Japanese audio brand Final has introduced Porta, a pair of wireless on-ear headphones that rethink one of the most familiar elements of headphone design – the headband. Unlike most headphones with a conventional padded arch, the Porta uses a minimal, single-wire structure called AirWire, reducing the headphones’ weight to approximately 40 grams while aiming to make extended listening more comfortable.

The AirWire design minimises the area of contact between the headphones and the wearer’s head. According to Final, this approach reduces pressure on the top of the head, a common source of discomfort with traditional headphones. The lightweight construction also gives the Porta an unusually stripped-back appearance, with a thin metal-like frame connecting two compact earcups. The pair of cans is a minimalist accessory that goes well with your other no-nonsense gadgets.

Designer: Final

Porta’s aesthetic draws on the visual language of older portable audio equipment. Its orange ear pads recall the bright accents associated with classic Sony Walkman headphones, while a black version offers a more understated alternative. Both variants share the same main body, with the ear-pad colour providing the visual distinction. Final also plans to sell replacement ear pads separately in 2027, giving owners the option to refresh the look without replacing the entire product.

Despite its lightweight construction and retro appearance, the pair of cans incorporates modern wireless connectivity. Bluetooth 5.4 enables connection to compatible devices, while support for the SBC and AAC audio codecs provides compatibility with a broad range of smartphones and other Bluetooth audio sources. The headphones have a stated frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz.

Final says the Porta has been tuned to deliver a lively presentation, with a sense of depth and substance in the midrange and lower frequencies. The company highlights vocal weight as a particular consideration in its sound design, addressing the challenge of maintaining a full listening experience in a lightweight headphone enclosure. These are manufacturer claims rather than independently verified performance results.

A 57mAh lithium-ion battery provides up to eight hours of music playback on a charge. Recharging takes approximately 90 minutes through USB-C, keeping the charging process straightforward. The headphones also carry an IPX4 rating, indicating resistance to water splashes, which offers some protection during everyday use and light exercise.

The design does involve trade-offs. The Porta does not offer active noise cancellation, a feature found in many contemporary wireless headphones. Its modest battery capacity and eight-hour rated playback time also place the emphasis on everyday convenience and low weight rather than extended listening between charges.

Final has priced the Porta at ¥12,800 (approximately $80), with availability in Japan scheduled for October 23, 2026. International availability has not been confirmed, although the brand sells products through its Amazon storefront.

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I’ll say it: Nothing launched the Ear (open) under the wrong logo. The open-ear buds debuted in 2024 at $149, wrapped in Nothing’s signature transparent look, and they were good enough to win a Red Dot Product Design award. Still, every time I looked at them, my brain kept whispering “CMF.” Open-ear buds are the casual, colorful, sweat-friendly second pair you toss in a gym bag, which describes CMF’s entire personality. Even Nothing seems to have noticed, since the Ear (open) now comes in soft blue for $99 in the US. That’s CMF money in a CMF color, wearing a Nothing name tag.

Apparently I’m not alone in this conspiracy theory. Industrial designer Shreyansh Onial, whose CMF Flip foldable concept got a reaction from Carl Pei himself, built the CMF Ear (open) that Nothing never released, and it looks like it rolled straight off CMF’s assembly line. The over-ear hook stays, but the transparent panels give way to solid Coral, Light Grey, and Dark Grey. Each bud gets a chunky physical button, and the pill-shaped case borrows the knurled Smart Dial from CMF’s $99 Clip Pro. It’s the alternate-universe launch I didn’t know I was waiting for.

Designer: Shreyansh Onial

Trading Nothing’s see-through shell for CMF’s candy-colored hooks

Coral, Light Grey, and Dark Grey carry the whole concept, and they match the Clip Pro’s palette exactly. Transparency is Nothing’s calling card, though on the Ear (open) much of the surface is a silicone ear hook anyway. Onial goes fully opaque, with a soft matte finish on the hook and a glossier coat on the round acoustic pod that sits by your ear canal. The outer face is a rounded pill panel with a single round button and a tiny glyph made of a circle, a dot grid, and a filled dot. The battery tail picks up a fine stippled texture, which gives sweaty fingers something to grip.

