Everybody’s favourite Guangzhou city based purveyors of hi-res digital audio hardware have invented the portable stereo cassette player.
Yours for £99.
Buy a Fiio
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
I would refer the honourable gentleman to the comment made in August…….
They also have a CD player coming soon: https://www.otic-audio.co.uk/products/fiio-dm13-portable-cd-player-with-bluetooth
I’ve heard they’re working on wax cylinders and a phonograph.
Mini Disc next, then..?
Huzzah!
Been out for a while. There are a few of these available from different manufacturers but apparently they all use the same cheap cassette mechanism because only one company makes those.
Fiio is harder to adjust than some if the speed is off.
Bring back mono.
Most youngsters do listen in mono these days through a Bluetooth smart speaker
Being childfree I have slumped into a comfortable haze of audiophile complacency and I am blithely unaware of such activities.
Totes true @dai. My Goddaughter wanted a Bluetooth speaker for Christmas so I thought I’d treat her by getting her two quality ones that could be paired for stereo. She couldn’t grasp the concept and only ever used one at a time..
I have the 5.
Great sound.
Shit interface.
Yep. The Fiio music app that’s built in is appalling isn’t it? I use MediaMonkey for Android on my M11 which works a treat.
There’s a FIIO player app for Android phones which is also terrible. Presumably it uses the same code.
Well, Fiio’s are Android OS based machines, so it’ll be exactly the same code.
Yep, many of the touchscreen Fiio players are effectively an Android phone with the phone network bits removed and pumped-up audio hardware.
Any modern SoC chip supplier will supply a Reference Design plus enough code to get the chip up and running and the OS booting. I used to do that as a job for Frontier Silicon. Several of their customers (Philips and Samsung come to mind) have my bits (as it were) inside their mp3 players.
Ooh ‘errr!
Where is that confounded Moose?
Should always be said out loud, in the stylee of the voice at the end of The Crunge…
No Dlobby? Odd. I was tempted, as my beautiful Sony FM Walkman finally gave up the ghost a year or two back and I still have three enormous boxes of well-recorded SA90s, but the photo of the gizzards put me off – placcy gearwheels and whatnot? It comes across as a triumph of analog PR piggybacking on a good rep in the digital space. Decided not to invest.
I remember tape being considered as a flawed mediumeven at the height of its popularity. It didn’t sound great (especially pre-recorded tapes), wasn’t particularly robust, the cases would break and whilst smaller than vinyl, they were still a bit bulky. A tape getting stuck in the car player was a real pain in the arse.
But they were portable, allowed playback on the move and best of all, allowed mixtapes to exist.
All of these issues have been massively addressed by digital files and streaming and the benefits have been built upon in most cases.
So why on earth would anyone buy one other than nostalgia? It’s like riding a horse to work or utilising leeches in healthcare.
They still do that I believe. Leeches, that is. And my wife would certainly ride a horse to work, if she were employed in the next village.
The thing I miss about cassettes is the pretty skeins of tape fluttering in the breeze as my car zooms past a despooled Now That’s What I Call or perhaps Clarkson’s Driving Rock, ripped from the deck and hurled from the cab of a passing HGV onto the central reservation.
I also miss the satisfaction of fixing a wayward tape with nothing more than a Bic biro and patience.
Indeed @leedsboy – my facility with Bic cassette repair was, in my own mind, my retort to all those adults who told me I’d “never work with my hands”..
Spot on, V V – some hospital pharmacies have leech farms.
Very useful for improving circulation, eg if you cut your finger off and the surgeon sews it back on…
…and don’t even mention maggots…
Best way to clean a nasty infected wound is sterile maggots.
https://www.chelwest.nhs.uk/your-visit/patient-leaflets/tissue-viability/maggot-therapy
Hell, yeah! I remember going to a presentation (with slides) on sloughy wounds, maggots and leeches – just before lunchtime…yum!
Depends on what you consider important. A lack of maggots or leeches in my treatment has always been quite a highly valued aspect of my medical care.
My cousin lost his leg after breaking it skiing and then picking up some sort of infection. It started off having to be amputated mid-shin, as I recall, and they used maggots to tidy up the infection. (But then that got infected and they had to lop a bit more off. And then a bit more again…)
Kids today won’t know the joy of seeing tape fluttering in a hedgerow. Or of white dog turds.
Which both sound the same to be fair.
Spotted in the wild last year in Greece.
The lesser-spotted roadside unwound cassette tape. Sadly it’s outer carapace was missing.
Ah, a hatched infant freshly out of its shell. Adults of the C90 sub-species can grow up to 128 metres long in the wild.
If you hear a bustling in the hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a tape flung from a Vauxhall Corsa
They can sound pretty decent with good quality tapes and decent equipment. And you get that lovely warm analogue sound rather than brittle cold digital …
Probably sound no worse than low-bitrate mp3s.
I think there is a growing trend for people to want physical objects for products that have gone digital. It’s not a massive market, but it’s there and growing. The vinyl revival has been one of the more visible representations of this. And I think the resurgence of vinyl is one reason why cassettes are coming back, because some people who have started buying vinyl have realised that, while it’s a beautiful medium to have and hold, it’s also a pretty bulky and inconvenient one. And these days an expensive one. So, I think that people are drifting towards cassettes, because they offer convenience and portability, basically the same reasons why they drifted towards them in the 70s and 80s. After all, it was a cassettes, not CDs that nearly killed off vinyl the first time. So I think that the competitor for cassettes is not streaming or digital files, it’s vinyl.
One one company is making cassette mechanisms any more, and they’re of poor quality, even when fitted with a metal flywheel. Even the few remaining players from major manufacutrers use these mechanisms.
Furthermore the relevant ICs containing Dolby noise-reduction circuitry are no longer in production either.
I was asked recently, if I had a tape deck and I do, someone need to digitise a cassette. Actually, its a combined CD and tape deck and it’s really heavy. I think it’s this one. Hasn’t left the warehouse for at least 10 years.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/255865969048?chn=ps&_ul=GB&mkevt=1&mkcid=28
I had my Nak serviced about a decade ago because it had been boxed for years and was playing slow. It had a reduced-cost playback-only service because I’m never going to start recording tapes again. I think I’ve played half a dozen tapes on it since, simply to digitise them.
I volunteer in an Oxfam music shop. Whilst album sales are mostly vinyl and cd there is a growing demand for cassette tapes predominantly amongst people in their 20’s and 30’s.
Well you could go one better and get a reel to reel – Revox have recently launched a new model…..
https://revox.com/intro-b77/
Drools
Oh. My. Word.
A bargain at €15,900. Where’s my chequebook?
Strangely enough, I have a Revox G36 in my attic…