We are Rewind - Cassette Player Review
A brand new, good-looking cassette player? Yes, please.
For a long time, I was wondering why there were no companies making cassette players. In the past few years, more and more people have been using tape & cassettes in their studios or even for listening to music because the exact moment you press play on a cassette player, you are instantly hit by a wave of nostalgia and warmness.
So recently, I came across a French company called We are Rewind, which is producing a beautiful cassette player and it’s available for purchase brand-new! I had to try it out so I contacted them and they were kind enough to send us a review unit to test it out. So let’s see what it’s about!
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The Cassette Player is, as the name implies, a 2-track stereo cassette player that can play all types of cassettes (Type I, II, III, IV). As you’d expect, it has all the characteristics of a tape player, like noise, wow & flutter, and mild distortion. And that’s a good thing since all those things are the key characteristics of the “tape sound“.
It has a boxy aluminum casing and it comes in three colors, Grey, Orange, and Blue. It certainly is one of the most beautiful cassette players you’ve ever seen so the aesthetics are on point!
And since we are in 2023, it also has some modern features. It has a 2000mAh Built-in Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery and you can also use it to play your tapes via Bluetooth!
We are Rewind markets this as a player for your old (or new) cassettes but since we are focused on electronic music production, we are going to find its use for making music!
Using tape for coloring your sound is not a new thing. We have a full article on this too. Running your sounds, or even full songs, through a cassette, adds a lot of noise and saturation making them interesting and broken in the best way possible. So since the Cassette Player has an input for a 3.5mm Jack, you can use it to record anything you want!
You can record just a pad sequence to add some extra noise and wow & flutter or even a full mix. It’s up to taste how much of a LoFi sound you want. By increasing the player’s volume to max, you’ll also get mild saturation and distortion that can sound great on some parts of your track.
And if you want to have even more fun, you can create some tape loops and record on them. You’ll soon be addicted to creating tape loops and recording small bits of sound on them and using them in your productions. The crunchy sound you get from a cassette recording is unmatched and cannot be replicated (even if there are tons of cassette simulation plugins).
The key when using tape is to experiment and have fun with the process. It is a slow process and having a portable cassette player next to your setup certainly makes things a lot easier.
Conclusion
We are Rewind Cassette player is a great little device for anyone that thinks about using cassettes. The fact that it is brand new is very important because nowadays if you want to work with tape, you’ll need to find a used device that was probably in a dark basement for 30 years. Its price is also very reasonable at 149€ if you consider the prices on cassette decks and 4-Tracks these days. It may not have an extended set of features for recording and playing back sounds but its simplicity and portability are what make it so useful.
My wishlist and request to our friends at We are Rewind would be to include Pitch Control, Multiple playback speeds (Half Speed, Double Speed), and a Microphone for field recording on Version 2! That would make it the ultimate cassette recorder!
