REVIEW : 'We Are Rewind' portable cassette player 

Here’s a tear down video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-chWDaAjddF0.html

EDIT: I'm gonna leave my original comment under here, but I have to post a correction. Turns out it is possible to take it apart, rather easily. You just have to unhinge the front door, and the screws become accessible. Thanks to @Nile9063 in the comments below for pointing this out. Even if it scored better in the sound department, the fact you can't open it up without damaging it, in order to e.g. change your belts when they wear out, would be a definite deal breaker for me. With all the right to repair efforts going on around the world, to release something in 2022 that doesn't even allow for basic maintenance, that's just plain user hostile.

The way they say they made it more sustainable by adding a rechargeable lithium battery, but admit it's going to die in 5 years and can't be changed because the case can't be opened, shows they didn't really think it through.

My last Sony Walkman was all metal and not much larger than the cassette tape inside of it. It could also play either side of the tape and was auto seeking and super quiet. It felt quality, but then again, even their plastic sports Walkman did…

I love how you were clear to point out you got this for free. Honest RU-vidrs are so important.

Fun fact, only the Dolby logo is under -copyright- trademark. Patents for noise reduction have long since expired, and decks not implementing it are just low effort.

It's a shame that the cassette tech of the present just cannot compete with the past.

It's sad that they can't make decent cassette tape players anymore. Thanks for this excellent new product review.

If it means the difference between being able to listen to cassettes or not, to a younger generation, then it’s worth it. Great review.

This product is a novelty item. The fact that they’ve included a pencil as a nod to the rewinding with pencil joke, they’ve named the colours after rockstars, the company’s name is Rewind implying they are going back in time, all make it feel like a toy. More about the aesthetic of cassettes as apposed to the actual use of them. I wish some wonderful, preferably Japanese company would come along and do it properly and make a new quality cassette mechanism.

In my experience, the best 'test' source for wow and flutter is a recording of a piano. It becomes glaringly obvious then, if theres a problem with playback.

I honestly wouldn’t buy a tape player in this day and age, but as others have said, the fact this has been produced without the ability to open it up is shocking.

One of the best portable cassette recorders was the Philips 1967 model. I had one as a teenager, and loved it. It had electronic erase, a really good, stable motor, metal flywheel, the lot! It even came with a lead to record direct. I'm 70 now, and still miss that cassette recorder. Happy days!

The owner of one of these will never know the absolute, headspinning joy of upgrading to an Aiwa full logic control with auto reverse from a massive Alba unit that only had three transport control buttons (play, ff, stop).

The hum doesn’t sound like motor noise to me, but rather like the buzz from a DC-DC converter, which it almost certainly contains as part of the battery circuitry.

I feel that the best chance we have of getting a quality personal stereo is from old manufacturer doing a "anniversary edition" or similar. Most likely Sony, because they have the strongest brand in personal stereos. The super small ones are probably too expensive to produce (not every part is easily sourced these days), but a retro edition with early walman styling, with some modern electronic upgrades (bt, usb-c charging) could be worth it. Noise reduction, megabass, shielding from electric interference are all problems they could just pick one of their old electronics schematics out and add the few new components. The mechanism would probably be mostly outsourced but with quality control that isn't a problem.

would love if sony just out of nowhere put out a new cassette player with their own mechanism based on one of their old designs, would certainly lose them money, so it seems like the kind of thing they might do lol

I'd really like to see the folks at We Are Rewind take Matt's advice to heart and send him v2.0 with improvements, since it shouldn't actually be that difficult to remove the motor noise and adjust the record bias. The wow and flutter could be a little more difficult but worth it.

It's not a bad starting point to build on. Like you said. It's better than the rest. There's a lot of people who use tape for experimental purposes and love the saturation and wow and flutter. I can see these being popular in those circles. A handy small line in recording device, to create the tapes for playback on the cheaper models we hack into performance tools.

The thing that frustrates me the most, and probably shoudn't, is the play button not being the first button and facing the right way. Grinds my gears.

