Rewind

Since I am a cassette aficionado of sorts I couldn’t help but notice the new contraption that had come to market by French company We Are Rewind. I read lots of reviews and absorbed the online vitriol about it, and in the end decided to order one, just to see how terrible it possibly could be. It arrived last week and I have been playing with it since.

The package is very nice, simple and well thought out. The addition of a pencil for those in the know is relatively amusing if a little pointless. I got mine in the blue finish. I would have probably ordered black if it had been in stock, although the orange was quite tempting just for a change.

Its a solid unit, made of aluminium and has a nice heft to it. Much more so than my trusty old Sony Walkman from back in the day. The Sony of course was a much better unit in terms of features, and probably sound quality too, but it died a noble death after thousands of hours commuting to and from university back in the day and is now sadly long gone.

Speaking of sound quality, I hooked the new unit up to the Shindo system using an Audioquest 3.5mm to RCA interconnect I had lying around and put in a few old tapes. One was a rehearsal tape of my old band and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it sounded. Very open and somewhat forgiving of the raw nature of that recording, not to mention its content. Modern releases actually sounded great. Paradise Lost’s Gothic album sounded suitably doomy and grim, and ELR’s Maenad sounded huge and expansive. It was genuinely surprising.

My one complaint is the mechanism itself is quite noisy, although it wasn’t noticeable during most playback, and would probably be alleviated if I moved the unit away from me during playback. Still not great though.

There are reviews out there by actual reviewers that range from, ‘this thing is great’ to ‘this thing is arse’. I think the reality is somewhere in between. It’s not meant to be a hifi source, and I don’t think it has been marketed as such. It’s a nod to the nostalgia of the old days, and it is cheap enough to buy for a lark and indulge yourself. It does acquit itself well, impressively well given the context within which I was playing with it, the naysayers can go back to their ivory towers with their vintage Dragons and write tomes about how bad it must be.

What it actually is though is a nice, solid little modern cassette player with some cool features. I will be interested to see what they will do if they ever do a version 2.