Century audio: Philips plays the vintage card with its new helmets and turntables

To celebrate a birthday is always an opportunity for a manufacturer to renew its products with new design, to raise the level of their technical characteristics or to enter new markets. This is exactly what Philips undertaken on the occasion of his annual Barcelona event by revealing his new range of audio products.

Designed to celebrate 100 years of success in the consumer audio market, this new series called Philips Audio Century has no less than five products combining retro design and modern features. Among them, there are all-in-one vinyl turntables The Tina and The Stevie, the Hi-Fi Open The Freddie helmet, the Bluetooth helmet The Ringo, as well as the little radio The Janet. Each of them was developed in tribute to the glory hours of Philips within the different branches of the audio market.

Philips The Freddie: a hi-fi helmet open in pure tradition

Worthy inheriting the Fidelio X3 launched in 2020, The Freddie is a Hi-Fi helmet as there are rare within the Philips catalog. Combining an architecture open to 50 mm neodymium transducers, The Freddie promises an extended frequency response and a particularly wide sound scene. Its design leaving the sound to escape to the outside of course reserves it for home use in combination with a source with moderate fuel or a helmet amplifier. No technical specification is currently available, if not the presence of controls on the earrings and the inclusion of a detachable cable of 3 m.

Philips The Ringo: Nostalgia for the 80s

A nod to the first portable helmets marketed in the 1980s, with which in particular could play sports, The Ringo is dedicated to nostalgic. Very fine hoops and supra-ear design, it has everything from a vintage helmet. Philips, however, took care to modernize them using an autonomy of 20 hours and a 5.4 Bluetooth receiver compatible. Philips also insists on the quality of its call architecture, which promises a reduction in ambient noise thanks to an AI algorithm.

Philips the Stevie & The Tina: All-in-one turntables above the lot?

Philips also unveiled two new vinyl turntables in reference to the time when they included all-in-one systems. Thus, each of them incorporates speakers and an amplification developed to measure.

The most affordable of them, Stevie, is equipped with a modest amplification of 12 watts. With a simple mini-jack output 3.5 mm, the connectors is spartan. Connectivity is more provided, however, with a 5.4 Bluetooth receiver compatible with the audio standard and its LC3 high-resolution codec. The Auracast technology is also there to diffuse the same pieces on several plates, wireless speakers and compatible Philips. In addition, you can also count on a Bluetooth transmitter to spread the sound to the external wireless speaker of its choice.

The Tina, on the other hand, presents itself as “The most powerful all-in-one vinyl platinum in the world“. It indeed combines two wide strip hp and a 10 cm woofer powered by an amplification developing a power of 120 watts. From its robust tray to its aluminum reading arm, passing through its internal anti-vibration design, all seems to have been implemented to avoid mechanical disturbances caused by integrated speakers. RCA entrance and USB-A port.

If we know that the Ringo helmet will be launched in June 2025 at a price of € 29.99, no price positioning or release date has been announced for the Hi-Fi helmet the Freddie. The Tina and The Stevie turntables, as well as the radio The Janet, will for their part launched at the start of the 2025 school year at repsective prices of € 399, € 149 and € 79.