Why are cassette and CD players so bulky now?

Cassette portion income are astatine a 20-year high, the vinyl marketplace is connected a 17-year maturation streak, and CDs person caught the attraction of Gen Z. After a resurgence of retro carnal media, tech companies person present jumped successful to supply caller hardware to play these formats.

Companies similar We Are Rewind, Fiio, and others connection updated designs for caller cassette and CD players, with immoderate further functionality similar USB-C charging and Bluetooth.

But aft a speedy glimpse astatine these updated euphony gadgets successful person, we recovered that they are seemingly not arsenic precocious arsenic immoderate of their vintage counterparts. The dimensions of We Are Rewind’s Bluetooth cassette player are astir the aforesaid arsenic Sony’s first-ever Walkman from 1979 — but by the clip the cassette Walkman ended its archetypal tally successful the aboriginal 2000s, cassette players were practically the size of cassettes themselves. Fiio’s DM-13 Bluetooth CD player has a ample quadrate plan that resembles a Sony Discman from the precocious 1980s, adjacent though, by 2001, we had ace slim circular CD players from iRiver, Panasonic, and Sony with capable anti-skip extortion to marque it done an full album.

So, what happened to the compact designs we took for granted successful the aboriginal 2000s? For The Verge’s YouTube channel, I talked to the companies making these modernized players — We Are Rewind and Fiio — to fig retired wherefore we can’t marque cassette and CD players similar we utilized to.

Keep watching for a hands-on reappraisal of these gadgets compared to cassette and CD players astatine the tallness of the technology.