Western pencils DOOOOOo wind tapes. You'll have to spin the tape around the pencil like a helicopter.. It will go fast!! So fast, It can break the tape!!!
@@MuZeSiCk77 Matt Techmoan seems to forget anything about France but the Minitel. The perfect pencil is French made BIC Crystal, it was the one used at Philip's in the 60's when the cassette was invented and finalised
If I put the pencil at a slight angle it works just fine. I would use an old pencil not so long any more. ✏ Also I don't know why some of these companies out there are not making new versions of the older stuff.
If you’re able to in the future, Could you please review the filo cassette player. It’s similar to this one but $50 cheaper. I’m considering buying one.
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.
Retro tech to me means repairable. It took me a few minutes to process the fact that this isn't; I kept trying to deny it. I suppose if someone gave me one I could use it, but... it's tainted, you know? :)
I vaguely hope some hot air would allow you to pull the front door off, but I can understand TM not wanting to risk it. Once you got access to those screws everything else should come open easily one would hope
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.
@@pervertedalchemist9944 It's also that Dolby doesn't license the technology anymore. But you can buy chips that employ the same technology, they just can't name it Dolby NR. And without noise reduction, tape decks are hissing central. Nowadays you can even do noise reduction in software. Like pre-apply the noise reduction to a WAV file, record it, play it back, and apply the reverse transformation.
Yes! If you're making a cassette deck in 2022, it better be the best cassette deck ever. Complete with all the noise reduction technology. Either license it from Dolby or have a different implementation of it.
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.
Might as well have included Rechargeable AA batteries and a built in charger. But of course today you wouldn't be trusted not to recharge Alkalines or something like that. A removable 18650 would have done the trick, too.
I’m sure they thought it through. Let’s be honest, though, going through with a record function that sounds like ... that ... means they had no intention that their customers would still be using this thing in five years.
It's the same practice most companies these days take... build em to break and so that you can't fix them yourself. Throw it out and buy a new one. It's strange how much this applies to.. It's sick really.
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…
maybe in the future they discover a cave where the equipment where sony made their high range walkmans will be found so they can make the old high quality stuff back again :) that would be nice..
it could if they cared. all of these devices are just novelties designed to capitalize on nostalgia. they don't really care to produce a premium product nor is there a market for that. there aren't nearly enough people willing to pay top dollar for a premium cassette player to warrant putting actual effort into making one.
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.
@@handsolo1209 I’d go as far to say that it’s a fashion accessory at that price point and with that marketing. It’s something to be seen using, rather than to be used. Blërg.
@@RobCamp-rmc_0 Yes, it really is just a fashion accessory. It's there to say "look at how hip and cool I am with being into retro audio". The price is both there to fleece these people and to trick the few remaining fools who believe that higher price means quality.
@@handsolo1209 I agree but comparing to 2nd hand isn't fair, if SONY were to make them again, it will not be cheap, there's no cost down, we'll get inflation adjustment instead, I'd still be happy to buy them though.
@@JimmyZeng The point is though that there are still lots of very affordable Walkmans (and not just Sony, but Panasonic, Phillips, etc) available with far superior components. Even a spares and repairs Walkman is going to be 1/10th of that price and even if it costs €20 to fix, it is still far cheaper than this piece of crap.
Yeah, the name alone is very telling. You can get any of a number of working sony walman units from the 80s/90s that are serviceable and will generally run as well as they did new with a little servicing. I would be surprised if any of these work in 10 years, given how hard it is to replace the belt, and even by then the name will have aged very awkwardly. 30 years? Nobody will remember it. It's a cash grab for today, not an attempt to make a good product.
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.
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!
They did actually make a few decent ones like the Tomashi F-116, but finding another modern cassette player with the similar mechanism is unlikely though, unfortunately.
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 was thinking the same, the track chosen here was just something where I wouldn't notice the wow and flutter very well but with something that has longer consistent notes it's far more noticeable
It's also exactly why electronic musicians like Hainbach use a tape + piano combo; it puts in a lot of character that's harder to achieve in a digital setup. The bug becomes a feature
That was really the whole point of the demo. Almost no one is going to be listening to piano music off cassette on a new personal cassette player in 2022. They’d be listening to a CD is they wanted a physical album. This cassette player is being marketed to the same people buying the new non-Dolby, non-chrome, average to crappy-quality, new novelty ‘collectible’ cassette releases. These new tapes aren’t for the discerning listener - so the test was all about how would an average modern pop/dance track sound…since that’s the kind of thing most people would be playing on this.
@@chrisvinicombe9947 Piano can't sustain a not long enough to test for wow. As where a violin can sustain a note indefinitely. Synthesizer would be ok though. Preferably, get a musician with perfect pitch to listen for you.
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.
@@niclaskarlin I suspect you’ll find a tech startup like this has 99% sales marketing and design and 1% engineering staff… I like the design very much, but there should be at least some function behind it.
@@KuntalGhosh Thing is, all you have to do is ask on the internet and someone will show you how to clean it up. They'll also tell you not to run the signal lines from the tape heads near the noisy switching circuit.
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
@@MultiWirth imo sony is the one that makes questionable business decisions and niche products that are over engineered for their sales volume and I love them four it. I bet sony also has some tooling for these things somewhere in a warehouse that some department don't realise they're paying for, at least that's how I see sony haha, I feel like playstation makes all the sane business decisions and then the rest is full of people trying to make something they want, and just cross their fingers and hope it makes money. it's the spaghetti on the wall approach.
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.
I’d recommend it. It’s quite liberating to go for a walk and disconnect from the constant stream of social media and the internet. Even more so, if you can still listen to your banger mixtapes or record an audio log without apps interrupting you or worrying about spyware. Our ancestors had a point, we do need to go to simpler times.
Yep. It's a shame devices are glued and use proprietary or hard to source parts. The world wouldn't be a worse place if devices had standardized batteries.
Use a minidisc player then? Audio quality better than MP3 or streamed music, play your old discs and you can record and you have optical out if you need to, plus they look way cooler, retro music player of choice for me.
@@richardroach5866 - Honestly, I love the idea of all this retro stuff but I’m more than happy with listening to music via iTunes or TH-cam Music. I mostly listen in the car, and apart from the rubbish CarPlay interface on those two apps, it’s ideal for me. The original argument still stands though. New kit should be repairable without having to resort to glue afterwards.
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
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).
Wow, this brings back memories. I had an Aiwa car stereo back in the day that was so cool it got stolen from my school parking lot within a week. My last walkman was a JVC from around 85 that had every feature I could dream of, and it was tiny. Such a brilliant device!
@@ChrisB... my last personal stereo was an aiwa device that only took one AA battery and was only slightly bigger than an actual cassette. It was soooo cool!
I still have the monster yellow brick of an alba from I think late eighties to early nineties, and after I got my first after school job I saved like a mo fo for a basic ish Sony and the difference was almost like a religious revelation. My college bus journeys were infinitely much better.
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.
Those wow and flutter numbers are totally normal for low to mid range tape and record players. 80s/90s gear will be better, it's due to tooling etc. It used to be a very big business, a lot of re-investment would need to take place to improve those numbers in a way that would make the gear affordable.
