The Gadhouse Cosmo Reviewed

I was really looking forward to trying out this Gadhouse Cosmo and it certainly is crammed with the sort of features that you would expect in a much more expensive unit.

The top deck boasts Volume, Tone and Speed controls, Manual DJ or Automatic return and a set of buttons to control the recording and playing back of digital files. The Cosmo has 4 input modes: Turntable, FM Radio, Bluetooth, and AUX and the side panel has a power on-off switch a 3.5mm Aux input jack socket, ¼” and 3.5mm headphone jacks, phono line out connectors, and USB & SD card slots which can be used for recording or playing back digital media. It has a 22 page instruction manual and a barcode to download the App to integrate with the unit and help organise your music.

Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Well not entirely….
The ideas incorporated in it are great but the realisation of them doesn’t quite match up. I would not complain too much if this was a really budget item, but I see that it retails at £159 so I would expect the basics to be right.
Don’t get me wrong, mostly it does what it says, for example when playing music digitally via Bluetooth or listening to an FM station the sound is pretty good even if Gadhouse don’t seem to have taken full advantage of advances in the technology of getting big low-end sounds from small loudspeakers.

But it’s when it comes to the record player that the Cosmo comes unstuck. To begin with, the spindle which locates the record centrally on the turntable is undersize, allowing the records to sit off centre leading to an audible ‘wow’ or pitch variation on sustained notes. But that is a small problem compared to the harsh tinny sound that came from the loudspeakers when playing vinyl. Knowing that the loudspeakers can produce a decent sound I checked the sound from the Line Out and Headphone sockets. They all had the same tinny sound with no bottom end and the moving magnet type of pickup used in the Cosmo should produce a good sound. Could it be that Gadhouse have failed to include RIAA equalisation on their phono input? Because that’s exactly what it sounds like!

Another small oddity is that the QR code on the box of stickers, which looks like it’s supposed to link you to the GadGo app, links instead to an advertising site called me-qr.com which does not even mention the app. The GadGo app is however available on Google Play and presumably App Store for direct download.

The Cosmo could be a fun multi-function party machine but poor attention to key details let it down, at least on the sample I tested.