News New portable cassette player comes loaded with modern features like Bluetooth, USB-C, and a rechargeable battery

[edzieba]

Horrible audio. Might as well bring back 4 & 8 track players. Three awful formats can be yours!

Cassettes can have perfectly fine quality. A good Type IV tape and a player with a decent head and Dolby NR (and a cassette mastered for the same) will be perfectly good for domestic use (not enough continuous playtime for wear to be a concern, no extreme environmental conditions during storage or playback).
A cheap Type I tape on a bargain basement player with no Dolby? Yeah, that'll be awful, just like listening to music via youtube videos.

An old-stock but high-end-at-the-time cassette player will always be superior to a 'new' player as long as it is functional or has only basic repair required (e.g. new belts or general cleaning and degreasing).

most of them have had the same Chinese-made mechanism and the quality has not been very good.
I hope that this one has something better.

Very unlikely. Even if they decide to stamp new metal and add a new motor & flywheel, there's only the one manufacturer of heads left and they only make the most absolute bottom-quality bargain-basement heads.

 

[Findecanor]

This is not Walkman.

I thought so too, but when I looked up "Walkman" I discovered Sony lost exclusive rights to trademark the name back in 2002.
https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/sony-loses-walkman-trade-mark-as-too-generic
https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/article/walkman-has-become-generic-rules-supreme-court

When Sony introduced the first model, it was first marketed as the "Soundabout" in the U.S., as the "Stowaway" in the U.K., and as the "Freestyle" in Sweden.

Here in Sweden, "Freestyle" became the generic name for the form factor.
I've heard that "Stowaway" would have been used as a generic name in the U.K, but I've not got that confirmed.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

Horrible audio. Might as well bring back 4 & 8 track players. Three awful formats can be yours!

You get/got good quality with quality tapes. I I used to use metal and chrome. With Dolby there was a very very low level of hiss on my (now dead) technics hifi.
The difference between ferric tapes and chrome was huge.

Look up “techmoan” on YouTube his channel does a good tape type comparison.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Thanks! I ran some of that through a translator. I could not find that the USB port could be used for anything but charging unfortunately.


Rechargeable AA are underrated. I used to use them all the time.

Their only downside was that you needed a separate charger. You couldn't charge them in the same device that you used them in — probably because of the risk that someone could try to charge non-rechargeable batteries by mistake.
I wish there was a standard for in-device rechargeable batteries with a form factor engineered so that a device could fit either these or standard AA batteries, and thus avoid that problem.

I use a power supply to charge batteries, even had success charging Alkaline. Some Alkaline batteries can be recharged three or four times. Be careful, they will explode if overvoltaged. I cover them just in case.