@@WeAreRewind1 Just watched the GTG teardown. I didn't see any bypass capacitors for the motor. That may be the cause of the motor noise if they're not present.
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.
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.
Dolby doesn't license out their NR anymore. It's technically possible to replicate the algorithm with a compatible generic moniker, but Sony would have to manufacture their own ICs. Not to mention the upfront investment required to mass manufacture high precision mechanical parts with good performance and still raise a profit from what is still a niche market.
@@wer123456 cassettes will probably remain a niche market, and that's kinda nice even if it has downsides like this. The culture of repair and the spotlight it shines on smaller indie artists compared to massive bands is something thats pretty unique to the format now and I hope it stays that way. As long as people keep teaching others how to keep old decks alive, we won't need new decks for quite awhile.
@@wer123456 everyone seems to forget about the power of dsp... you can absolutly and very easily implement dolby b & c and probably even s with dsp. its very easy to replicate it even with plugins in a daw.
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.
The brown chunky one you could swing above your head and knock people out with, which took C cells, and had a little electret mic built in? I had the front door on and off mine enough times because I was fascinated by the mechanism, and I recorded little radio shows... 😂
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.
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.
I remember in my childhood there were portable cassette players (not sure if there was also one like this from Sony and thus a proper Walkman) that didn't rewind at all. You had to flip the cassette around and fast forward... Auto-stop was not needed, by the time you reached the other end of your 60 minute tape, you had burnt through 3 AA batteries 🤣
@@Colaholiker The problem is not that the simpler mechanisms didn’t exist when we were kids, the problem is these crappy knockoffs are the ONLY tape mechanisms available for manufacturers to use. ( Back in the day, the simpler tapedrive mechanisms existed but more complicated ones also existed - auto reverse and bidirectional playback, 4-track heads, smooth lever actions and reliable pinch rollers that wouldn’t eat your favorite tape.
For a while in my childhood, all our home cassette decks were like that too. When I found out there were models with full auto-stop, I thought it was pretty neat. I never liked the crude, tension-based auto stop because occasionally it seemed unreliable and it provided no protection against tape spillage/eating (which was uncommon, but did happen from time to time since back then our equipment and its upkeep weren't the greatest).
In my experience the auto stop mechanism using the tension arm between the heads only worked at best about half the time. Auto stop is much more reliable when activated from the take up (or supply) reel, not to mention it then works on all transport modes, not just playback
@@skylined5534 Taste is subjective for sure, but to be honest it looks so much modern bland style that I can't like it. I miss the late 90s to mid 2000s style, those had their charm for actually looking something different, even when some of them were seriously overdone.
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.
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.
Thing is as he mentioned there's ways to improve the sound by using quality electronics with the clunky mechanism but they aren't even doing that sadly. I personally think the hum that sounds like a 40 yr old Walkman with failing components is inexcusable.
@@AtheistOrphan If people are wiling to pay (THAT is the question), short runs in laser cut sheet metal with CNC bends are easily achievable, the engineering cost of that tho is something that a small run might not absorb. Doing it with mass production stamping, definitely not worth it nowadays.
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.
@@1djbecker the designers definitely are, while the people who own the company don't care, as long as the sell the dumb thing to the hipsters or nostalgia tards
Yes. Indifference to the persistent hum (plus the pencil!) plus the limited frequency response all adds up to nothing. Disappointing. I would love to own one of these properly designed.
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.
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 think I saw a hole in the usual place on the bottom for motor speed adjustment, might have been a trick of the light but if so then they are likely using a stock motor. Could fix the 1.3% over speed though. Yep, a second after 17:09 for under a second it is visible. For a review unit it would have been nice to make sure it was spot on. Unless voltage and temperature cause significant drift. These days one could keep it spot on with optical feedback from the flywheel and servo control with the motor back EMF.
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.
At university, in the early 80s, I shared a flat with a chap who owned a Nakamichi tape deck. Not a Dragon or 1000, but pretty close to their top end; so about as good as it gets. It sounded great at the time, through a good amp and Linn speakers, but it would sound pretty awful compared to a good digital source and a decent DAC. If you really want tapes, then try reel-to-reel. Compact cassette, slow speed, narrow tape, is inherently shit.
@@davidmorgan6896 so, just out of curiosity, how would you respond to someone who liked the way this model sounded and just enjoyed making tapes and having them in their bag or car bc they did it when they were young? Genuinely asking, not trying to argue or be rude
@@31TV_TX I see that as fetishism. Hardly the worst form of behaviour; just silly. Honestly, I don't care if people use compact cassettes or vinyl records or shellac 78s. I get mildly put out when these people say that the sound quality is better. The sound quality with all those media is objectively worse than the main digital formats. I saw an article in the paper recently about a man, it has to be a man, who collects VHS tapes. He even went so far as to say that the picture quality was better. Better than what? A UHD Blu-ray? He, like your apocryphal cassette fan, are wrapped up in nostalgia; which is a little sad. I guess I would be disinclined to trust these people's judgement.
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.
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.
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.
It could also be a compression/normalisation artefact (not related to quality compression, but volume compression). As this supports bluetooth, my theory is the headphone and BT output are being compressed and the loudness normalised leading to the hum persisting on both outputs. This would mean that the headphone jack isn’t bypassing the DAC it uses for bluetooth, which probably makes this cheaper for them to manufacture but leads to an “inauthentic” reproduction of what is actually on the tape itself.
what it is is just the AC frequency from the coils in the motor than you hear, theres not really much that can be done about it other than moving the motor farther away from everything else (not an option here) or using better magnetic sheilding on everything
When you started the sound demo I was blown away with how good it was, until I looked up, realised TH-cam had sneaked in an M&S advert, skipped the ad and then the despair set in lol
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!..🤔🤔😳
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.
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.
It wants to look like something from the 80's. You cannot avoid sharp corners if you want an 80's look. It was in the 90's when round corners began to take hold.
@@GoldSrc_ BS, I have a number of 80s portable cassette players that don't have corners nearly as sharp as the device in the video. The one in the video has "sharp" corners. Not even rounded at all.
@@GoldSrc_ It's more contemporary, minimalist, Ikea style than 80's. While the 80's was a very boxy decade, they did round the corners on most portable devices still because any designer with half a brain can figure out that hard pointy things hurt in a pocket and/or hand.
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 still have two portables from the 90’s, one a GE and a Magnavox with built in AM/FM radio. They both make that exact same noise when a tape is playing, but the audio quality from the GE seems to be a little clearer even though I suspect they share the same mechanism.
Same, mine were an Emerson and a Koss, both in the sub-$40 range in the early/mid ‘90s (the former even may have been ~$25), including an AM/FM tuner, the latter with preset buttons and a digital frequency display and cassette auto reverse. They were fine for a 13-year-old loser like me but that’s something to be expected at that price point. This? For ~$150, I’d expect something much better, like at least an auto stop function on FF/rev.
