Audio Video News

Tom DeVesto, 40 year consumer electronics industry veteran and Hall of Famer who co-founded Cambridge SoundWorks with AV legend Henry Kloss in 1988 and started Tivoli Audio in 2000, has launched a new venture, Como Audio.

The Boston-based company’s first offerings will be a pair of portable Internet radios reminiscent of the Model One table radio Tivoli introduced in 2000. The radios, dubbed Solo and Duetto, were recently launched on Kickstarter and with a month to go the company has already surpassed its $50,000 funding goal.

Expected to launch in October, the Solo is being offered for pre-order at $200 with free shipping—a savings of $100 off its retail price of $299—and the Duetto at $300, or $99 off its retail price of $399.

The radios, offered in furniture-grade walnut and white gloss, provide “high quality sound and build, simplicity of use, and an unprecedented number of music listening options available at the touch of a button,” according to the company.

“When streaming services took over, a lot of people stopped paying attention to sound quality,”DeVesto said. “You listened to music through your earbuds, your laptop, or your smartphone. Or you connected to a music player through Bluetooth and everything sounded a little better—as long as you stayed within 30 feet. My goal is to deliver true high-fidelity sound in a compact wooden design that would not only produce great room-filling sound, but have the ability to sync music throughout the house, simply by pressing a button.”

The Solo measures 5 x 9.5 x 4.7 inches and has a 3-inch woofer and 0.75-inch dome tweeter. The Duetto is more elongated at 5.3 x 14.5 x 5.6 inches and uses the same drivers but has two woofer/tweeter complements. Both models, described as Google Cast- and Amazon Dot-ready, offer the following features:

• 2 x 30 watts of power (RMS)
• Access to Spotify and more than 20,000 Internet radio stations • Bluetooth/aptX streaming with NFC pairing
• High-performance FM tuner
• Color display (2.8 inches for Solo, 3.2 inches for Duetto) • Compatibility with DLNA wireless streaming
• Four inputs: two analog, one optical, and one USB
• Alarm clock with snooze and sleep timer functionality
• Remote control
• Multiroom capability

For more information visit kickstarter.com.

See TWICE’s recent interview with DeVesto here.