When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother... "mom, can I buy the latest Redwall audiobook tape so that I can listen to it in the car on the way to vacation?"
"Yes," she replied, "but only if you eat all your greens."
So eat all my greens I did, and one audiobook about anthropomorphic animals that live in a big forest was socketed into my cassette player. That cassette player was my only way to listen to just about anything beyond the radio at the time.
CDs where well into their popularity by that point, but I remained a cassette kind until I was about 10. So tapes have always held a special place in my heart.
While my extensive collection of audiobooks and music has long since been sent to the great cassette deck in the sky, I've been able to accumulate others since. But I need something to play them with.
Enter, then, We Are Rewind and the Walkman-like Cassette Player. It looks like my old player, albeit in a more premium feeling shell. I've been playing with it for the last few days — and I'm hooked.
About as simple as they come
By the time I was 8 in the (very) early 2000s, cassettes had been through around 50 years or so of technological development. There were noise reduction devices built in that would get rid of crackles and pops, and special mechanisms that would stop tapes from getting snapped by over-eager rewind and fast forward.
And sound enhancers that made music sound better, even with special kinds of tape that would increase sound quality. I only used cheap players, so I never really got to try all those features out. I just plopped a tape in my player, pressed play, and away I went.
The We Are Rewind player doesn't feature any of these technological advancements either, making it both an incredible blast of nostalgia for me and a very simple device to use.
Open it, put the tape in, and press play. Get to the end of the tape, turn it over, and play from the other side. No frills, no fancy auto stop mechanisms, no auto reverse — just you and a cassette tape.
There is some noise that comes through during playback, as I remember with my old player. Given that it's not going to be my primary music playback machine, I don't really care — and if nothing else, it takes me back to a car on the highway on the way to some countryside cottage for vacation.
It sounds... like a tape player
Was I looking for mind-blowing Hi-Fi sound with the We Are Rewind cassette player? No. I wanted something that would play my burgeoning selection of old cassettes, and the We Are Rewind player gives me everything I could ever want. It plays my tapes.
Those with impressive equipment would probably tell me that there's some wow and flutter score that means its not as good as a top of the range player from the late 90s, and that it plays things slightly fast.
To my ear, that's used to vinyl playback, it seemed completely fine — and I've now listened to a good few hours of music and audiobooks.
Modern features
Despite its nostalgia invoking simplicity, there are a couple of modern touches that make it feel a whole lot better to use. There's a built-in battery, and you can charge it with the USB-C port on the side.
That's good for 12 hours of playback, apparently, which is nice. I'm not sure if that battery figure holds up if you also use my favorite modern extra, the Bluetooth 5.0 connection.
That has allowed me to listen to my cassettes over the best wireless headphones and the best Bluetooth speakers, making it around 72% more convenient than the wired options I used to use when I was a small one.
A tactile delight
I love physical controls on just about everything that I use. I don't enjoy touch controls, or even some of these funny rubber covered buttons that get gross after years of use.
The We Are Rewind features the ultimate physical controls — mechanical switches that move components in the device for some of the best feeling buttons this side of pressing the big red button in the President's office.
Clicks and clunks are the lifeblood of usability in my mind, and beyond the cassette playing abilities of my new tape playing companion, it's that tactility that makes me really love this thing.
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