I've got a CEC (Columbia electronics corp) unit (which I've been told us the cheapest of the cheap from the late 1970s) and it definitely makes a similar hiss, it's got to be the motor, as my device does not have ANY erase magnets.
Same here, I associate that sound with all the portable cassette players I ever had. Not top tier ones only ever had shops own brands (Saisho from Dixons etc) or mid-range Sonys.
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.
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.
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.
Which decks would those have been? Even the vaunted Nakamichi decks (which didn't have Dolby S) weren't completely transparent to their source, though they were very good.
Nakamichi had already crossed the 20kHz threshold by the early 1970s. The only real major advancements beyond that were more durable head materials and the various new Dolby noise reduction schemes.
@@johnstone7697 These 20kHz response figures were at very low levels, usually -20dB or thereabouts. Anything approaching a realistic recording level would saturate badly at these higher frequencies. When I used to line up Studer reel to reel machines at the BBC we set them up at 0dB operating level to get a flat response. At these levels, cassette recorders were hopeless. Give them anything with loud cymbals or a tambourine and it would all fall apart. The later Dolby systems (HX Pro and C) were designed to reduce this effect and along with metal tapes, a really good, well lined up deck could give RTR a run for its money.
@@garethonthetube Sure, but most musical content is way down in level at those high frequencies anyway, and there was also no illusion that a cassette deck would be a good choice for live music recording. Take a look at the spectral content of most any recording up at 20kHz. Not much going on up there, and very few people can hear that high anyway. I sold a lot of cassette decks, and the demo was simply to record a song off an album and then sync the playback of the album with the playback of the tape, and compare the two. On any Nakamichi it was very hard to tell them apart. Cassettes, even metal, were never thought of as the ultimate carrier for recorded content. If you were going for that, you went for a reel to reel machine. The improvement in headroom had most to do with substantially improved tape formulations and more aggressive noise reduction schemes.
@@igorszamaszow171 The point: there is no market enough, to produce any better mechanics\motors, even for double or triple price. Since limited buyers are mostly penniless young ones (all collectors would better prefer old new stock (from Sony) for 5-10X Price). Catch-22. The only way is to make it super trendy, via Apple or some Kardashian-like influencers.
$149 is kinda steep for what seems to be a pretty mediocre cassette player. Might as well go with a used Sony from the 90s for much less but with better sound and quality.
I know this mechanism from cheap (like 15$) 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi there, I have a very serious request, when you described tape components and electronic you do so in a way which is clear and easy to understand. as someone who has very little experience with electronics I appreciate that so much as I find other people can be arrogant when explaining stuff, So my serious request is can you please do some videos that show common problems and malfunctions of tape decks and walkmans and how to fix them. I’m getting old now, knowledge of tapes is getting lost in time and I think it’s important for people who love tapes to know stuff that otherwise only a qualified technician would know. If making these kinds of videos would require money I would contribute through a patreon or such.
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.
I love the aesthetic of your mono recorder, but your recorder can't even play stereo. Like, it's losing 50% of the signal of all music, unless for some reason you only listen to mono.
@Solomon Kim True, but I honestly can't tell the difference. That and most of the cassettes I have state on them "Gives genuine playback on Mono equipment." That's not to say it wouldn't be better with a stereo head (it certainly would) but for a pretty decent portable cassette player that's 50 years old, it's pretty hard to hate it even if it is only Mono.
@@TaijanDean uhh... Sure. I mean, you probably can't tell the difference because you never compared your mono experience to the proper stereo experience. If you did a test comparison of both I think you would definitely realize how much you were missing. No one is asking you to hate it. It was just a device made for a different purpose. I wonder what it's frequency range is. (edit: 50Hz-10kHz
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.
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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.
Dolby relies on both record and playback machines to be perfectly aligned. Very challenging on a domestic cassette deck. The higher end decks had a self calibration feature which allowed them to adjust for differences in tape stock. Any frequency response errors would be magnified by Dolby.
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.
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.
I used to have a cheap knock-off portable tape player in the 80s that had that "whine." I always assumed the amp wasn't properly shielded. I'd say they're using Dolby to encode without using it to decode but chances are it's just a really aggressive automatic level control.
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
I too look forward to Saturday mornings with Techmoan. This may be by accident but maybe not. More retro TH-camrs should do the same so we can “change channels” while eating Trix cereal.
@@thefenrisianssweatshop Yeah 100% get tomorrows world vibes from this channel love it. It's funny because theres another channel I follow called 'Explaining computers' and it always reminds me of the old educational programmes that you'd watch at school or were on during daytime hours.
Same here, same age, give or take. My family wasn't poor by any means, but we had one TV, which was in service from 1976 to 1999 (in storage now, still works fine), one VCR, and that was pretty much it, gadget-wise. I didn't have a personal stereo until I was 12, and no computer until I was 14, so I was *seriously* starved of consumer electronics all through the 80s, and had to make do with browsing the Littlewoods catalogue and occasional visits to Dixons to admire the merchandise. Now I can relive my youth from the comfort of my living room.
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 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.
as a technics RS-BX606 owner, I still think this is fairly cool for where we are at in general. I make cassettes for bands and it's getting SO popular to use them as a local independent artist for merch. Things like these are going to enable normal people to engage with the modern tapes which mostly sound pretty bad anyway. it's just not about hifi anymore, but people like me still use RTM 900 tape which is the same as BASF Super Ferric and Dolby B on the releases I make. The more people who care about the format at all the higher the chance that we finally get a proper new deck or device. I'm excited people are caring!
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.
When testing Bluetooth functionality on portable devices, so you don't have to stick your microphone into the ear cup of your headphones, maybe you can use a Bluetooth receiver that has a line out on it. I know logitech used to make one and maybe there is an even better option too.
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.
@@Techmoan Not seen this episode before, it was bizarrely fascinating for such a seemingly inconsequential theme!! Incidentally, hope you did get your well earned one million subs plaque!😀😀
The sound referenced at about 10:30 was most likely the feedback between your headphones and your lavalier. When using cellphones back in the day (early 2000's) if you had your headphones too close to the ear piece/microphone or if your computer speakers were to close to the phone at all it would make that exact noise. If you had Motorola Razr or Krazr you probably recognize that sound because it was constant near any microphone, speaker or magnet. Drives the person on the other end crazy. The more you know :)
Reminds me of my 1980 Sanyo, but missing tape speed adjustment. Oh that’s a pretty good metal tape you were using there, haven’t seen those since the late 80s.
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.
With stepper motor tech advances and logic controllers with drone devices being so far advanced and dirt cheap you would think it easier to create a perfect wow and flutter and far less much complicated mechanism using a pair of direct drive motors. The head mechinism movement would also benefit from phone like tech with tiny steppers and screws to move pop up cameras. I guess it has to be seen if there's a wider market for cassette audio to justify any development, but technically it could be massively improved using existing cheap tech.
I don't see how a stepper moter would help. It only introduces more pulses into the movement. They already know how to reduce wow and flutter: use a heavier, properly balanced flywheel and a decent dc motor that drives it with a belt to filter out the higher frequency variations. That's really all there is to it. But that requires a manufacturer willing to do the work and a customer willing to pay the bill. These cheap China transports were designed primarily to be cost effective. As for cassette transport development using newer technology, there's simply not enough demand for it.
