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There is a moment, maybe thirty seconds into the first song you play on the MorningBlues SonicGlass A1, when the gimmick stops feeling like a gimmick. The lyrics don’t scroll so much as drift, landing on the beat, restyling themselves depending on whether you cued up lo-fi or hip-hop. Behind the glass, you can watch the driver actually move. It’s the rare piece of home audio that makes people put their drinks down and walk over.
That’s the pitch, and MorningBlues nailed the landing where it counts: 1,515 backers put roughly HK$9.5 million behind the campaign against a HK$78,000 goal – about $1.2 million USD, or 12,000 percent funded. Kickstarter gave it a Project We Love badge. Forbes covered it. So did Digital Trends and Yanko Design. For an emerging design-led audio brand selling a $799 glass speaker, that’s a real result.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Positioning
Let’s be honest about what this is. At 9.25 kg and just over 20 inches wide, the A1 is explicitly not portable – MorningBlues describes it as a home audio-visual centerpiece for desks, shelves, and nightstands. It runs off a 24V wall adapter. You place it once and leave it.
The pricing has moved fast. Kickstarter super early birds paid $649 against a planned $999 retail; MorningBlues’ own store now lists it at $799, with the Music Hub 1 controller at $359 and the karaoke mic pair at $159. Buy the full karaoke bundle, and you’re past a thousand dollars. Whether you need the full bundle really depends on how you plan to use it daily. If you want to get the most out of it, the Smart Karaoke Audio Bundle is a great choice.
Where to buy SonicGlass A1
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Design
MorningBlues built the A1 out of high-transparency tempered glass with an oxidation-resistant finish meant to keep it looking clear years in, and the company’s own term for the approach is “dual-transparent”: a clear enclosure paired with a transparent driver, deliberately exposing the acoustic hardware every other speaker hides. The engineering underneath is more considered than the aesthetic suggests. The diaphragm uses a symmetrical suspension to keep it moving evenly, a concave geometry intended to smooth the response, and a high-flux neodymium motor. You can watch all of it work.
Physically it’s a slab: 515 by 316 by 140mm and 9.25 kg – heavier than it photographs, and reassuringly so. Controls are refreshingly analog. A button and a rotary wheel sit on the right edge, letting you handle volume and menus without breaking the clean face, and the rear panel glows, which reviewers left switched on permanently because it makes the front display far more vivid in low light. The judges agree: the A1 has taken two design awards, including an iF, and showed at CES 2026.
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The screen
It’s a 21.5-inch, 1920×1080 TFT panel sitting behind high-transparency tempered glass rated at over 90 percent light transmission. In a dim room, it looks genuinely unlike anything else on a shelf. I can call it easily the most unique speaker I’ve ever used, and the rear backlight – adjustable from zero to full – makes the front panel pop even harder.
One honest caveat: the display isn’t fully see-through the way some promo shots imply. There appears to be a frosted layer on the rear panel to boost contrast and legibility. That’s a sensible engineering trade – you cannot read white serif lyrics against your living room wall – but if you bought in expecting a floating hologram, adjust expectations.
Features
MorningBlues calls the lyric engine MoodLyric, and it ships with 14 dynamic visual effects that move with the track. There are four top-level modes: Lyric Lab, Studio Lab, Serene Lab, and Clock. Lyric Lab is the headliner and the one you’ll live in. Studio Lab is a straight audio visualizer. Serene Lab handles ambient sound, meditation, and ASMR. Clock mode turns the whole thing into a very expensive bedside display, which sounds dismissive until you’ve seen it at 6 a.m.
Then there’s the AI layer, which is where the A1 gets weird in a way most people seem to enjoy. Upload a photo through the app, and it can drop your face into a generated music video playing on the speaker’s screen, and you can load your own photos and clips to build a personal visual soundtrack. Karaoke works too, via a mic with a Bluetooth receiver that plugs into the USB port on the back – though MorningBlues says the Music Hub is required for proper vocal and backing-track mixing. That’s an extra $359 to unlock a headline feature, which stings.
Lyric sync itself is good but not instant – expect a beat of lag at the top of each song before the words catch up. Do note the effects rotate between tracks rather than repeating, which keeps it from going stale.
Sound
This is where you should calibrate your expectations. MorningBlues leans hard on a German Schott glass diaphragm, which it bills as a world first, and argues glass is roughly nine times stiffer than a typical paper cone, meaning less breakup and lower distortion. Physically, that’s true. Whether you hear it is another question.
The final production spec is dual full-range drivers spanning 100Hz–20kHz, 2×80W Class-D amplification, a sealed cabinet, and three tuning modes.
In practice, we found the signature somewhat flat and the bass short on punch, with vocals staying clean and casual listening perfectly pleasant. That tracks with a sealed enclosure and a 100Hz floor: tight, controlled, unambitious below the midbass. It fills a room. It won’t shake one. Bluetooth is 5.3 with SBC and AAC only – no LDAC, no aptX – so Wi-Fi streaming is the better path.
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Verdict
Buy the MorningBlues SonicGlass A1 for the screen, and you’ll be delighted. Buy it as your primary hi-fi and you’ll wonder where the low end went. MorningBlues built a genuinely new object – a stereo, an art frame, a clock, and a karaoke rig that happens to share one beautiful pane of glass – and the crowdfunding response suggests plenty of people have been waiting for exactly this. Just go in knowing that the audio is competent rather than transcendent, that the software needs another few firmware passes, and that the karaoke story costs extra. As a piece of design, it’s the most interesting thing on a shelf this year.
Where to buy SonicGlass A1
The SonicGlass A1 is now available for pre-order. Use the discount code rootna1 at checkout.
