Robosen's TRANSFORMERS Soundwave Does What the 1984 Original Only Pretended: It Actually Works as a Speaker - Yanko Design

"The G1 Flagship Soundwave represents something more interesting than another collectible robot. It's a study in how designers can honor iconic industrial design while pushing the technical boundaries of what consumer robotics can achieve. The original 1984 Soundwave toy worked because it made sense. A portable cassette player was something you carried. It had buttons, a display window, speakers. The disguise wasn't just clever, it was culturally relevant."

"The Sony Walkman launched in 1979. By 1984, when Soundwave first appeared in toy form, the portable cassette player had become one of the most recognizable consumer electronics forms in existence. Rectangular, pocketable, with a clear window showing the tape spools and a row of tactile buttons along the bottom edge. This wasn't arbitrary product design. It was the distillation of function into form that industrial designers spend careers trying to achieve."

Robosen and Hasbro recreated Soundwave as a G1 Flagship figure that preserves the original cassette-player disguise while adding real-world functionality. The figure functions as a Bluetooth speaker in cassette mode and uses front-panel tape-deck buttons for playback, pause, track skipping, and integrated recording. The design honors the Walkman-era industrial logic by retaining a rectangular, pocketable form with a clear tape-window and tactile controls. The original toy succeeded because the cassette player was a culturally ubiquitous object that made the disguise credible. The remake emphasizes that effective product camouflage pairs trusted consumer form-factors with modern robotics and sound technology.

Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News