I'll be honest, I've never really understood the concept of wearable merchandise for a channel such as this one. Until now. Because if you put out a T-shirt or hoodie with a stylised pencil-loosely-through-cassette logo and the words _"Western Pencils Don't Wind Tapes"_ in both English and Japanese I would sell my own grandmother to get one. Just putting it out there.

I remember growing up, my memory taking me back to when I was 3 years old in 2004, I had a Fisher Price toy cassette player that played full size cassettes, and THAT had auto-stop for fast-forward and rewind. I would listen to my Dad’s Jackson Browne cassette on it.

It's so funny that, after not using cassette technology for almost 23 years, all those sounds - the audible motor running, the sound (hiss) of the tape being "engaged" and the sound of the tape stopping. These were sounds heard daily by most of us, hopefully. And here they all are, and I still remember them. By that, nothing audible coming off of the cassette machine itself is annoying to me. Just 2nd nature. Thank you for posting this.

Thank you for declaring the "payment"!! Seriously underappreciated today.

That thing looks like what would result from IKEA and Yugo collaborating to make a cassette deck.

The inclusion of the pencil tells me this is made by cheeky hipsters who value aesthetics over function. And the fact the pencil doesn't fit tells me they aren't remotely concerned about function.

There's definitely been a revival of sorts for cassettes with a lot of artists releasing their albums on novelty tapes but it seems astounding that there's not a single good quality player to actually listen to them on.

I feel like Sony could just open back up one of their productions facilities and they would make a killing selling the only properly working cassette players on the planet.

I love how all your positives about this deck had nothing to do with the audio quality - says a lot really! Great review.

Thanks for doing the right thing and clicking the "Paid Promotion" box. You were absolutely correct to do that, payment does not have to be plain money, it can be goods and services too. I tried to explain this to Chris on the Explaining Computers channel but he was stubbornly arrogant that it didn't constitute payment.

just a shorty: i´m from germany and we rewinded our casettes with normal german shool pencils. they mostly were from -faber castell- and do fit to spool it :D

I remember this kind of noise. If you listen to audiobooks it is maddening! Once in the ear you don't get it "out"! Its a dealbreaker!

I wish someone would do a run of good quality tape mechanisms to use for all these retro devices we keep on seeing on the channel.

Honestly, I was kinda digging it until we couldn't open it. That's my favorite part of old cassette players - If something goes wrong with it, I can open it up, figure out what it is, and fix it myself in most cases. Not gonna let me do that? Then it's no fun.

Yes, that background noise is caused by motor turning and it's due to poor motor (and its driving circuitry) decoupling (positive terminal decoupling and /or even wrong grounding point on the circuit). My experience suggests that background motor noise may be attenuated using little inductor(s) in series with + and - terminals/wires of the motor. Even a proper value capacitor connected in parallel with the motor terminals may help. It depends on tape deck circuitry and may vary, in terms of motor noise reduction, from case to case. And listening with Bluetooth headphones represents the worst scenario because a typical digital streaming background noise is added to the motor turning background noise. Bluetooth digital noise is not so easy to attenuate and it is caused by poor decoupling/grounding of the Bluetooth circuitry and unwanted digital noise injecting in the very close (just a few centimeters, in the best case...) analog circuitry of the tape deck. Not the best conditions to obtain a quiet background noise listening.

In the early 1990’s I got a job with the U.K. mobile phone company Cellnet. At our annual conference every employee (around 800 at that time) was given a free Sony Walkman, as an example of the innovation and forward thinking the Chairman wanted everyone to work towards in this fledgling company. I still have mine, and it still works if I slap a pair of AA batteries into it, oh and I find some 3.5mm wired headphones. Great piece of engineering, sadly no longer available.

It goes full circle - coming back to another excellent video you made explaining why people think tapes sound dreadful. It's all because of the poor implementation now as opposed to the excellent mechanisms back then. To this day I still can't tell the difference between a CD and a cassette played back on a quality 80s stereo.

I remember in my childhood many of the cheaper Walkmans (and even home cassette players) would only auto-stop on playback; never on rewind or fast forward. There's a small arm that goes through a hole in the bottom of the cassette. When it reaches the end, the tape becomes taut and presses the arm down, causing the whole mechanism to spring away stopping the machine.

