We spend an embarrassing amount of time choosing what to listen to. You open Spotify, scroll for fifteen minutes, start a playlist you’ve already heard a hundred times, and somehow feel like you’ve made a decision. You haven’t. You’ve just exhausted yourself before the music even started. The Atonemo NTS Radio Player takes a different approach entirely, and I think it might be onto something important.
At first glance, it barely looks like a product. It’s small and flat, almost matchbox-thin, the kind of object that quietly disappears onto a shelf or windowsill without demanding attention. Swedish design company Atonemo built it in collaboration with NTS Radio, the London-born internet radio station founded by Femi Adeyemi in Hackney in 2011. Together, they’ve made something that feels less like a piece of tech and more like a considered position on how we should all be listening to music.
Designer: Atonemo x NTS Radio
The interface is almost aggressively simple. A rotating dial lets you scroll through 16 of NTS’s “Infinite Mixtapes,” each one a continuously running, human-curated stream built around a mood or genre. No artists. No albums. Just a small icon (a sun, a microphone, a smiley face) and whatever’s playing when you land on it. Two large buttons on the device give you direct access to NTS Radio 1 and 2, the station’s two flagship live channels. That’s basically the whole UI. And somehow, that’s enough.
The concept driving the collaboration is “omakase listening,” borrowing the Japanese dining philosophy of trusting the chef to decide what you eat. As the team describes it: “You hand over the decision to someone whose taste you trust, and you get something better than anything you’d have chosen yourself.” It’s a simple premise that most of the streaming industry has completely abandoned in favor of algorithmic personalization and infinite scrollable libraries. The NTS Radio Player bets on the opposite.
On the technical side, Atonemo hasn’t cut corners. The player outputs 24-bit audio at 192kHz through a 3.5mm analogue jack, and it ships with an RCA adapter so it can connect to older amplifiers and vintage hi-fi setups. That feels very intentional. A good chunk of NTS’s audience are people who care deeply about how music sounds, who shop for turntables, collect records, and treat their speakers like furniture. Atonemo’s core Streamplayer is already designed for that crowd, and the NTS Radio Player extends the same idea: give old gear a new life without sacrificing audio quality. It also supports AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz for when you want to step outside the NTS ecosystem entirely.
The design itself is worth sitting with for a moment. The dial immediately calls to mind the iPod’s click wheel, which is probably not accidental. That association carries real weight: there’s something inherently warm and tactile about scrolling through options with your hand rather than your thumb. Physical interaction with music hardware is having a quiet revival right now, riding the same cultural wave that’s kept vinyl sales growing year after year. The NTS Radio Player reads the room.
My honest opinion? The $179 price point is a reasonable ask for what you’re getting, especially if you’re already an NTS listener. For anyone new to the station, this is an unusually elegant entry point into a catalog of music that’s genuinely harder to find elsewhere. NTS has built its entire reputation on programming diverse, underheard work from artists, DJs, and record collectors across more than 60 cities globally. Six million people listen every month, and it still manages to feel like a secret.
So much of modern tech is built to maximize the time you spend choosing, scrolling, and clicking. The Atonemo NTS Radio Player is designed to do exactly the opposite. You plug it in, you turn the dial, and then you just listen. For a lot of people right now, that simplicity might be the most radical feature of all.
The post NTS Radio’s New $179 Player Wants You to Stop Choosing first appeared on Yanko Design.