This unfortunately misses the hidden benefit of cassette players -- sharing tapes with friends. Without the network effect it is just an elaborate way to listen to your own tapes, but with all the wow, flutter and hiss of analog tape.
Music also used to be scarce. Tapes/CDs were expensive, recording off the radio requires time coordination and is incredibly linear. Assembling a mix tape involved hours of effort. Then the tape would wear out, or suffer from noise from generational copying. Music was finite.
Now with a bit of coaxing an LLM will make you a mixtape from spotify or youtube. We have no scarcity, no attention, no room for individual taste.
It seems this model does not have a recording feature. There's an alternative model from Aiwa with Bluetooth and cassette recording support, but I'm not sure if it's available globally, could not find much information about it online.
Apparently, all of the audio cassette players being produced now use the same mechanism (perhaps from multiple factories). Some upscale brands like Fiio use basically the same mechanism but use some more premium parts in places, swapping out plastic bits for metal ones. If you need low wow and flutter, it makes sense to seek out vintage players that were built like a tank.
A great youtube channel on both modern cassette players and legacy audio formats is Techmoan. I never knew I was interested in this topic before watching those videos.
Buttons, controls, and overall design (basically) match. Aliexpress/Alibaba's visual search is a funny way to discover and find everyone's drop shippers these days...
How to record the tapes, though? I wonder if there is a way to have 2x 60mins casettes (on each side) in modern age - a lot of electronic music sets/podcasts aim for the 60mins runtime.
EDIT: Seems 120min tapes are available on amazon and walmart, but boy, they cost a premium.
Music also used to be scarce. Tapes/CDs were expensive, recording off the radio requires time coordination and is incredibly linear. Assembling a mix tape involved hours of effort. Then the tape would wear out, or suffer from noise from generational copying. Music was finite.
Now with a bit of coaxing an LLM will make you a mixtape from spotify or youtube. We have no scarcity, no attention, no room for individual taste.
https://www.syl-via.com/products/aiwa-t7-retro-bluetooth-cas...
It's surprising to see these kinds of retro cassette players still being updated in 2026.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FC5MD6WP/
A great youtube channel on both modern cassette players and legacy audio formats is Techmoan. I never knew I was interested in this topic before watching those videos.
Buttons, controls, and overall design (basically) match. Aliexpress/Alibaba's visual search is a funny way to discover and find everyone's drop shippers these days...
EDIT: Seems 120min tapes are available on amazon and walmart, but boy, they cost a premium.
There are also others:
https://www.thomannmusic.com/compact_cassettes.html
https://revox.com/en/revox-news/now-available-revox-empty-ca...