Is it any wonder that some music fans are starting to look for alternatives to streaming services? Not only do estimates indicate that most streaming services pay artists a fraction of a penny per listen, but in recent months we’ve seen articles about services raising prices, CEOs showing total disdain for the value of artists’ work, and playlists being populated by music from questionable sources.
The resurgence of vinyl is old news at this point, and that format works great for enjoying physical media at home. But how do you say “So long!” to Spotify while you’re walking the dog or riding the subway?
Would it surprise you to learn that, for some people, a portable cassette player is the answer? The cassette format, introduced in the 1960s, is enjoying a resurgence of its own, and many major pop artists now offer their latest works on cassette. New portable cassette players inspired by Sony’s 1980s Walkman have appeared from various companies, including upstart manufacturer We Are Rewind, audiophile fave FiiO, and numerous off-brands on Amazon.
But can people really go back to carrying around a separate tape for every album they want to hear—and having to flip it halfway through to get to the rest of the music? Not to mention tolerating the possible loss of fidelity? And paying at least as much for every new album as they would spend for a month of streaming?
To get a better idea of what you can expect from this new crop of cassette players, Wirecutter acquired samples of the We Are Rewind and FiiO players, plus the inexpensive Reshow 235A, and put them in the hands of senior updates writer Arriana Vasquez, a music enthusiast who’d had only fleeting experience with cassettes, and senior staff writer Brent Butterworth, who’d used cassettes every day for decades. Brent also ran technical tests and conducted some listening sessions with a few vintage-audio enthusiasts.
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A fresh listen to a faded format
Cassette players with tapes and a pair of headphones on a table with a mug of coffee.
Photo: Marki Williams
When we unpacked the new players, we were delighted to find features that a Thriller-era Sony Walkman owner couldn’t have imagined. The We Are Rewind player can connect wirelessly to Bluetooth headphones and speakers, and the Reshow 235A has a USB output for recording cassette audio onto a computer. The We Are Rewind and FiiO players both have rechargeable internal batteries, so there’s no need to carry spare AAs.
Arriana began her cassette adventure in classic 1980s fashion: commuting with the players and a set of wired AKG N60 NC headphones on the New York subway. Not surprisingly, she found that grooving to analog tape was a substantially different experience from streaming digital files—better in some ways, worse in others.
“I liked the nostalgia of listening to tape, even though the bass sounded weak,” she reported. “There’s a kind of peace of mind, almost like listening to the radio. I didn’t have that much control over what plays; you can fast-forward, but it doesn’t feel worth the effort. So I just sat back and listened—unlike the phone, where there’s always that subtle tension of being able to switch to something different so easily.”
She continued: “It was also nice having the cassette player when my phone’s battery was dying. I was able to listen to music without draining my phone further. And having the inserts with the artwork, and in some cases the lyrics, is a nice touch that streams can’t match.”
Someone taking notes while listening to a cassette player.
Someone taking out a tape for a cassette player with a notebook next to them.
Arriana takes notes as she listens to music through the FiiO CP13 portable player. Photo: Marki Williams
Someone taking notes while listening to a cassette player.
Someone taking out a tape for a cassette player with a notebook next to them.
But Arriana also noted that adding a cassette player and tapes to her everyday carry was a major hassle compared with just using her phone. “My one biggest gripe was the increase in space that everything takes up,” she said. “The players and the tapes are kind of bulky, and it was a challenge to get everything I need into my bag and still keep it manageable.” In particular, she found the We Are Rewind player, which is sheathed in a sturdy-looking aluminum case, impractically large and heavy for portable use.
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2024 testing meets 1960s tech
Two people in a shop using audio analyzer software on a cassette player.
Brent (right) teamed up with vintage-audio expert Paul DeMara (left) to put these portable cassette players through objective testing, using audio-analyzer software. Photo: Brent Butterworth
Although Brent has decades of experience in testing audio gear, cassettes were already on the way out when his career began. So he drove to Surrey, British Columbia, to consult with Paul DeMara, a vintage-audio expert and writer who owns “at least a couple dozen” portable cassette players and has extensive experience in testing them.
The two borrowed a test bench at Innovative Audio, a retailer that specializes in selling and repairing vintage audio gear. To test the players, they used NAK T-100, an audio-analyzer software program that is especially suitable for evaluating cassette players.
Although these players looked different and had different feature packages, Edwin Shih, Innovative’s master technician, noticed that they all used the same transport mechanism, which fast-forwards and rewinds the tape and moves it across the playback head. But that didn’t mean they all sounded the same.