A real button on each bud fixes the biggest workout annoyance with the Ear (open), which relies on pinch controls that get fiddly with slippery fingers. CMF already gave the Clip Pro physical buttons for exactly this reason, so the move fits the brand’s own playbook. Flip the bud around and you’ll find a perforated metal grille shaped like a little kidney bean, plus two pogo pins on a short collar for charging. That bean grille is my favorite detail, because it gives the bud an oddly cartoonish face. It also mirrors the soft circles of the dial on the case. The whole thing feels friendly and approachable, which suits a pair built for sweat and sidewalks.

The Clip Pro’s Smart Dial case meets a hook built for runners

The case comes straight from CMF’s Clip Pro, a deep pill-shaped capsule with a knurled metal dial set into one end of the lid. On the Clip Pro, that Smart Dial adjusts volume, controls playback, answers calls, and triggers pairing. CMF put the same dial on its Buds Pro 2, and it has since become the brand’s signature move. Onial adds a dot-matrix “cmf” wordmark on the lid, a front status LED, and a USB-C port on the side. Inside, molded cradles hold the two hooks in a neat V, with a charging pocket waiting for each acoustic pod.

Over-ear hooks anchor behind the ear, which keeps them planted through runs, burpees, and sprints for the bus. The Clip Pro’s C-shaped clip hugs the ear’s outer edge instead, a format better suited to commutes and long desk days. That leaves the runner with a CMF-shaped hole in their gym bag, since CMF currently offers nothing for them (lowercase n). A dial makes even more sense here, because twisting a knob on the case beats digging through phone menus mid-stretch. Pair it with real buttons on the buds and you get a workout setup that never asks for a precise touch gesture.

Where a CMF Ear (open) would land in a crowded open-ear market

Open-ear audio got crowded fast, with Bose’s Ultra Open sitting at the top for $299 and Sony’s LinkBuds Clip, Huawei’s FreeClip, and Shokz’s hook-style buds filling out the field. The Clip Pro landed at $99 with LDAC support, a 10.8mm driver, and up to 32.5 hours of total battery. The Ear (open) counters with a bigger 14.2mm driver, 8 hours per charge, and 30 hours with its case. Each Ear (open) bud weighs 0.29 oz (8.1 grams), while each Clip Pro bud weighs 0.21 oz (5.9 grams). A CMF hook could split the difference, pairing the Ear (open)’s stable fit and big driver with the Clip Pro’s dial, buttons, and price.

The blue Ear (open) already sells for $99 in the US, the same price as the Clip Pro, so Nothing has basically priced its own product at CMF level. Moving it under the CMF badge would make that price tag look like a plan instead of a markdown. It would also free Nothing to return later with a pricier transparent sequel, flipping the usual order where the premium brand gets the good stuff first. CMF became an independent Nothing subsidiary headquartered in India last year, and a signature sport bud would give the young brand another reason to stand apart from its parent. Onial’s renders already look ready for the shelf. Sometimes the little sibling deserves the new toy first.

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David Guetta just won DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs poll for a record sixth time, and I have a very specific idea for his trophy shelf. Somebody on the internet has turned a Pioneer DJ setup into Korean blue-and-white porcelain, tigers and all. Two decks and a four-channel mixer, glazed bone white and hand-painted (well, AI-painted) in cobalt blue. It looks like something you’d find behind glass at the Met, right before a security guard asks you to step back. It’s also the most Guetta-coded object I’ve seen all year, because a guy who headlines weekly Ibiza residencies deserves a rig that looks as expensive as the bottle service.

The setup comes from creators patchkims and takitani.lab, who posted it as the “Joseon Baekja Prototype,” complete with a “1 of 1, no restock” caption that reads like a sneaker drop. It’s an AI render, so nobody’s shipping it to Guetta’s villa anytime soon. The idea still lands, though. Each jog wheel carries a tiger and a magpie under a pine tree, lifted straight from Korean folk painting, and the screens swap waveforms for misty mountains and waterfalls. Suddenly your DJ gear graduates from booth equipment to living room centerpiece, which is a fun flex for anyone, let alone the world’s No. 1 DJ.

