience here, and the jump will feel enormous. Pre-orders open October 28, with deliveries starting November 6. That makes it the third new Apple product in two days, after the iPad mini and alongside the M6 MacBook Pro, with touchscreen Macs still on deck. HomeView may have gotten the nostalgic looks this month, but the iMac is still the one doing the family’s homework.

The post Apple’s new M6 iMac is faster, not different first appeared on Yanko Design.

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