That whine you hear when playing the tape is called nostalgia for me.

The metal case absorbs any RF, so that's a plus right there. The test recording input level should have been tested at different levels to determine if a lower gain showed improvement in sound quality or if the volume control has any affect on the input level during recording.

$149 is kinda steep for what seems to be a pretty mediocre cassette player. Might as well go with a used Sony from the 90s for much less but with better sound and quality.

Great Video, a bit pricey at £149. Did not like the round window, would have prefered a normal rectangle window. 12.5khz is a bit low for the top end

I've been watching your channel for many years and your videos never cease to catch my interest. Thanks my friend 👍

To be honest….that hiss/static does bring me back to the 80s. I probably never had good equipment back then. 😎

A BIC Biro used to be a perfect fit for winding cassettes. I always used one to save the batteries, by spinning the cassette on the pen.

Making it impossible, or at least very difficult, to dismantle really limits the life span of the device. It may look good with no visible screws in the case but you can't get in to adjust the speed, replace belts, or as is very frequently required for rechargeable devices replace the battery. This device is going to have a lifespan less than that of a mobile phone.

I really enjoy viewing your videos to remind me of these old devices. It's pretty hard to imagine that very many people would want to actually buy such a device, maybe they have some old tapes they want to transcribe to digital, once? Anyway keep up the interesting work.

As a kid I somehow got the knowledge that pencils could wind cassette tapes. Tried it a few times, discovered exactly what you did, that it takes a weird angle to achieve not great results, and have opted to spin the tape about a stationary fingertip stuck in one of the spools ever since. Not that I get a lot of use from that technique these days, lol.

When you started the sound demo I was blown away with how good it was, until I looked up, realised RU-vid had sneaked in an M&S advert, skipped the ad and then the despair set in lol

Wireless bluetooth cassette player 😀 What a time we live in

I know this mechanism from cheap (like 15$) dual cassete players from 1990s. Original mechanism had shared motor for both decks, was experiencing serious drag issues and often was not even able to keep tape properly in line with head. Also auto stop mechanism relying on tape tension was adding to the issue - lever coming in touch with tape made transport even worse

That is why I like your videos, honest and no punches pulled. It is somewhat a neat little unit, but things made today are just not as good as they were in years gone by.

Love the abundance of sharp corners. Just the thing to drop in a pocket, where it'll eat holes to win its freedom. Sometimes the design monkeys need reining in.

Way back when, when I worked a shop repairing cassette decks, we would typically set them to about 3% fast speed. The reason is that a tape playing a bit fast is less objectionable than one playing slow.

Thank you, i have been waiting a long time for someone to do a talk and review on this. Thanks techoman

That box giving Canadians strong NoName vibes.

I just noticed that I'm getting waaaay too excited every time I see new Techmoan video.

I think my last tape got played 20 years ago. That was when my tapeplayer/recorder died. I didn't bother to buy a new one. Don't see me buy a new one now. Sometimes we need to let old tech rest in pieces.

It isn't the permanent magnet erase head that adds much noise. It is the DC bias. Many boomboxes in the '80s had permanent erase heads, but AC bias, and their recordings aren't really noisier compared to an AC erase head boombox of the same category. The permanent erase head causes problems with Type II tapes, because they often can't erase them efficiently enough, and forget erasing metal tapes with it.

Saw this device a couple of days ago for the first time and immediately thought this might be something Mat would like to review. And here we are!

By the format's peak in the 90s, tape could record 20hz to 20khz, with double blind tests being unable to discern the tape from the original with dual drive, dolby S and automatic bias.

The motor whine issue was present with Ion’s portable cassette player and even transmitted over the USB to computer connection. I did a number of transfers to digital and consistently had to use noise reduction to knock it out.

This is why I won’t part with my top Sony tape decks I bought in the late 1980s , it’s really sad no one makes decent cassette decks anymore , thanks for the video, very interesting to see!..🤔🤔😳

Biro pens fit, almost, perfectly to rewind tapes.