@@johnstone7697 with a PWM rate of many tens or hundreds of kHz you can get “perfectly smooth” (within the bounds of the application) motion, effectively also quartz locked by the clock in the microcontroller. Of course the old ways work best at any rate when you have the space, but it definitely could be used to get a better and a thinner portable walkman.
@@johnstone7697 it means you can control the exact speed at any time (within a certain tolerance depending on how cheap or pricey the motor is) so you can sync up 2 motors instead of relying on wobbely and doomed to dissolve belts and plastic gears.. However I don't trust the lifespan of the chips that would be used, so I'd still stick with the old..
Hard to believe that there's not a single company out there that can perfect the cassette player in 2022. You'd think it would be an easy task considering everything we know now.
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.
And as usual, you've got just three days to do it! As a Texan, Time Team was one of the coolest things I've ever discovered on TH-cam. I remember the first episode I watched I was like, "Who is that guy, he seems so familiar..." and right after I figured it out, in that particular episode he was showing a weapon that had been found, and said "And this, I'm afraid I must tell you, is a baldric."
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!!! :)
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.
You say the fit and finish is good but it looked like the door wasn't straight against the front right edge and seemed to taper in towards the bottom. All seemed very average like you said, thanks for another great and honest review.
No kidding, it is as if the portable cassette player universe is inverted. This should be the great grandfather to a modern player not the great grandson.
Hi! Love your videos. My We Are Rewind device arrived this week, and I hear that hum during quiet sections, but would say that the sound exceeded what I was expecting so I can live with it. I’m happy with mine, if only for the novelty of it. I noticed there’s a little hole in the back and I’m wondering if that is the access point for speed adjustment.
Need a good one with 80s style and bluetooth. Audio Technica did it right with the Sound Burger. Wish Sony would follow their lead, so many iconic things they could release to great fanfare.
Not exactly the craziest ordeal. My old Yamaha deck didn’t have auto stop on fast forward or rewind either and that was from the early 80s. It was a piece of shit though
Every time his recycle bin is knocked over by the wind, neighbors and picking minidiscs and tumble weeds of 1/8” magnetic tape out of their garden for a week
Here’s a tear down video
th-cam.com/video/chWDaAjddF0/w-d-xo.html
Western pencils DOOOOOo wind tapes. You'll have to spin the tape around the pencil like a helicopter.. It will go fast!! So fast, It can break the tape!!!
What about a test of cassette bluetooth adapter to convert old deck to bluetooth ? Many thanks for the work.
@@MuZeSiCk77 Matt Techmoan seems to forget anything about France but the Minitel. The perfect pencil is French made BIC Crystal, it was the one used at Philip's in the 60's when the cassette was invented and finalised
If I put the pencil at a slight angle it works just fine. I would use an old pencil not so long any more. ✏
Also I don't know why some of these companies out there are not making new versions of the older stuff.
If you’re able to in the future, Could you please review the filo cassette player. It’s similar to this one but $50 cheaper. I’m considering buying one.
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.
Not to mention replacing the battery.
I was extremely disappointed in it not being user serviceable. Given that it is from a French company I had higher expectations.
Retro tech to me means repairable. It took me a few minutes to process the fact that this isn't; I kept trying to deny it. I suppose if someone gave me one I could use it, but... it's tainted, you know? :)
I vaguely hope some hot air would allow you to pull the front door off, but I can understand TM not wanting to risk it. Once you got access to those screws everything else should come open easily one would hope
How? The belts won’t go out for like 20-30 years I have some decks that still haven’t lost belts
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.
My life feels more complete now, thankyou.
Dolby has since turned their attention to DVD, Blu Ray and 4K UHD. I even saw Dolby pop up on some computers in recent years.
@@pervertedalchemist9944 It's also that Dolby doesn't license the technology anymore. But you can buy chips that employ the same technology, they just can't name it Dolby NR. And without noise reduction, tape decks are hissing central.
Nowadays you can even do noise reduction in software. Like pre-apply the noise reduction to a WAV file, record it, play it back, and apply the reverse transformation.
Yes! If you're making a cassette deck in 2022, it better be the best cassette deck ever. Complete with all the noise reduction technology. Either license it from Dolby or have a different implementation of it.
Perhaps you could add Dolby NR on a player by referring to it as "Dolby™ compatible noise reduction"?
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.
Might as well have included Rechargeable AA batteries and a built in charger. But of course today you wouldn't be trusted not to recharge Alkalines or something like that. A removable 18650 would have done the trick, too.
I’m sure they thought it through. Let’s be honest, though, going through with a record function that sounds like ... that ... means they had no intention that their customers would still be using this thing in five years.
I love rechargeable replaceable batteries. Wish everything used them.
Or it's just marketing.
It's the same practice most companies these days take... build em to break and so that you can't fix them yourself. Throw it out and buy a new one. It's strange how much this applies to.. It's sick really.
I love how you were clear to point out you got this for free. Honest TH-camrs are so important.
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…
My ps2 controllers felt quality until they literally melted
Which model are you referring to?
@@GenophefeElisabethwm-10 is the only tape sized Walkman from Sony that played both sides automatically.
I still have 3 working of those. Probably the belt will not last much longer, but otherwise they are just fine.
@@medes5597the later models released around 2000 are the ones he's talking about. They were the pinnacle of the walkman.
It's a shame that the cassette tech of the present just cannot compete with the past.
Yeah, well, NASA forgot how to fly to the moon. So we all are devolveing, driveling, moronic, feckless, and weak, brain-dead amoebas.
Amen to that. I still buy up old tape decks and renovate those as the better older ones are fairly bullet proof.
maybe in the future they discover a cave where the equipment where sony made their high range walkmans will be found so they can make the old high quality stuff back again :) that would be nice..
It's like discovering a lost civilization where their technology far outstripped ours. A bit.
it could if they cared.
all of these devices are just novelties designed to capitalize on nostalgia.
they don't really care to produce a premium product nor is there a market for that.
there aren't nearly enough people willing to pay top dollar for a premium cassette player to warrant putting actual effort into making one.
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.
@@handsolo1209 I’d go as far to say that it’s a fashion accessory at that price point and with that marketing. It’s something to be seen using, rather than to be used. Blërg.
@@RobCamp-rmc_0 Yes, it really is just a fashion accessory. It's there to say "look at how hip and cool I am with being into retro audio". The price is both there to fleece these people and to trick the few remaining fools who believe that higher price means quality.
@@handsolo1209 I agree but comparing to 2nd hand isn't fair, if SONY were to make them again, it will not be cheap, there's no cost down, we'll get inflation adjustment instead, I'd still be happy to buy them though.
@@JimmyZeng The point is though that there are still lots of very affordable Walkmans (and not just Sony, but Panasonic, Phillips, etc) available with far superior components. Even a spares and repairs Walkman is going to be 1/10th of that price and even if it costs €20 to fix, it is still far cheaper than this piece of crap.
