Hodinkee's $23,500 Spaceship Music Box

We've praised dozens of fascinating mechanical devices over the last year, but this here truly has to be among the cream of the crop. Certainly, it's the most ambitious. A 17-pound, 21-inch spaceship music box, the MB&F MusicMachine 2 is an incredible bit of gears and springs, brought to you by none other than our extremely punctual friends at Hodinkee.

Hodinkee collaborated with MB&F and an ancient music box maker from Switzerland to create this extremely unique device. Using 1,400 hand-applied pins, it plays six songs, one of which is, of course, "Stairway to Heaven."

According to Hodinkee, this is the first music box to contain its own amplifier, so it doesn't matter what surface you rest it on. This is possible because of the wood, sourced from the densest spruce trees in a Swiss forest. Usually only one out of every 10,000 trees will make the, uh, cut—they're then chopped down in a waning moon in November and dried out for half a decade. That's five years, kids. 

So far, only five have been produced. And three have been sold. That's most definitely because the other songs are Star Wars themes, "Angie," and "Should I Stay or Should I Go." Because rock 'n' roll.

And it has free shipping. Talk about a conversation starter.


Ethan Wolff-Mann is an editor at Supercompressor. He is not one of the three lucky owners. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.