An audio player without speakers…now that’s absurd right? Wrong. We’re in 2012, get with the times! The Vomo C Personal Audio Player is a small gadget that plays your music, yes, without a speaker. I’ve been playing around with one of the first units to be distributed for the past 2 weeks now and I’ve been getting a kick out of the faces of those curious enough to come by and check it out.

Being one of the first people in the world to critique or review a product is a bit overwhelming, so I took my time in checking out the Vomo C and its features.

The Product

The Vomo C Personal Audio Player fits easily in the palm of your hand but packs enough power to fill an entire room with rich 360-degree sound. It comes outfitted with an SD card slot, 3.5 mm jack, and an FM receiver  for three sources of sound. It uses a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery and outputs 3W of sound. The actual “shell” of the player has an almost pearly, luminescent design. The pod shape gives it a really nice futuristic look, and it can easily cast as the centerpiece in a room or the highlight of a table.

It has a multi-functional scroll wheel which serves as a volume controller, track changer, and FM channel seeker and comes with a nifty remote control for doing pretty much the same thing.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the Vomo C Personal Audio Player is the fact that it’s not wireless. For such an innovative sound device, having it tied down to the 3.5mm cable can me frustrating at times. I’ve been told that there’s a Bluetooth version in the works, which is a great way to make the Vomo C Personal Audio Player an even better device in terms of mobility. Another suggestion I’d make is purely aesthetics, but the lights that flash when the device is a neat feature, having it synchronize with the beat of the music playing though would be even cooler.

Something to make note of is the EQ setting of the device you’re outputting your audio from; too bass-y and the sound will be muffled and distorted, and if it has too much treble the sound will be flat and screechy.

The Technology

Perhaps the coolest things about the Vomo C Personal Audio Player for me was placing it on different surfaces and seeing which one produced the best sound. So far it’s been my guitar, which makes sense since it is an acoustic device.

The Vomo C uses sound conduction and displacement technology to distribute sound in 360 degrees on any surface. This also allows you to hear whatever is playing at the same level no matter where you are located around the surface that it’s on.

The Video

It’s hard to convey the working of the Vomo C via text, so I made the following video to give a better idea of what it looks like and how it sounds.

The Verdict

The Vomo C Personal Audio Player is a cool gadget to have and in fact it’s been my main speaker for the past two weeks, simply because of the fact that I can achieve rich sound without lugging around a speaker that half as portable. While there’s a limited range of sounds it can play without sounding distorted or muffled, WLeaf claims the frequency response is 80Hz-18KHz, you’ll really have no problems playing music for yourself on your bedside or loud enough that an entire room can enjoy. The Vomo C can be found for $59.99 on Amazon, and you can find out more about it here.