Yeah, the name alone is very telling. You can get any of a number of working sony walman units from the 80s/90s that are serviceable and will generally run as well as they did new with a little servicing.
I would be surprised if any of these work in 10 years, given how hard it is to replace the belt, and even by then the name will have aged very awkwardly. 30 years? Nobody will remember it. It's a cash grab for today, not an attempt to make a good product.
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 know your grandmother and she agrees with your plan. 😉
How much for the grandmother, and how many old style recipes does she know?
because it'd go hard
Does your grandmother wind tapes, though?
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!
It's sad that they can't make decent cassette tape players anymore. Thanks for this excellent new product review.
It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to.
They did actually make a few decent ones like the Tomashi F-116, but finding another modern cassette player with the similar mechanism is unlikely though, unfortunately.
Why would they? It's fun, but there's no money in it anymore
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 was thinking the same, the track chosen here was just something where I wouldn't notice the wow and flutter very well but with something that has longer consistent notes it's far more noticeable
I find sustained strings from violins and chelos show it up fast too
It's also exactly why electronic musicians like Hainbach use a tape + piano combo; it puts in a lot of character that's harder to achieve in a digital setup. The bug becomes a feature
That was really the whole point of the demo. Almost no one is going to be listening to piano music off cassette on a new personal cassette player in 2022. They’d be listening to a CD is they wanted a physical album. This cassette player is being marketed to the same people buying the new non-Dolby, non-chrome, average to crappy-quality, new novelty ‘collectible’ cassette releases. These new tapes aren’t for the discerning listener - so the test was all about how would an average modern pop/dance track sound…since that’s the kind of thing most people would be playing on this.
@@chrisvinicombe9947 Piano can't sustain a not long enough to test for wow. As where a violin can sustain a note indefinitely. Synthesizer would be ok though.
Preferably, get a musician with perfect pitch to listen for you.
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.
Yep, sounds like switching noise.
Would it be very expensive to fix it? The producer can't missed the hum, right?!
@@niclaskarlin I suspect you’ll find a tech startup like this has 99% sales marketing and design and 1% engineering staff…
I like the design very much, but there should be at least some function behind it.
It's just what u get from copy and pasting "typical application circuit" diagrams from datasheets onto one pcb and using that for your final product..
@@KuntalGhosh Thing is, all you have to do is ask on the internet and someone will show you how to clean it up. They'll also tell you not to run the signal lines from the tape heads near the noisy switching circuit.
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
lose.
not loose.
loose means "not tight"
How about Panasonic or Aiwa?
They also made high quality personal cassette players.
@@MultiWirth but Sony was the original maker, and in celebration of their cool invention, they might recreate it
@@helpfulcommenter it was a typo, i'm typing with a remote and it double clicks sometimes lol :)
@@MultiWirth imo sony is the one that makes questionable business decisions and niche products that are over engineered for their sales volume and I love them four it. I bet sony also has some tooling for these things somewhere in a warehouse that some department don't realise they're paying for, at least that's how I see sony haha, I feel like playstation makes all the sane business decisions and then the rest is full of people trying to make something they want, and just cross their fingers and hope it makes money. it's the spaghetti on the wall approach.
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.
I’d recommend it. It’s quite liberating to go for a walk and disconnect from the constant stream of social media and the internet. Even more so, if you can still listen to your banger mixtapes or record an audio log without apps interrupting you or worrying about spyware. Our ancestors had a point, we do need to go to simpler times.
Yep. It's a shame devices are glued and use proprietary or hard to source parts. The world wouldn't be a worse place if devices had standardized batteries.
Use a minidisc player then? Audio quality better than MP3 or streamed music, play your old discs and you can record and you have optical out if you need to, plus they look way cooler, retro music player of choice for me.
@@richardroach5866 - Honestly, I love the idea of all this retro stuff but I’m more than happy with listening to music via iTunes or TH-cam Music. I mostly listen in the car, and apart from the rubbish CarPlay interface on those two apps, it’s ideal for me. The original argument still stands though. New kit should be repairable without having to resort to glue afterwards.
@@knoxiemanor rip your cds to .flac with a $25 LG DVD burner. Transfer files to phone and you're all set.
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
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).
Wow, this brings back memories. I had an Aiwa car stereo back in the day that was so cool it got stolen from my school parking lot within a week. My last walkman was a JVC from around 85 that had every feature I could dream of, and it was tiny. Such a brilliant device!
@@ChrisB... my last personal stereo was an aiwa device that only took one AA battery and was only slightly bigger than an actual cassette. It was soooo cool!
I still have the monster yellow brick of an alba from I think late eighties to early nineties, and after I got my first after school job I saved like a mo fo for a basic ish Sony and the difference was almost like a religious revelation. My college bus journeys were infinitely much better.
@@thefenrisianssweatshop Sony Fontopia in-ear headphones... oh man, they sounded good.
I had a couple of Sony full logic deck tape players for my cars over the years, loved them!
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.
Won't happen until the Chinese factory upgrades the available parts.
Those wow and flutter numbers are totally normal for low to mid range tape and record players. 80s/90s gear will be better, it's due to tooling etc. It used to be a very big business, a lot of re-investment would need to take place to improve those numbers in a way that would make the gear affordable.
Of course we will :)
@@WeAreRewind1 Right on!
@@WeAreRewind1 Just watched the GTG teardown. I didn't see any bypass capacitors for the motor. That may be the cause of the motor noise if they're not present.
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
Most of the cheap ones sold on Urban Outfitters have the round window or a clear shell. But the quality leaves a lot to be desired.
The cost is the result of limited manufacturing its gets cheaper per unit per every unit made.
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.
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.
Dolby doesn't license out their NR anymore. It's technically possible to replicate the algorithm with a compatible generic moniker, but Sony would have to manufacture their own ICs. Not to mention the upfront investment required to mass manufacture high precision mechanical parts with good performance and still raise a profit from what is still a niche market.
@@wer123456 cassettes will probably remain a niche market, and that's kinda nice even if it has downsides like this. The culture of repair and the spotlight it shines on smaller indie artists compared to massive bands is something thats pretty unique to the format now and I hope it stays that way. As long as people keep teaching others how to keep old decks alive, we won't need new decks for quite awhile.
@@wer123456 everyone seems to forget about the power of dsp... you can absolutly and very easily implement dolby b & c and probably even s with dsp. its very easy to replicate it even with plugins in a daw.
I love how all your positives about this deck had nothing to do with the audio quality - says a lot really! Great review.
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.
I'm now picturing a random child playing doctor, while playing "Doctor My Eyes" on a Fisher Price tape deck... 🤣
Egads, I must need more sleep.
The brown chunky one you could swing above your head and knock people out with, which took C cells, and had a little electret mic built in? I had the front door on and off mine enough times because I was fascinated by the mechanism, and I recorded little radio shows... 😂
That Fisher Price tape player probably had a better cassette mechanism!
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.
Thank you for declaring the "payment"!! Seriously underappreciated today.
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 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.
