Rewind Cassette Player Review: The Best Portable Tape Player

Cassettes do have a warm and distinctive sound, though—once you have a taste for light hiss, you may find yourself missing it in cleaner formats. The unique difficulty of skipping songs gives the album format a primacy no other medium can—you may find yourself learning to like songs you'd have skipped. (While writing this review I realized Liz Phair's “Crater Lake” is an absolute banger.) For the collector, cassettes are still relatively cheap and affordable in an era when you see a vinyl copy of Billy Joel's extremely meh 1980 album Glass Houses marked at $25. Also, they look cool and feel nice in your hand. In short, collecting cassettes makes sense because they're readily available and only the 1% can feasibly collect MiniDiscs. Being Kind to Rewind The Rewind has a very sturdy aluminum case and a built-in battery that recharges with USB-C. It weighs 14 ounces, just a little less than two iPhone 15 Pro Maxes. In addition to the headphone audio out, there is a 3.5mm audio in so yo ... Read full article.