John
The move from CDs to rips, downloads and cloud streaming have robbed us of the button pushes once used to open and close a CD player drawer, play the CD, pause it, skip tracks and, in many cases, the immense satisfaction of using a rotary to adjust the volume. Many of us now control music playback and adjust volume with a smartphone — click, click, drag.
One downside (especially when the phone rings with an incoming call) is that we must pull the smartphone from a pocket, unlock it – with fingerprint, finger-drag or PIN – before launching the control app (Sonos, BluOS, Roon, etc.) that allows us to hit pause or finger-slide the volume downwards. The same applies when we want to juice the SPLs on a favourite song.
Berlin startup SENIC (not pronounced ‘scenic’) is looking to put the tangibility back into streaming music control with their Nuimo (€319) and Nuimo Click (€179) devices, which already integrate with the Sonos ecosystem. Use the deceptively weighty Nuimo disc to play/pause, forward/next, adjust the volume or punch in a favourite playlist. The Nuimo talks to an outboard receiver box which in turn communicates with a Sonos system on the same LAN.
The way SENIC’s CEO Tobias Eichenwald tells it, the more direct the path to getting music playing in the home, the more music people will play. And what could be faster than a single click on a wall-mounted Nuimo Click?
In this video, Eichenwald gives us a hands-on demo of his products as well as a tour of SENIC’s Berlin headquarters:
Don’t have a Sonos system? Eichenwald says he and his team are talking to Roon about Nuimo integration possibilities.
Further information: SENIC
