It's 2024 and FiiO is making a portable cassette player with all-analog features | Hacker News Reader

It's 2024 and FiiO is making a portable cassette player with all-analog features

liliputing.com

18 pointsrcarmo7 comments

According to Youtuber Techmoan there is only one company making actual cassette playback mechanisms anymore and the mechanisms are not great. Any device claiming to be able to play standard audio cassettes sold in recent years is built on one of these barely acceptable mechanisms.

Does anyone have a counterfactual to that?

edit: typo

To emphasize this, Techmoan does thorough mechanical and electrical reviews of cassette decks across eras, and had largely critical reviews of similar new portable players and recorders, such as the We Are Rewind: https://youtu.be/WleZGWAebsY

Many—not all—of these criticisms are based on the fact that the only new mechs coming out now are the same budget Tanashin mechs from shitty 90s decks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nezGOVOpHtc

This effectively sabotages any new deck, from a $20 Amazon white label portable to a $40 Walmart Sony to a $500 Teac with the same fundamental reliability and quality problems.

Unlike turntables, which demand precision but are fundamentally simple machines, cassette mechs are complex mechanical devices and nobody wants to make things like that anymore.

The playback relevant parts are not that complex, a good motor,and speed control, capstan/ flywheel the pinch roller and a rigid enough chassis to maintain geometry. You hear people complaining that things like that are not made anymore but if they were they wouldn’t buy them anyway.

The article seems to confirm it at the end, mentioning off the shelf components and that it won’t out perform the competition.

based on the audio Techmoan has posted, “not great” is probably an understatement. “fair” to “poor” is what it sounds like.

I don't think cassettes are popular with indie artists because of their lack of durability as the article says, it's just a nice physical artifact that's easy to do in small batches.

They've come round full circle. They're popular now cause of the tiktok/ig and the easy to make mix tapes, e.g. an aux cable to a tape recorder.

Youtube has great examples of teens showing other teens the tech and it's funny to watch.

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