Random Thoughts

Do you remember the pandemic? People did some pretty odd things during those years. For instance, bands were doing live streams, and people were apparently watching them? I remember think pieces going “Is this the future of music?” and kinda expecting the answer to be “yes”, for once.

All that came to a grinding halt even before the pandemic was over, and the conclusion was “no, we wanna get out and get drunk while listening to music”.

One of the more innovative initiatives during those years was the Oda speaker. The pitch was unique: Buy these really nice-looking speakers, and you’ll get access to exclusive music. But there’s a twist! You won’t get to choose when to listen to it! Everything is live streamed, and the only thing you control is whether to turn the speakers on or not.

I though that that sounded like an absolutely doomed idea. But I like fun but doomed ideas and I wanted to support them. (And people like Julia Holter, Laraaji and Arooj Aftab were on board as performers.) So I got a set.

And they’re very nice looking. They’re made out of wood, and while the audio quality can’t be described as “the best ever” (especially as far as bass goes), the sound is very pleasant. Arooj Aftab coming out of these was very cool.

Even the back looks very appealing.

The central control unit is this. It has an on/off button at the top that glows menacingly when it’s on. And there’s a volume dial. That’s it. When setting it up (from the app), you give it your wifi password, and it does the rest: Whenever there’s a concert, it turns the volume up automatically and plays the concert. You can disable this in the app, but that was the selling point: Relinquish control of one thing in your life, like.

(When there’s no concert, the speakers live-streamed nature sounds from various parts of the world, but you could opt out of that. Or just turn the volume down to zero.)

The three components all stand on a separate heavy metal sheet, and the components attach very satisfyingly using the magic of magnetism.

Even the packaging is great — they came in these very sturdy cardboard boxes…

… that slide into another box.

Everything is just so thoughtfully made.

But like everybody predicted, the entire business idea went belly up pretty fast — I was late in ordering my speakers, so it took me a while to get them (they were producing them very slowly, but ethically). And by then they only had a couple more months worth of performances before they shut that down.

*sigh*

Yes, it was doomed from the start, but I’d hoped that I’d get a bit more time before the end, but nope.

So the speakers went into a cupboard and I didn’t think more about them, but a few weeks later, Oda announced that they were opening up the speakers — i.e., allowing buyers to use them as normal bluetooth speakers.

I didn’t do anything about that, because I don’t really use bluetooth at home, but I was tidying up yesterday when I came across these speakers again and I thought “hm!” Perhaps I should at least see whether the bluetooth thing even works?

And… yes, they connected fine, and when twiddling the volume knob, I could see that they were communicating, too. But absolutely zero music was coming out.

Then I did this:

Yes! It’s just the cable that’s all fucked up. And not just that cable — the cables to both speakers! How is that even possible — you make this entire thing: The streaming base station and the nice wooden speakers, but you fuck up the RCA cables!?

Cables probably ethically made by these hipsters.

Opening up the cables, it looks like they’ve tried to do the right thing, at least — even such luxuries as shrinkwrapping the terminals.

Uhm… yeah… I’ve seen better soldering. But it’s odd — they’ve used two stereo cables instead of two mono cables.

ANYWAY! I installed some non-ethically made ones, and then the speakers work totally fine.

So perhaps I’ll use these speakers for something now? I dunno — they’re very nice looking for sure.

Anyway, even though it was doomed to fail, I still think it was a cool idea. If only…