Maxell! Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. And it's back with the MXCP-P100, a new portable cassette player. It has some modern features to please modern listeners, such as Bluetooth, a USB Type C port to charge its built-in lithium battery, and sleek contemporary styling. But it lacks ones that were commonplace in the good old days: a recorder and the all-important "Metal" button. [via Liliputing]
It won't play MP3 files or any other digital format. And it only officially supports cassette tapes that hold up to 90 minutes of audio (45 minutes on each side).
I think of the dimensions and wonder at how much modernity you could get in one of these devices while keeping that traditional Walkman vibe (datapoint: WM-10). There's some cheap-looking "cassette to MP3"-type gadgets in the form factor; surely it's time for Tascam to take a run at at.
You know what? Maybe it's time for a new magnetic cassette format. While such a thing would be less snazzily accomplished by putting solid-state storage in the microcassette housing, it would be much better to fail spectacularly trying to engineer microcassettes with flexible CoPtCr strips on the tape running at 10x speed or whatever you'd need to get FLAC on it.
Previously:
• Bluetooth cassette player
• Minecraft music released on appropriately blocky format
• Car cassette slot mistaken for iPhone dock, and also the real deal
• TapeDeck.org celebrates the graphic design history of analog cassette tapes
