Whether you’re a hardcore audiophile or not, chances are your feed has lately been filled with content about Tiny Vinyl. The Nashville-based brand rose to fame last year when it shrank the record down to a four-inch collectible. It’s back in the news now thanks to a turntable built specifically to play those earlier releases. Dubbed Tiny Vinyl Player, the turntable launched on Target on July 14 alongside a matching storage crate and display frame, marking the company’s foray into hardware.
The buzz needed no guessing. CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and USA Today all featured the launch news. That gave us reason to sit down with co-founder Neil Kohler to talk through the thinking behind this unique vinyl player.
Kohler and Jesse Mann founded Tiny Vinyl in 2023. The duo came up with an idea that sounded easy at first: To press a fully working vinyl record at one-third the size of a standard 12-inch LP, with one song on each side. But it turned out to be harder to pull off than it sounded.
Kohler told Homecrux that the idea came from two separate trends meeting at the same time. “My background is in the toy business, while Jesse is a festival promoter. Jesse and I saw two trends converging: the huge return to vinyl with vinyl sales surging globally, and another trend, particularly in toys, toward miniaturized everything. We thought, how small could we make an authentically pressed vinyl record? And Tiny Vinyl was born,” he states.
Turning that idea into a working four-inch model took more than just design work. Kohler had previously described the physics of playing vinyl at that scale as far from trivial to solve, and the company spent real engineering effort getting a record that small to hold a groove and track properly on a standard needle. The bet paid off commercially as “Tiny Vinyl records landed in more than 1,800 Target stores last fall,” Kohler claims. So, when and where did the turntable enter the picture?
“As we sold our one millionth Tiny Vinyl, the number one request from fans of our tiny format has been for a custom turntable. So, we talked with our partners at Target and developed a Tiny Vinyl Player, storage Crate, and 2×2 Frame to give our fans what they asked for.” And that is precisely what gave birth to the Tiny Vinyl Player.
Kohler walked us through what actually made it into the box. “For starters, a standard turntable is a great way to play Tiny Vinyl. Our Tiny Vinyl Player is about the size of a shoebox. In this small size, we included a tonearm and standard cartridge, stereo speakers, Bluetooth compatibility, and a storage pocket. And it retails for under $50. We think it’s a good value at this retail,” he says.
Hi Consumption, which did a rundown of the device, describes a clamshell cabinet wrapped in pebbled faux leather with a mesh speaker grille up front, a look the outlet compared to a miniature guitar amplifier rather than a conventional deck. Coverage elsewhere has been candid about what that price buys. Fast Company’s testing found a noticeable wobble in playback on its review unit, something Kohler attributed to a “break-in period rather than a defect”, and Mashable’s hands-on take was blunter still, describing the built-in audio as tiny and muffled next to a full-size turntable.
Kohler doesn’t dispute the tradeoff, stating, “Player was never meant to be an audiophile machine, and that Bluetooth output was built in specifically so owners could route sound to better speakers when they wanted it.”
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“A standard turntable remains the practical way to hear Tiny Vinyl at its best”, he says, “but the dedicated Player, Crate, and Frame exist to give fans a self-contained little universe to build out, something closer to a display piece with working parts than a serious hi-fi component.”
For now, the Tiny Vinyl Player is a rage online. It isn’t a real challenger to a proper turntable, and isn’t trying to be, priced closer to a concert T-shirt than to hi-fi gear. Whether it becomes a genuine addition to how fans engage with the format or settles in as a novelty display piece next to the records it plays, Kohler and Mann seem comfortable either way. As Mann and Kohler say, “the goal was never to compete with existing turntables, but to establish something of its own.” Those interested can secure their purchase on Target, where the tiny player is available for $50 only.
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