I remember in my childhood there were portable cassette players (not sure if there was also one like this from Sony and thus a proper Walkman) that didn't rewind at all. You had to flip the cassette around and fast forward... Auto-stop was not needed, by the time you reached the other end of your 60 minute tape, you had burnt through 3 AA batteries 🤣
@@Colaholiker The problem is not that the simpler mechanisms didn’t exist when we were kids, the problem is these crappy knockoffs are the ONLY tape mechanisms available for manufacturers to use. ( Back in the day, the simpler tapedrive mechanisms existed but more complicated ones also existed - auto reverse and bidirectional playback, 4-track heads, smooth lever actions and reliable pinch rollers that wouldn’t eat your favorite tape.
I saw the arm at very beginning, when Mat was showing the erase magnet.
For a while in my childhood, all our home cassette decks were like that too. When I found out there were models with full auto-stop, I thought it was pretty neat. I never liked the crude, tension-based auto stop because occasionally it seemed unreliable and it provided no protection against tape spillage/eating (which was uncommon, but did happen from time to time since back then our equipment and its upkeep weren't the greatest).
In my experience the auto stop mechanism using the tension arm between the heads only worked at best about half the time. Auto stop is much more reliable when activated from the take up (or supply) reel, not to mention it then works on all transport modes, not just playback
That thing looks like what would result from IKEA and Yugo collaborating to make a cassette deck.
I wouldn't put it past IKEA - not too long ago, they just released their own turntable...no, seriously!
@@pervertedalchemist9944 I was hoping you were kidding. You were not kidding.
@@sootikins
I had no idea IKEA and Yugo were quite so stylish.
@@skylined5534 Taste is subjective for sure, but to be honest it looks so much modern bland style that I can't like it.
I miss the late 90s to mid 2000s style, those had their charm for actually looking something different, even when some of them were seriously overdone.
If it were built in circa 1985 and had a Braun logo slapped on it these things would be going for serious coin
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.
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
Dang, you beat me to it. Wrote my comment without scanning down enough. 😉
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just not economically viable I’m afraid.
Thing is as he mentioned there's ways to improve the sound by using quality electronics with the clunky mechanism but they aren't even doing that sadly. I personally think the hum that sounds like a 40 yr old Walkman with failing components is inexcusable.
@@AtheistOrphan If people are wiling to pay (THAT is the question), short runs in laser cut sheet metal with CNC bends are easily achievable, the engineering cost of that tho is something that a small run might not absorb. Doing it with mass production stamping, definitely not worth it nowadays.
@@JoeUrbanYYC Feels like you gotta recap the thing out of the box
@@Kalvinjj yep exactly
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.
If only. This rectangular prism has all the aesthetics of DIY laboratory equipment.
They don't need to be hipsters to cynically use that marketing.
@@1djbecker the designers definitely are, while the people who own the company don't care, as long as the sell the dumb thing to the hipsters or nostalgia tards
Yes. Indifference to the persistent hum (plus the pencil!) plus the limited frequency response all adds up to nothing. Disappointing. I would love to own one of these properly designed.
Bitter much?
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.
That whine you hear when playing the tape is called nostalgia for me.
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 mean it is a piece of junk anyway, seems like the best way to avoid waste is not buying it.
No visible screws, and no visible belt clip either. This is a device designed to have photographs taken of it, not to be used.
I think I saw a hole in the usual place on the bottom for motor speed adjustment, might have been a trick of the light but if so then they are likely using a stock motor. Could fix the 1.3% over speed though.
Yep, a second after 17:09 for under a second it is visible. For a review unit it would have been nice to make sure it was spot on. Unless voltage and temperature cause significant drift. These days one could keep it spot on with optical feedback from the flywheel and servo control with the motor back EMF.
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.
Exactly. My 1979 Telefunken RC200 with Highcom NR Sounds as good as a CD with Type 2 Tapes already.
At university, in the early 80s, I shared a flat with a chap who owned a Nakamichi tape deck. Not a Dragon or 1000, but pretty close to their top end; so about as good as it gets. It sounded great at the time, through a good amp and Linn speakers, but it would sound pretty awful compared to a good digital source and a decent DAC.
If you really want tapes, then try reel-to-reel. Compact cassette, slow speed, narrow tape, is inherently shit.
@@davidmorgan6896 so, just out of curiosity, how would you respond to someone who liked the way this model sounded and just enjoyed making tapes and having them in their bag or car bc they did it when they were young? Genuinely asking, not trying to argue or be rude
@@31TV_TX I see that as fetishism. Hardly the worst form of behaviour; just silly. Honestly, I don't care if people use compact cassettes or vinyl records or shellac 78s. I get mildly put out when these people say that the sound quality is better. The sound quality with all those media is objectively worse than the main digital formats.
I saw an article in the paper recently about a man, it has to be a man, who collects VHS tapes. He even went so far as to say that the picture quality was better. Better than what? A UHD Blu-ray? He, like your apocryphal cassette fan, are wrapped up in nostalgia; which is a little sad. I guess I would be disinclined to trust these people's judgement.
@@davidmorgan6896 Well, most health related woo believers are women, so... to each their own.
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.
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.
Plenty of great second-had ones around going cheap.
Tascam...pricy and well worth the money.I buy albums on cassettes...and they sound great!
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.
It could also be a compression/normalisation artefact (not related to quality compression, but volume compression).
As this supports bluetooth, my theory is the headphone and BT output are being compressed and the loudness normalised leading to the hum persisting on both outputs.
This would mean that the headphone jack isn’t bypassing the DAC it uses for bluetooth, which probably makes this cheaper for them to manufacture but leads to an “inauthentic” reproduction of what is actually on the tape itself.
what it is is just the AC frequency from the coils in the motor than you hear, theres not really much that can be done about it other than moving the motor farther away from everything else (not an option here) or using better magnetic sheilding on everything
When you started the sound demo I was blown away with how good it was, until I looked up, realised TH-cam had sneaked in an M&S advert, skipped the ad and then the despair set in lol
Despair? Why? Did you purchase one before seeing this vid and yours hadn't been delivered yet?
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!..🤔🤔😳
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!
Its Lord Techmoan.
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.
To be honest….that hiss/static does bring me back to the 80s. I probably never had good equipment back then. 😎
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.
It wants to look like something from the 80's.
You cannot avoid sharp corners if you want an 80's look.
It was in the 90's when round corners began to take hold.
@@GoldSrc_ BS, I have a number of 80s portable cassette players that don't have corners nearly as sharp as the device in the video. The one in the video has "sharp" corners. Not even rounded at all.
@@GoldSrc_ It's more contemporary, minimalist, Ikea style than 80's. While the 80's was a very boxy decade, they did round the corners on most portable devices still because any designer with half a brain can figure out that hard pointy things hurt in a pocket and/or hand.
The whole thing is rather ugly. Doesn't look like any fun in it at all.
The edge of that door looks like it'll slice you to ribbons.
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 still have two portables from the 90’s, one a GE and a Magnavox with built in AM/FM radio. They both make that exact same noise when a tape is playing, but the audio quality from the GE seems to be a little clearer even though I suspect they share the same mechanism.
I have had many and only a couple of the cheap ones made that noise.
