By Andrew Marino , an audio and video creator at The Verge since 2015. He has produced shows like The Vergecast, Why'd You Push That Button, and va

Why are cassette and CD players so bulky now?

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2024-11-15 18:30:02

By Andrew Marino , an audio and video creator at The Verge since 2015. He has produced shows like The Vergecast, Why'd You Push That Button, and various Verge video content.

Cassette tape sales are at a 20-year high, the vinyl market is on a 17-year growth streak, and CDs have caught the attention of Gen Z. After a resurgence of retro physical media, tech companies have now jumped in to provide new hardware to play these formats.

Companies like We Are Rewind, Fiio, and others offer updated designs for new cassette and CD players, with some additional functionality like USB-C charging and Bluetooth.

But after a quick glance at these updated music gadgets in person, we found that they are seemingly not as advanced as some of their vintage counterparts. The dimensions of We Are Rewind’s Bluetooth cassette player are roughly the same as Sony’s first-ever Walkman from 1979 — but by the time the cassette Walkman ended its initial run in the early 2000s, cassette players were practically the size of cassettes themselves. Fiio’s DM-13 Bluetooth CD player has a large square design that resembles a Sony Discman from the late 1980s, even though, by 2001, we had super slim round CD players from iRiver, Panasonic, and Sony with enough anti-skip protection to make it through an entire album.

So, what happened to the compact designs we took for granted in the early 2000s? For The Verge’s YouTube channel, I talked to the companies making these modernized players — We Are Rewind and Fiio — to figure out why we can’t make cassette and CD players like we used to.