LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 5, 2026--
Belkin, a global leader in consumer electronics for over 40 years, today announced the SoundForm Mini 2, the newest generation of its popular kids headphones, available today on Amazon.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260605611218/en/
Designed for children ages 3+, SoundForm Mini 2 builds on the success of the original SoundForm Mini headphones with meaningful upgrades that make listening easier for kids and more convenient for families.
Designed for Modern Family Listening
SoundForm Mini 2 maintains the safety, comfort, and durability that have made the SoundForm Mini line a favorite among parents worldwide.
New upgrades make the experience even better for families on the go. A foldable, travel-ready design makes the headphones easier to pack for road trips, flights, and daily car rides, while an upgraded battery delivers up to 55 hours of listening time on a single charge. An intuitive scroll-wheel volume control simplifies operation for younger users, and the introduction of Rockstar Mode allows kids to share audio between two SoundForm Mini 2 headphones via dual wired/wireless options, ideal for siblings, shared entertainment during travel, and family viewing experiences.
Designed for everyday family life, the headphones continue to prioritize the features parents value most. SoundForm Mini 2 includes an 85dB volume limit to help protect young ears, along with durable sweat-, splash-, and drop-resistant construction. Wireless Bluetooth connectivity and an optional 3.5mm wired connection provide flexible listening across a wide range of devices and environments. Whether kids are learning, traveling, watching movies, or listening to music, SoundForm Mini 2 is built to keep up with them.
Belkin's Continued Leadership in Kids Audio
The launch of SoundForm Mini 2 comes as Belkin continues to strengthen its position in the U.S. kids wireless headphone category. The award-winning SoundForm Mini family has sold more than 2 million units globally, making it one of Belkin's most successful product lines for families.
"Families have made SoundForm Mini one of Belkin's most successful kids products, and we're excited to build on that foundation with SoundForm Mini 2," said Trevor Hirsch, Director of Product Management for Audio at Belkin International. "Parents trust us to create products that are safe, durable, and designed for real everyday use. With longer battery life, new sharing capabilities, and a more travel-friendly design, SoundForm Mini 2 gives kids a better listening experience while giving parents confidence that they're choosing a product built with their family's needs in mind."
Key features include:
Pricing and Availability
SoundForm Mini 2 is available now on Amazon.com for $39.99.
Imagery is available for download here.
About Belkin
Belkin is a California-based accessories leader delivering award-winning power, protection, productivity, connectivity, and audio products over the last 40 years. Designed and engineered in Southern California and sold in more than 100 countries around the world, Belkin has maintained its steadfast focus on research and development, community, education, sustainability and most importantly, the people it serves. From our humble beginnings in a Southern California garage in 1983, Belkin has become a diverse, global technology company. We remain forever inspired by the planet we live on, and the connection between people and technology.
SoundForm Mini 2 in purple, exclusively available on Amazon
SoundForm Mini 2 unveiling new packaging
It's one of baseball’s most iconic records: For 2,632 straight games over 17 seasons, Cal Ripken Jr. never missed a day in the Baltimore Orioles’ lineup.
For the past 28 years, lifelong Orioles fan Rick Taylor has been amassing a collection to match it, trying to gather a ticket from each game of Ripken's “Iron Man” streak, which lasted from 1982 to 1998. After decades of searching, Taylor is just eight tickets short of completing what experts agree is already one of the most impressive collections of baseball tickets ever assembled.
“Did I ever really think I would get this far? No, not really,” said Taylor, a retired 69-year-old food industry salesman who lives outside Baltimore. “But I always said to myself that if I could ever get down to single digits, I think I could do it.”
Taylor's collection now fills 16 boxes in his collectible-filled basement, each ticket individually protected in a hard plastic holder and labeled with its corresponding game number — the physical manifestation of a record that many believe will never be broken.
“The amount of time and the effort to put something together like that is astonishing,” said Mike Provenzale, a production manager at Heritage Auctions, which is not affiliated with Taylor’s collection. “Everyone marvels at Ripken’s record. It’s almost an equal feat of perseverance to put together a collection of that many tickets.”
Taylor's pursuit, though, comes as physical tickets have largely become a thing of the past, with teams shifting toward digital passes and QR codes that offer little of the appeal of an old-fashioned ticket stub.
“It’s devastating,” Taylor said, lamenting that younger collectors will never be able to build similar collections that span the careers of today's stars like Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge.
“It would be impossible to put together a run like this today,” said Matt Fuller, head of ticket authentication at PSA, which authenticates and grades collectibles.
Taylor initially had a more modest goal: a ticket from every game in which Ripken hit one of his 431 career home runs. But when a fellow collector asked him if he had thought about expanding the search to encompass the Iron Man streak, Taylor was intrigued: "I said, ‘That would be crazy, but you might have something there.’”
