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4 Best Cassette Players for Listening to and Making Old-School Mixtapes
We're over streaming. Time to go analog again.
The last time I used a cassette player was in the 2002 Honda CR-V I drove in high school. I'm not trying to undercut my authority by pointing out how young I am, but I've got a special connection to cassette, unlike most of my Gen-Z counterparts. To play music in my car, I had to use a cassette to aux converter. My friends never let me live down how bad it sounded, so I leaned in. I got a shitty little recorder and used downloaders to turn YouTube videos to MP3 files and MP3 files to cassette tapes. I might be the only person in the world that had Young Thug's Barter 6 and Future's DS2 on cassette. (Hopefully I'm past the statute of limitations on that.)
Vinyl is its own beast, obviously. Everyone has a turntable and bookshelf speakers these days. But, there are little enthusiast communities popping up around all sorts of bygone media types, not just the analog ones. There are people who still use MP3 players (technically called DAPs now) and DVD players and Hi-Fi analog speakers. I might sound like a bozo saying, "Wow look what I just found out, people still use old stuff," but it's cool.
No matter how much new tech, like goggle computers, pours out and gets awarded by tech editors like myself, people are always going to use older, physical media. Some might even go back because of the fast-pace of new tech and streaming services, not in-spite of them, and experience stuff like cassette players for the first time. That, my friends, is a beautiful thing. If you're looking to do it and want to know what the best cassette players on the market are, I did the testing for you. You can shop them right here.
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