Teenage Engineering are one of those fascinating and fantastic companies that come around every so often with a brilliant new product. This time, it is the OD-11 Cloud Speaker, a high-tier audio speaker that is being shown off at CES 2013.
OD-11 works with WiFi and Bluetooth, and is controlled with a unique circle remote. There are no buttons on the remote, to play: you press down, to turn the music up: you move your hand around the circle. Incredibly, the remote can last up to two years on a single battery because of advances in Bluetooth 4.0.
The design of the OD-11 Cloud Speaker is a large cube, measuring 26x26x26 cm. The design of the cube is very minimalist, with no controls or panels on the speaker. Inside the cube there is 100w class D amplifier along with a flurry of filters and a DSP.
If you want more than one speaker, you can connect three more that play the same sound. We believe all three will play music at the same level as each other. We don’t believe the remote will have any configuration between different speakers if you choose to get more than one.
Since the OD-11 is very minimalist, it will play music straight from your Spotify, Soundcloud or other music collection, instead of having plug-ins. This can be a little troublesome if you want to play one song and it is on a playlist, but we believe this will only be a small annoyance to some users.
OD-11 certainly isn’t cheap and Teenage Engineering make no mistake in trying to make this speaker affordable to everyday buyers. At $800 for a single unit, you may question how much you want to listen to music. The audio on this speaker is amazing though and Teenage Engineering have been working with old parts from vinyl days.