So Taylor began placing ads in The Baltimore Sun, which quickly yielded calls from people offering to sell or trade their tickets to him. As a local, finding a ticket from each home game was relatively easy, Taylor said, even if he had to pay $4,400 in 1999 to win an auction for the jewel of his collection: a May 30, 1982, ticket that marked the first game of Ripken's streak.
The road games have proven much tougher.
Over the years, Taylor has gone to card shows, scoured eBay and even bought the tickets of other Ripken fans who'd given up on their own Iron Man collections. A lively Facebook group called Booger’s Ticket Stubs has also been a big help, as members help each other track down things on their friends' wish lists.
A few years ago, things had slowed to a trickle: 2023 yielded one ticket. 2024, zero. But then he got three in 2025. And this year, amid a renewed push to publicize the collection on social media, Taylor has already gotten five more.
That leaves eight largely uneventful road games from the 1980s still missing: four against the Minnesota Twins, three against the Texas Rangers and one against the Kansas City Royals. Taylor can recite the dates by heart: 6-4-82 in Minnesota. 8-21-82 against the Rangers. 4-25-84 vs. the Royals.
Taylor partially attributes the difficulty in finding the Twins and Rangers tickets to the fact that both teams were mediocre in the mid-80s and did not command large crowds, further increasing their scarcity. He is offering $100 per ticket to garner interest.
“I’m just hoping there are people who see that someone needs those tickets — because they’re out there,” Taylor said.
Fuller, from PSA, agreed: “I have no doubt they’re out there, collecting dust in a desk drawer, a scrapbook or a shoebox.”
The fact that Taylor has already found so many of those obscure tickets is astounding, Provenzale said, recalling the poorly attended Rangers games he used to attend while growing up in the 1980s.
“To find somebody that held on to a ticket like that, it’s jaw-dropping,” Provenzale said.
Taylor is searching for tickets that few thought to save. But for today’s fans, there may soon be no physical tickets at all.
For years now, tickets to sporting events have been largely distributed digitally or via printable PDFs, neither of which has the appeal or style of a ticket on cardstock. Some teams will print out a ticket for a nominal fee. Others have ceased the practice entirely.
Taylor recalled attending an Orioles game last year in which the Dodgers' Ohtani hit two home runs. Knowing some of his friends collect Ohtani tickets, Taylor went to the Orioles' box office to buy 10 bleacher tickets for $35 each. The only problem? Taylor says the Orioles staffers refused to print the tickets, offering only digital tickets instead, something Taylor had no interest in paying for.
“They turned down $350," Taylor said. "They can print the tickets; they just don't want to.”
In a statement, the Orioles defended digital ticketing, citing reduced fraud, better communication with fans and a smoother entry process. The team said it still provides physical tickets in certain circumstances, such as when a minor doesn’t have a cellphone.
Ironically, it’s this shift away from physical tickets that has increased their appeal, Provenzale said. He said the market grew about a decade ago and “exploded” about eight years ago, appealing both to memorabilia collectors, as well as card collectors, who value condition.
If Taylor completes his collection, he says he's going to "sit back for a while and just enjoy it.”
Beyond that, though, he's not sure what to do with it. He and his wife don't have any children, and he said their nieces and nephews aren't especially interested in it. One possibility he'd welcome is for the collection to end up with Ripken himself.
It could also fetch a substantial sum at auction. Provenzale estimated that Taylor's collection, if completed, could command in the “high five figures,” and potentially more than $100,000, especially because of the “story” it tells.
“If somebody got a ticket to every game Ken Griffey Jr. played, that would be impressive, too, but the Ripken collection has something a little bit extra because of that consecutive games record," Provenzale said. “It adds a purpose to the collection.”
But even if Taylor finds the last eight tickets, the hunt wouldn't necessarily be over. In the collecting world, there's a hierarchy: Full tickets are more desirable than ticket stubs. Ones issued by the box office are better than ones from Ticketmaster. And none are more valuable than the oversized, elaborately designed tickets issued to season ticket holders. In other words, there are always ways to improve the collection.
“It's never-ending,” Taylor said with a laugh.
Baltimore Orioles fan Rick Taylor holds two newly-acquired tickets to add to his collection of tickets from almost every baseball game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 game "Iron Man" streak, at his home in Reisterstown, Md., Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Orioles fan Rick Taylor thumbs through his collection of tickets from almost every baseball game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 game "Iron Man" streak, at his home in Reisterstown, Md., Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Orioles fan Rick Taylor shows the log that he uses to track his progress in collecting tickets from every game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 game "Iron Man" streak, at his home in Reisterstown, Md., Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Orioles fan Rick Taylor holds a ticket from the first baseball game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 game "Iron Man" streak, at his home in Reisterstown, Md., Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Orioles fan Rick Taylor looks through his collection of tickets from almost every baseball game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 game "Iron Man" streak, at his home in Reisterstown, Md., Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