Same, mine were an Emerson and a Koss, both in the sub-$40 range in the early/mid ‘90s (the former even may have been ~$25), including an AM/FM tuner, the latter with preset buttons and a digital frequency display and cassette auto reverse. They were fine for a 13-year-old loser like me but that’s something to be expected at that price point. This? For ~$150, I’d expect something much better, like at least an auto stop function on FF/rev.
I've got a CEC (Columbia electronics corp) unit (which I've been told us the cheapest of the cheap from the late 1970s) and it definitely makes a similar hiss, it's got to be the motor, as my device does not have ANY erase magnets.
Same here, I associate that sound with all the portable cassette players I ever had. Not top tier ones only ever had shops own brands (Saisho from Dixons etc) or mid-range Sonys.
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.
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!
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.
I used to wrap masking tape around pencil to thicken it..
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.
Yes, the best decks were very good indeed.
Which decks would those have been?
Even the vaunted Nakamichi decks (which didn't have Dolby S) weren't completely transparent to their source, though they were very good.
Nakamichi had already crossed the 20kHz threshold by the early 1970s. The only real major advancements beyond that were more durable head materials and the various new Dolby noise reduction schemes.
@@johnstone7697 These 20kHz response figures were at very low levels, usually -20dB or thereabouts. Anything approaching a realistic recording level would saturate badly at these higher frequencies. When I used to line up Studer reel to reel machines at the BBC we set them up at 0dB operating level to get a flat response. At these levels, cassette recorders were hopeless. Give them anything with loud cymbals or a tambourine and it would all fall apart. The later Dolby systems (HX Pro and C) were designed to reduce this effect and along with metal tapes, a really good, well lined up deck could give RTR a run for its money.
@@garethonthetube Sure, but most musical content is way down in level at those high frequencies anyway, and there was also no illusion that a cassette deck would be a good choice for live music recording. Take a look at the spectral content of most any recording up at 20kHz. Not much going on up there, and very few people can hear that high anyway. I sold a lot of cassette decks, and the demo was simply to record a song off an album and then sync the playback of the album with the playback of the tape, and compare the two. On any Nakamichi it was very hard to tell them apart. Cassettes, even metal, were never thought of as the ultimate carrier for recorded content. If you were going for that, you went for a reel to reel machine. The improvement in headroom had most to do with substantially improved tape formulations and more aggressive noise reduction schemes.
Wireless bluetooth cassette player 😀
What a time we live in
With a rechargeable battery, no less!
Incredible.
Bad analog sound + horrendous digital artifacts = together at last!
@@igorszamaszow171 The point: there is no market enough, to produce any better mechanics\motors, even for double or triple price. Since limited buyers are mostly penniless young ones (all collectors would better prefer old new stock (from Sony) for 5-10X Price). Catch-22. The only way is to make it super trendy, via Apple or some Kardashian-like influencers.
Which is digitised, completely defeating the purpose of having an analogue signal source!. LOL
$149 is kinda steep for what seems to be a pretty mediocre cassette player. Might as well go with a used Sony from the 90s for much less but with better sound and quality.
And you can refurb it
I know this mechanism from cheap (like 15$) 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
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.
I just noticed that I'm getting waaaay too excited every time I see new Techmoan video.
I'm not sure there is another youtuber who reviews with genuine interest all these unusual electronics in a topical British accent.
I do too 🤦🏼🤣
you and me both
Way too excited? That’s not possible.
@@CT-vm4gf it is if you wee yourself. lol
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.
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.
It looks like something you would have seen in a discount store.
Definitely the Bic!
Some pencils worked, most didn't, but a Bic biro always did the trick.
I very specifically keep a pile of Bic 'crystal' pens beside my cassette deck to wind tapes if both wells are full.
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
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.
Hi there, I have a very serious request, when you described tape components and electronic you do so in a way which is clear and easy to understand. as someone who has very little experience with electronics I appreciate that so much as I find other people can be arrogant when explaining stuff, So my serious request is can you please do some videos that show common problems and malfunctions of tape decks and walkmans and how to fix them. I’m getting old now, knowledge of tapes is getting lost in time and I think it’s important for people who love tapes to know stuff that otherwise only a qualified technician would know. If making these kinds of videos would require money I would contribute through a patreon or such.
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.
I love the aesthetic of your mono recorder, but your recorder can't even play stereo. Like, it's losing 50% of the signal of all music, unless for some reason you only listen to mono.
@Solomon Kim True, but I honestly can't tell the difference. That and most of the cassettes I have state on them "Gives genuine playback on Mono equipment." That's not to say it wouldn't be better with a stereo head (it certainly would) but for a pretty decent portable cassette player that's 50 years old, it's pretty hard to hate it even if it is only Mono.
@@TaijanDean uhh... Sure. I mean, you probably can't tell the difference because you never compared your mono experience to the proper stereo experience. If you did a test comparison of both I think you would definitely realize how much you were missing.
No one is asking you to hate it. It was just a device made for a different purpose. I wonder what it's frequency range is. (edit: 50Hz-10kHz
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.
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.
Same, I let the equipment change the quality of the sound otherwise You are left with different factors.
Dolby relies on both record and playback machines to be perfectly aligned. Very challenging on a domestic cassette deck. The higher end decks had a self calibration feature which allowed them to adjust for differences in tape stock. Any frequency response errors would be magnified by Dolby.
@@garethonthetube Quite.
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.
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.
I used to have a cheap knock-off portable tape player in the 80s that had that "whine." I always assumed the amp wasn't properly shielded. I'd say they're using Dolby to encode without using it to decode but chances are it's just a really aggressive automatic level control.
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
I’ve mentioned this before. And I’m not far from your age. Also has a modernised ‘tomorrows world ‘ vibe as well.
I too look forward to Saturday mornings with Techmoan. This may be by accident but maybe not. More retro TH-camrs should do the same so we can “change channels” while eating Trix cereal.
@@TH-cam4Rudy "Silly wabbit... Trix are for kids".... Wow did you take me back in time with your comment! Thanks for that. Fred
@@thefenrisianssweatshop Yeah 100% get tomorrows world vibes from this channel love it. It's funny because theres another channel I follow called 'Explaining computers' and it always reminds me of the old educational programmes that you'd watch at school or were on during daytime hours.
Same here, same age, give or take. My family wasn't poor by any means, but we had one TV, which was in service from 1976 to 1999 (in storage now, still works fine), one VCR, and that was pretty much it, gadget-wise. I didn't have a personal stereo until I was 12, and no computer until I was 14, so I was *seriously* starved of consumer electronics all through the 80s, and had to make do with browsing the Littlewoods catalogue and occasional visits to Dixons to admire the merchandise. Now I can relive my youth from the comfort of my living room.
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 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.
as a technics RS-BX606 owner, I still think this is fairly cool for where we are at in general. I make cassettes for bands and it's getting SO popular to use them as a local independent artist for merch. Things like these are going to enable normal people to engage with the modern tapes which mostly sound pretty bad anyway. it's just not about hifi anymore, but people like me still use RTM 900 tape which is the same as BASF Super Ferric and Dolby B on the releases I make.
