Here's a decidedly niche electronic product with heavily retro looks: Yamaha's THR, "a cross between a hi-fi stereo player and a guitar amp." Intended as an amp for the home guitarist, the THR can also be used as a portable speaker for your iDevice or similar.
What we most dig about it is something that would've run us afoul of our design professors back in school: The design belongs to that retro class of objects that, independent of function, were all painted with the same broad design brush. In other words, if you transported this back in time to a home in the '60s, it wouldn't have looked out of place at all, but one person would guess it was a portable heater while another would assume it was a transistor radio.
The video below explains the features of, and thinking behind, the THR. (Non-music lovers may find the guitar demo parts get a bit long; for those of you who actually play guitar and are interested in the THR's aural properties, there's a series of videos more targeted towards you here.)
(more...)