We’re just about old enough to remember the era when cassettes were the chief music listening format. Those little plastic rectangles which housed miniature tape spools were quite a finicky and often unreliable format for containing your favourite music, and they weren’t a safe bet for long-term storage either.
But still, there was something - much like the vinyl format - about the way cassette tapes sounded. There was the engagement engendered from that physical interaction with your listening medium, the tactile mini-thrill of just pressing substantial, clicky buttons. It's an element of music listening that we're finding ourselves warming to more and more as we progress ever further into the smartphone-dominated 21st century.
The appeal of this type of format-nostalgia is shared by We Are Rewind, the French company who (with a little help from a cabal of seasoned engineers who worked on portable cassette players back in the golden age of tape) has created an all-new breed of modern personal cassette players, which balance the legacy mechanics with some of today's bells and whistles such as Bluetooth 5.1 functionality and a rechargeable battery.
Now, ahead of the release of the company’s impressive looking take on the classic boombox, we spoke to We Are Rewind’s co-founder Romain Boudruche, and found out more about how the team overcame myriad obstacles to bring this classic format back to life. Let's hit play.
