Fresh Find: A Speaker That Gave the Game Boy Its Stereo Back

Here is a secret the Game Boy kept from most of its owners: many of its games were composed in stereo, but the console could only play them in mono. That gap between what the music was and what most people heard created a small market, and this arrival is one answer to it, a clip-on amplified speaker from Nuby that finally let the Game Boy sing in stereo.

What It Is

The original Game Boy shipped with a single mono speaker, even though many of its games were written for stereo sound, so the console never really did justice to its own soundtracks. The American maker Nuby answered this with an attachable stereo speaker that plugs into the headphone socket, the one output that actually carried the native stereo signal, and adds a built-in amplifier for a fuller, louder sound. Nuby was not alone in spotting the gap: the collection also holds the Japanese Sunsoft Sound Boy, which used almost the same approach, Nintendo's own DMG-02 stereo headphones, and FM radio add-ons such as the BigBen FM Gameball and the Beeshu GameTunes tuner.

Turns out the Game Boy was playing in stereo all along and just forgot to tell anyone.

The Stereo Hiding in the Headphone Jack

The clever detail is which socket the speaker uses. The Game Boy's little built-in speaker was wired for mono, but the headphone output carried the full stereo mix the composers intended, which is why the console sounds so much richer through headphones than through its own grille. Nuby's speaker simply borrows that better signal and pushes it out loud through a pair of drivers with an amplifier behind them, giving you stereo sound without having to wear headphones. It is a neat piece of lateral thinking that turned a limitation the console never fixed into a solvable problem.

Sound was a surprisingly crowded corner of the accessory market, and this Nuby amplifier belongs to a whole little family of audio add-ons the collection documents together. Set beside the Sunsoft Sound Boy, the DMG-02 headphones and the FM tuners, it shows how many different companies tried to improve, extend or repurpose the Game Boy's audio, from squeezing out its hidden stereo to bolting on a radio. As a group they reveal how much people cared about how the console sounded, and how much untapped potential that single mono speaker left on the table.

Why It Joined the Collection

The Game Boy's audio accessories are a fascinating, under-appreciated category, and this Nuby amplifier is a clear example of the ingenuity they show. It fits directly into the collection's group of sound add-ons, from the Sunsoft Sound Boy to the FM tuners, that together tell the story of how people tried to unlock and improve the console's music. Preserving it keeps one more piece of the Game Boy's surprisingly rich audio history intact.

The Nuby amplifier is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.