UselessFinds
A Tesla Coil That Turns Your Music Into Lightning

the sound comes from the arc itself

Desk Toys

A Tesla Coil That Turns Your Music Into Lightning

A small solid-state Tesla coil in an acrylic case. Play music over Bluetooth and the plasma arc carries it — the spark is the speaker.

Buy this nonsense$38.71$19.16(sponsored link, opens in a new tab)
  • tesla coil
  • plasma arc
  • bluetooth speaker
  • desk toy
  • lightning
  • music

What Is This Thing?

A small solid-state Tesla coil mounted in a clear acrylic case, with a gold disc and a needle at the top. It takes Bluetooth or a 3.5mm cable.

Play music through it and a purple plasma arc rises off the needle and crackles. The crackling is the music. There is no speaker anywhere in the device — the audio signal modulates the arc, the arc heats and cools the air thousands of times a second, and the air itself is what you hear.

Why You Don't Need It

It is a terrible speaker. The frequency response is thin and buzzy, the volume is fixed at "audible in a quiet room", and it will sound worse than the phone that is feeding it.

It also produces ozone, makes a noise even without music, and should not be run all day next to your face.

Why You'll Buy It Anyway

Because the mechanism is the point. Almost every speaker you have ever owned works by pushing a paper cone back and forth. This one has no moving parts at all: it is making sound out of lightning, which is how thunder works, at a scale you can put on a desk.

The demonstration is also unusually good on video, which is presumably why the listing images are all captioned things like "music made visible" and "people notice it". They are not wrong.

A Tesla Coil That Turns Your Music Into Lightning — photograph 2
A Tesla Coil That Turns Your Music Into Lightning — photograph 3

Who It's Actually For

Desks with an audience — a shared office, a streaming setup, a workshop. It is a conversation object that happens to play music rather than a speaker that happens to look odd.

Also anyone who has ever wanted a Tesla coil and correctly concluded that a full-size one is a bad idea in a flat.

before you click buy

Read the safety notes rather than skipping them. The arc is high voltage at low current, which is the survivable combination, but it will still burn skin and it will interfere with nearby electronics — keep phones, cards and anything with a memory away from it.

Check what powers it and whether an adapter is included. These run on a mains brick that is not always in the box.

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