Designers: patchkims & takitani.lab

Kkachi horangi is a genre of Korean folk painting where a deliberately goofy tiger, nicknamed the idiot tiger, plays the aristocratic yangban, and a smug magpie in a pine tree speaks for the common people. Both jog wheels here carry that exact scene, with the cat prowling below and the bird looking unbothered above. The two decks get different tiger poses, so the platters work like a call and response. Joseon painters used the setup to poke fun at the ruling class, and now it sits under the palms of whoever runs the dance floor. That is either delicious irony or very on-brand for a king of the booth.

The screens trade waveforms for misty peaks, a waterfall, a pavilion, and a pair of moons, echoing Irworobongdo, the sun, moon and five peaks painting that stood behind the king’s throne in Joseon palaces. The sun and moon stood for the king and queen, so the painting doubled as a majesty backdrop. A headliner on a raised stage occupies similar real estate, so the throne comparison writes itself. The original sun burned red, and going cobalt turns it into a second moon, which suits a room that wakes up after midnight. Calling a DJ booth a throne room is a stretch, but watch a stadium crowd hang on a Guetta build-up and the royalty comparison stops feeling silly.

Joseon Korea made white its signature after the green celadon era of Goryeo, and cobalt-painted porcelain sat at the top of the pile. The pigment was rare and imported from China, so when supply dried up, court kilns improvised with iron-brown, and some banquet wares wore painted imitations of blue-and-white called gahwa, literally fake painting. A porcelain Pioneer rig conjured by AI is a 2026 gahwa, a convincing stand-in for an object nobody has actually fired in a kiln. I’m weirdly fine with that, because the Joseon court got there first. Meanwhile, Christie’s has estimated a genuine 15th-century cobalt jar at roughly $2 million to $3 million, so the real thing sets the bar high.

The real-world version of this lineup runs two AlphaTheta CDJ-3000X players at $2,999 each plus a Pioneer DJ DJM-A9 mixer at $2,899, roughly $8,900 in the US. The render looks closer to the older CDJ-2000NXS2 generation, disc slots and all. Pioneer did sell a limited white CDJ-2000NXS2-W run in 2017, so colorway flexes are old news for the brand. I imagine if such a product were to exist, it would probably cost in the hundreds of thousands. That being said, I’m sure an enthusiastic deejay with money to throw could acquire this for their den. Guetta, SHM, heck even Shaq… I’m looking at y’all.

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Adjusting your headphones shouldn’t mean searching for a tiny button or guessing where to tap a touch-sensitive surface. TUNE X3 explores a more hands-on approach, using knurled dials and physical switches that let users feel their way through everyday audio adjustments. Designed by Pressec Design as part of a fictional product family, these concept headphones make tactile interaction a defining feature of their industrial design.

The headphones pair a brushed aluminium chassis with high-contrast orange textile padding across the ear cushions and headband. The raw metallic finish recalls mid-century studio equipment, while the saturated fabric creates a bold visual contrast. Exposed fasteners and a wide-profile headband reinforce the utilitarian character, giving TUNE X3 the appearance of precision equipment. This is a detour from the currently trending minimalist consumer gadgets. It’s like bringing in a muscle car in the era of Tesla EVs.

Designer: Pressec Design

The physical controls are the core of the niche concept. Dedicated dials and tactile switches handle volume, treble, and active noise cancellation (ANC), giving users distinct controls for common listening toggles. Their knurled surfaces provide texture under the fingers, making the interface feel more deliberate than a smooth touch panel. The design suggests a listening experience in which users can reach for a control, recognize it by touch, and make adjustments without navigating an onscreen menu. While the concept does not establish how the controls perform in practice, it places physical interaction at the heart of the headphone experience.

TUNE X3 is part of the same fictional product family as the CINE X3. The designer developed both concepts around a consistent visual language, carrying shared characteristics across the collection without simply repeating the same shapes. Materials, proportions, finishes, and hardware details establish continuity while allowing each product to retain its own identity.

The project also explores how Vizcom can support product-family development by using previous designs as references. This approach helps designers preserve a recognizable character across multiple concepts while continuing to explore distinct forms and functions.

TUNE X3 remains a conceptual design, with no confirmed release date, price, or technical specifications. Its core idea is straightforward – physical controls can make headphone interaction feel more immediate and intentional, while giving the product a distinctive identity shaped by the way users handle it.

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