Glad to see your review, I'd been intrigued by the hype and wondered whether there was anything different going on here.

I remember back in the day buying these BASF cassette tapes from Lidl! They were great quality for the money.

I don't think I ever owned a cassette deck that didn't make that noise. Guess I always had substandard equipment back in the day. I had it so loud when the music was playing most of the time though that it never mattered.

I guess what's really sad is that this will inform young people's ideas about what the walkman/portable cassette player experience was like in its heyday. I remember my older brother being proud as punch as a teenager when he had saved the better part of 200 German Marks from doing odd jobs to buy a Sony Walkman that had done quite well on some hi-fi magazine's latest test. And the Aiwa HS-G34 I got for my birthday in 1988 was also packed with features and a sound quality that well withstood the scrutiny of my 14 year old ears. And now all the hipster kids buy devices like the one in the video and will think that other than the nostalgia factor, portable cassette players generally sounded underwhelming. Probably best to get the message across to them that a well-serviced upmarket cassette player from the 80s to early 90s will hands-down always be the better buy than some clickety, plasticky low-budget device from today.

Love your work! Thanks for showing this to us and for evaluating it!

That sound from the blank cassette brings me back to the 70s.

I lived through the cassette era and just accepted that motor hum lol

Imagine trying to sell this 30 years ago.

this video made me dig out my late 90s compact Aiwa. Only to find one of the pinch rollers is dented. Lovely.

I understand the need for fideluty but the whine for me is just pure nostalgia! Growing up in the 80's this was part of my music experience and it instantly brought back my childhood! I live it!

Thank you for the unbiased review. Threaten to break it open if they do not give instructions for doing so. I think you touched on all the relevant points and the results were pretty much as expected. Supplying disassembly instructions, schematics and spare parts would boost the product A LOT in this modern world where stuff is designed to be disposed of. I would not pay retail price for this unless I was sure the belt and battery was cheap and easy to replace (soldering allowed but must use a commodity parts and not be glued in). With that retail price there is budget to add sensors to the spindles to implement a motor stop on FF/RW. Seeing as they have added modern electronics into there it would be a VERY GOOD feature to implement a Bluetooth pause control that would allow for remote recording control without having to press buttons. EDIT: ===== I would also go so far as to demand a USB-C PAUSE and digital audio IN and OUT to RIP old basement tapes and master new material. Most of the pop music people hear today was never on tape and having to use an external digital to analogue converter makes no sense.

Noone ever used pencils here to rewind them anyway it was always a pen, usually a bic one

Okay, hear me out. The reason we'll probably never see tape technology being like it was in the 90s is just because, there's no reason for cassettes to try and be so high fidelity anymore. Digital is extremely accessible and extremely high quality for what it is, and very cheap to produce since it's what everyone's using right now. This Rewind Cassette Player isn't an audiophile device. It's made by people who love aesthetics and cassettes and modern convenience and decided to make something cool with it. It's a shame to see so much negativity surrounding this device. It's not perfect but it does sound better than the cheap Amazon specials I've tried, having real stereo playback and recording is very nice, and despite the motor noise it's clear enough to hear a lot of details. And, it has that vintage-y cassette sound without being horribly overbearing. Bluetooth works fantastic. Having a rechargeable battery is awesome. The recording feature being in stereo is awesome and recording with it is so much fun. There's no reason to take a Walkman out in public anymore so there's sadly no clip, but I bought some tiny rubber feet on Amazon to keep it from getting scratched up and sliding around when on my desk and they work great. I wish it at least came with one of those fake leather cases that would sling around your shoulder, and the rubber feet are necessary, but other than that I feel like the audiophile community is being pessimistic here and I hope more people interested in cassette releases give this thing a chance. It's perfect for those Bandcamp releases they're currently releasing. It is a bit pricy but this is a hobbyist device and not a necessity and for the price you pay it feels very high quality.