The more people who care about the format at all the higher the chance that we finally get a proper new deck or device. I'm excited people are caring!
ooof but the price
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.
When testing Bluetooth functionality on portable devices, so you don't have to stick your microphone into the ear cup of your headphones, maybe you can use a Bluetooth receiver that has a line out on it. I know logitech used to make one and maybe there is an even better option too.
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.
Biro pens fit, almost, perfectly to rewind tapes.
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
@@Techmoan Not seen this episode before, it was bizarrely fascinating for such a seemingly inconsequential theme!! Incidentally, hope you did get your well earned one million subs plaque!😀😀
@Just Browsing Japanese Pensils: get with the programme ... 😁
That box giving Canadians strong NoName vibes.
The sound referenced at about 10:30 was most likely the feedback between your headphones and your lavalier.
When using cellphones back in the day (early 2000's) if you had your headphones too close to the ear piece/microphone or if your computer speakers were to close to the phone at all it would make that exact noise. If you had Motorola Razr or Krazr you probably recognize that sound because it was constant near any microphone, speaker or magnet. Drives the person on the other end crazy.
The more you know :)
It was especially obnoxious if you used any Nextel Motorola models too.
Reminds me of my 1980 Sanyo, but missing tape speed adjustment. Oh that’s a pretty good metal tape you were using there, haven’t seen those since the late 80s.
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.
With stepper motor tech advances and logic controllers with drone devices being so far advanced and dirt cheap you would think it easier to create a perfect wow and flutter and far less much complicated mechanism using a pair of direct drive motors. The head mechinism movement would also benefit from phone like tech with tiny steppers and screws to move pop up cameras. I guess it has to be seen if there's a wider market for cassette audio to justify any development, but technically it could be massively improved using existing cheap tech.
I don't see how a stepper moter would help. It only introduces more pulses into the movement. They already know how to reduce wow and flutter: use a heavier, properly balanced flywheel and a decent dc motor that drives it with a belt to filter out the higher frequency variations. That's really all there is to it. But that requires a manufacturer willing to do the work and a customer willing to pay the bill. These cheap China transports were designed primarily to be cost effective. As for cassette transport development using newer technology, there's simply not enough demand for it.
@@johnstone7697 with a PWM rate of many tens or hundreds of kHz you can get “perfectly smooth” (within the bounds of the application) motion, effectively also quartz locked by the clock in the microcontroller. Of course the old ways work best at any rate when you have the space, but it definitely could be used to get a better and a thinner portable walkman.
Akai made decks like this.
@@johnstone7697 it means you can control the exact speed at any time
(within a certain tolerance depending on how cheap or pricey the motor is)
so you can sync up 2 motors instead of relying on wobbely and doomed to dissolve belts and plastic gears..
However I don't trust the lifespan of the chips that would be used, so I'd still stick with the old..
Hard to believe that there's not a single company out there that can perfect the cassette player in 2022. You'd think it would be an easy task considering everything we know now.
Issue isn't the knowledge - it's all the tiny little parts.
They can, but they would cost more to manufacture than they could sell them for. Surprisingly not many people buy cassette players now.
@@_Thrackerzod That little asian kid is doing the best he can for his 20 cents a day.
They can there just isn't a big enough market and/or people wouldn't pay the price for what it would cost if they did
They could, but there are almost certainly much more profitable market sectors for them to be looking at...
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.
love it!!
Go to "Time Team Classics" TH-cam channel and watch them all over again!
And as usual, you've got just three days to do it!
As a Texan, Time Team was one of the coolest things I've ever discovered on TH-cam. I remember the first episode I watched I was like, "Who is that guy, he seems so familiar..." and right after I figured it out, in that particular episode he was showing a weapon that had been found, and said "And this, I'm afraid I must tell you, is a baldric."
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!!! :)
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.
Noone ever used pencils here to rewind them anyway it was always a pen, usually a bic one
You can use a pencil -- he just used a rookie technique!! I did it with an old tape two days ago!!
my thought exactly. bic pens were the perfect size.
If your pencil appears not big enough, try inserting it sideways. I vaguely remember it helped me.
th-cam.com/video/58EitSEFzo8/w-d-xo.html
Yes! Saturday morning means a Techmoan video.
You say the fit and finish is good but it looked like the door wasn't straight against the front right edge and seemed to taper in towards the bottom. All seemed very average like you said, thanks for another great and honest review.
Imagine trying to sell this 30 years ago.
No kidding, it is as if the portable cassette player universe is inverted. This should be the great grandfather to a modern player not the great grandson.
They would wonder what this crazy usb c connection is and how bluetooth works
@@Tokaisho1 And why it is so big, without a belt clip, without auto-reverse, or without FM radio. All pretty much standard back then.
There were junk players 30 years ago also, but you could buy them for $10 from K-Mart. The price on this is ridiculous.
For $25, maybe.
Glad to see your review, I'd been intrigued by the hype and wondered whether there was anything different going on here.
I've been watching your channel for many years and your videos never cease to catch my interest. Thanks my friend 👍
£149?! You can get a perfectly capable digital audio player for that price..... along with the rest of the phone (-:
I wonder what kind of refurbished OG walkman you can get for that price...
Hi! Love your videos. My We Are Rewind device arrived this week, and I hear that hum during quiet sections, but would say that the sound exceeded what I was expecting so I can live with it. I’m happy with mine, if only for the novelty of it. I noticed there’s a little hole in the back and I’m wondering if that is the access point for speed adjustment.
wondering generally what it’s for…
A German owner who successfully opened this up confirms that the hole in the back is, in fact, for speed adjustment, so another nice touch.😊
You'll see that for the newbies, the Wow and Flutter will be characteristic for the sound :-)
There are definitely people who would be disappointed to buy a modern cassette player and hear perfect audio. "It doesn't sound like a cassette"
Yep, just as "patina" (ie: damage or aging) has been marketed into a desirable thing.
Need a good one with 80s style and bluetooth. Audio Technica did it right with the Sound Burger. Wish Sony would follow their lead, so many iconic things they could release to great fanfare.
5:33 - 'Compatible with I thru IV' may imply that it can detect the other holes in the cassette that signify Types III or IV.
I had high hopes. Perhaps their next version resolves the noise issue.
I think they'll be lucky if they even make a profit on this thing, I doubt there will be a next version.
No autostop on fastforward or rewind? That's asking for snapped tape that might've aged a little. 😱
Or a stretched tape perhaps, which would obviously improve this machine's wow and flutter specs
Not exactly the craziest ordeal. My old Yamaha deck didn’t have auto stop on fast forward or rewind either and that was from the early 80s. It was a piece of shit though
I'd like to imagine his neighbors see him go out in the garden every few days with a different audio device
Every time his recycle bin is knocked over by the wind, neighbors and picking minidiscs and tumble weeds of 1/8” magnetic tape out of their garden for a week
this video made me dig out my late 90s compact Aiwa. Only to find one of the pinch rollers is dented. Lovely.
Back in the day, for $157 USD (149 Euro), you could get a really nice top of the line Sony Walkman. Sigh, how times have changed.