A decade in the past I used to be reasonably stunned to search out that firms like Sony have been displaying off transportable music gamers at CES, as a result of I figured most individuals had moved on to utilizing smartphones to hearken to music.
However that’s earlier than I noticed there was a complete world of transportable hi-fi music merchandise. So what’s new at CES this yr? One thing decidedly extra analog… and never significantly hi-fi in any respect. A transportable cassette participant.
Chinese language firm FiiO makes transportable music gamers and HiFi digital to analog converters. However late final yr the corporate introduced it was growing a transportable cassette participant known as the FiiO CP13 that appears a bit like a Sony Walkman with a (very) few fashionable touches.
The corporate showed off the CP13 at CES 2024 this week, and plans to start promoting it in early March, 2024 for about $165.
So what does it do? It performs tape cassettes and appears fairly good. That’s just about it. However possibly that’s all it must do.
Tape cassettes are having a second, with many musicians and music followers adopting the know-how for its analog properties… and ephemeral traits. Digital music sounds the identical each time you play it on the identical tools, however tape cassettes degrade over time, resulting in warping and different imperfections within the audio.
I’ll all the time have a gentle spot for tapes… even when I’ve no urge to ever hearken to them once more (or hassle with attempting to restore one which’s come unwound). Once I was rising up within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, tapes supplied a reasonable approach to document music off the radio or from different tapes to make combine tapes, amongst different issues. And when my mates and I began a band collectively, we recorded our music first on a boombox with a tape recorder after which at my guitar instructor’s home, utilizing a 4-track tape recorder.
The FiiO CP13 doesn’t have a document operate. It’s only for taking part in music. However today, a rising variety of bands are distributing their music on tape cassettes in addition to CDs, vinyl, and streaming, and a transportable participant like this might be the proper approach to hear.
FiiO’s transportable cassette participant is a wholly analog machine with a 3.5mm headphone jack, giant play, pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons, and ana auto-rewind operate if you get to the top of a tape.
It does have a couple of fashionable touches together with a built-in Lithium Ion battery that lasts for as much as 13 hours of music playback (or longer at decrease volumes) and gives 268 days of standby time. There’s a USB-C port for charging.
The corporate says utilizing a built-in battery reasonably than detachable batteries results in longer playback time and a barely thinner design (together with detachable batteries would improve the thickness of the CP13 by about 1 millimeter).
However there’s no help for Bluetooth audio. You’ll want to make use of wired headphones or audio system or plug in a Bluetooth dongle if you wish to use wi-fi audio. And the USB-C port is simply for charging, not for transferring music. That’s as a result of there isn’t any {hardware} within the FiiO CP13 for storing or taking part in digital music.
The FiiO CP13 isn’t the solely fashionable cassette participant. In actual fact, it makes use of off-the-shelf parts which are extensively utilized by different firms working on this house, and FiiO acknowledges that whereas it’s made some adjustments to the {hardware}, this transportable music participant gained’t be a lot better than the competitors (and truthfully most likely isn’t nearly as good as discontinued classics like Sony’s Walkman DD collection cassette gamers).
But it surely has a beautiful design, help for a pleasant trying protecting case (offered individually), and is a first-generation product that FiiO can enhance upon sooner or later if the primary mannequin sells nicely.
What else might be on the horizon? An organization consultant hints {that a} fashionable transportable CD participant isn’t out of the query, as might be cassette decks for residence use.
by way of Gearnews, What HiFi, and TechRadar