Earlier this year, I watched BBC2’s Back in Time for Birmingham 4-part show. I noticed in the 80s and 90s instalment that the daughter in the participating family was dancing to music on a new cheapo Bush cassette player, I spotted the current Bush logo!

that hum was just a fact of life for me years ago when all we had were portable cassettes. that hum is a fond memory. i kind of miss it. brings back memories of the good old days.

great video as always, just had to say that im 47 years old and I get the same feeling when i watch your videos that i did from when i was a child in the early 80s when saturday cartoons were on. thanks for the nostalgia

BIC pens were also great for rewinding, the transparent ones with the hexagonal shape.

The recording revealed more to me than any of the other tests. Obviously the recording head has its limits on frequency bandwidth but the speed and the wow and flutter were really good. The other tests with electronic music is not as easy to determine because artists like to change the tone and speed in a song for effect. So for playback I would hope the the quality is better than the recording head. Classical music is a good standard for hearing how good a cassette player is in my book.

If I saw one of these in the early 90's, I'd think it was a crappy old model, not worth my time. BTW I'm convinced I used a standard Bic pen to rewind my tapes.

IMHO the apparently non-replaceable rechargeable battery is the worst part. A lot of these will end up in e-waste in a few years time as a result, even if they're working perfectly OK otherwise. And yes I know "perfectly OK" is subjective, but in the context of a early '20s cassette player, this device is perfectly OK.

Nice video. Thank you for all your work! My thought on the noise your hearing is the inherent noise of the device- it does say it's SNR is only 50dB- that's pretty noisy. good deck might get you to 80dB. The noise floor is built into the built-in amplifier and other electronics. Thanks again!!

It has the finesse of an old Bendix washing machine from the 70s. I’ve done my time with cassettes through the 80s and 90s. I do still have lots of high end cassettes and decks, even a Sony D6C pro Walkman. I wouldn’t be going back to this time consuming technology anytime soon. I use CD/Vinyl and Sony NW-A45 mp3 players for portable now. Mp3 is at max bitrate is still better than cassette.

I have a 50 year old portable cassette player / recorder: The Sony TC-40, which I picked up a couple of years ago in a charity shop for next to nithing since they didnt test it beforehand. Despite the built in speaker not working, it works perfectly (I haven't even changed the belts!) And I can say with 100% certainty, that (with headphones / earphones plugged in) it is the best cassette player I have ever listened to despite predating the Walkman by a few years. They don't make them like that anymore.

Early Saturday mornings formerly for me were about watching Time Team on Channel 4......now Saturday is about getting up to a new type of archaeology with Techmoan. I then ponder the day to come.

Thank you for this feedback on this cassette player.

A graph showing the frequency response of the device would be nice! I'd help visualize what's going on with the audio. Audacity call this Plot Spectrum. You could run a very well recorded tape of a sine wave with incrementing frequency (just like some original tapes have at their beginnings), record this on a quality recorder and plot the graph in Audacity. Interesting video!!! :)

Perhaps important today, but back in the day, I generally avoided Dolby when recording tapes for general use, as it sounded muted or muffled on other machines. And given this was supposed to be a portable format, I could live with some hiss. Especially as there would be considerable background noise out in public, or in the car.

I'd like to imagine his neighbors see him go out in the garden every few days with a different audio device

That's a really nice looking unit. I'd have gone for the orange too. Hopefully they improve it based on your findings. Not being able to open it could be an issue in the future.

loved the scene with the tape on the bench. they should use it on their commercial.

No autostop on fastforward or rewind? That's asking for snapped tape that might've aged a little. 😱

I was shocked by the price, I have not bought a portable cassette player in close to 30 years, but €149 for a basic player with Bluetooth seems like a lot, the last one I bought was a Panasonic unit with all the bells and whistles and I paid ­£130 back in the mid-90s, OK, it did not have record functionality, but still, basic players in the 90s were less than £20.

I have rarely loved my my Sony DDII as much as right now. Still working perfectly.

While the functionality and quality may not be there yet, I'm pleased to see that clean/simple aesthetics are coming back to electronic hardware. Maybe they'll release a newer model with higher quality... and screws.

The mechanism is quite similar, if not equal, to the w-1000ew recently sold by Recording the masters. it also does not have auto stop feature, but performs OK.

Yes! Saturday morning means a Techmoan video.