Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Elan Feingold’s new startup, and Snap’s new Specs.

When Plex co-founder Elan Feingold tried to find the perfect gift for a friend’s 60th birthday, he started tinkering. “My background is actually computer science and electrical engineering, and I've always been fascinated with making physical objects,” Feingold says. 

The result of that tinkering is a hardware music player that combines beautiful minimalist design – think walnut & anodized aluminum, one single knob for control and no distracting display – with a unique twist: The player is pre-loaded with 1001 albums, which can be accessed by putting little “album” cards into a recessed tray on its surface.

It’s a throwback to the days of physical albums, when you could only listen to one album at a time. No playlists, no shuffling, no algorithms. “I wanted to bring back the physicality of it,” Feingold says. “I wanted to bring back the inconvenience of switching”

The finished device was a beautiful gift, but impossible to turn into a commercial product, as pre-loading the music alone would cost a fortune. However, the process of building the player sparked something in Feingold. After decades of building software – Feingold had created the first version of Plex as a hobby in 2007, co-founded the company two years later, and left Plex at the beginning of this year – he was ready to finally give hardware a go again. 

Feingold also realized that some of the code he wrote for the player was valuable for a software project he had been working on in recent years: Plexamp, the dedicated music player powered by Plex’s personal media server. “Plexamp never had a really good solution for multi-room audio,” Feingold says. And since he was already rewriting Plexamp’s code for his one-of-a-kind birthday present, he decided to also bring it to other hardware platforms. “[Plexamp also] never had a really good story for the big screen,” he adds.