When Brent and Paul measured the frequency response—the evenness of output from bass to midrange to treble—they found that none of the players had much response above about 10 kilohertz. That’s the part of the audio spectrum that gives music much of its sense of spaciousness and sparkle. The FiiO CP13 also had a dip around 70 hertz, which is where some of the kick of drums and electric bass comes from.
Overall, we thought the We Are Rewind and FiiO players performed pretty well for portable cassette players. But the Reshow 235A didn’t—its treble response was even duller than that of the other players, almost as if we had stuffed the headphones with cotton. And its bass was too weak to faithfully reproduce the lowest notes of a guitar, much less a bass or kick drum.
The differences between players were more apparent—but the deficiencies more forgivable—when Brent listened to new cassettes such as Ariana Grande’s Positions and Ed Sheeran’s Subtract through a set of AKG K371 headphones. Despite the cassette format’s technical weaknesses, the We Are Rewind player produced a fun listening experience. It sounded the clearest of the three players, and its natural balance of bass to midrange to treble made it the most enjoyable to listen to. The FiiO CP13 seemed to have a midrange boost, which made the music more vivid and exciting but also made the sound thinner. The Reshow 235A sounded duller and more distorted than the other two.
The same tunes, streamed from Spotify at 320 kilobits per second through a Samsung Galaxy S10 phone, sounded much clearer, with stronger treble that made instruments such as cymbals easier to hear. The streamed music also had more of a sense of spaciousness and more separation between the left and right stereo channels; with analog audio technologies, there’s always some leakage of the left channel into the right, and vice versa. Despite many audio aficionados’ claims that old-fashioned analog sound is better, in this case it obviously wasn’t.
The We Are Rewind and Reshow players also can record from external sources, but we wouldn’t recommend using that feature. Both models exhibited even worse reductions in treble and bass on recordings than they did on playback. Both added annoying hiss, and the Reshow player’s recording added a lot of distortion—imagine the sound of an AM radio under a sweatshirt, and you’re close. You’re better off playing prerecorded tapes on these devices instead of trying to record your own.
We Are Rewind Portable Cassette Player
A full-featured portable cassette player
This portable cassette player sounded better than others we tested, and it has convenient features such as Bluetooth and a rechargeable battery. But it’s pretty bulky.
$160 from Amazon
The best portable cassette player for most people?
While it might seem silly to try to pick a “best” portable cassette player from a field with two models priced in the $100 to $150 range and numerous off-brand models available for less than $50 on Amazon, we did have clear preferences.
Arriana preferred the Reshow 235A because it was the smallest and lightest player, and she enjoyed being able to replace its AA batteries in seconds rather than taking hours to recharge an internal battery. For her, the Reshow player’s inferior sound wasn’t necessarily a downside: “The worse audio quality felt a little more nostalgic, kind of like deciding to take a photograph with a lesser-quality Instax camera over a smartphone,” she said.
Brent preferred the We Are Rewind player because of its superior sound quality, and because he loved the subversive joy of beaming music via Bluetooth from an old-fashioned analog cassette tape to the technically advanced wireless speakers he usually tests.
Someone using cassette player in a coffee shop.
A close-up of someone using a Reshow 235A Portable Cassette Player with tapes, a notebook and coffee on a table in front of them.
While Brent preferred the We Are Rewind player for its superior sound quality, Arriana found its aluminum case to be impractically large and heavy for portable use. Photo: Marki Williams
Someone using cassette player in a coffee shop.
A close-up of someone using a Reshow 235A Portable Cassette Player with tapes, a notebook and coffee on a table in front of them.
That said, neither of us even thought for a second about cancelling our streaming services after spending time with cassette players. We were both frustrated by the extremely limited selection of new cassette tapes, considering that most of the new releases we could find were Top 40 titles that rarely appealed to our tastes.
Both of us tried playing some decades-old prerecorded cassettes, but none of those tapes had survived storage well enough to deliver decent sound—although if you have a lot of old cassettes that you want to revisit, spending about $40 for the Reshow 235A to see if they still play seems like a reasonable gamble.
And both of us found that the storied tendency of cassette decks to occasionally “eat” a tape by sucking it into the mechanism is as common for these players as it was for 1980s models. Solving this problem required a delicate extraction of the tape from the mechanism and time spent winding the loose tape back into the cassette using a pencil or a fingertip. (The We Are Rewind player even comes with a short wooden pencil for just this purpose.)
Still, cassette has an undeniable appeal. Not only was it fun for us to play music from a mechanical device, but it also encouraged us to listen to entire albums in order, rather than concentrating on what tune we might like to hear next. In that respect, it’s even more effective than vinyl or CD in allowing people to take in an album as its creators intended, to focus more intently on the experience—whether you’re relaxing at home or strolling around the park.
This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.