It’s 2025 and sitting on my review desk is a beautiful black and gold cassette player. Yes, you read that right. We Are Rewind out of France are producing brand new, beautifully designed cassette players with a modern twist.
Before we being, lets start with a simple age test: Why on earth does We Are Rewind include a small pencil in their package?
Welcome to 1980.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The Amy – each different coloured cassette players from We Are Rewind all have regular human names – is packaged with a short USB-A to USB-C cable and the aforementioned pencil. A short multi-lingual manual, a quick start guide and a short security message for UK residents rounds out the package. Like the Amy itself, the packaging and its contents have a chic retro minimalist aesthetic.
Let me get this out of the way: The Amy is really a thing of beauty: Minimal. Clean. Tactile.
Back in the 1980’s I remember paying an exorbitant amount of money for some Type IV TDK MA-XG cassettes. I’m not being dramatic when I say these tapes cassettes have literally waited decades to be matched to a device that matches their simple metallic beauty.
The Amy cassette player is best described as a metal/hard plastic box measuring approximately 141 x 89 x 34mm. Six buttons extend out a further 6mm from one side providing physical push buttons to command the cassette player’s functions.
The Amy is finished in black with a touch of gold and feels lovely and decidedly metallic in hand. While its corners look sharp, they feel smooth and the tactile experience matches the visual one.
The front face is dominated by the manually operated door, featuring a clear window to gawk at the tape mechanism. To the right is a gold coloured stripe featuring the We Are Rewind logo.
The top face has all the usual cassette player buttons which are labelled like those of a modern media player. From left to right: Stop; Fast Forward; Rewind; Play and Record. Further right is a smaller button used to pair some Bluetooth headphones/speakers. Rounding out this face are two LEDs, one showing the Bluetooth status and the other reporting when the Amy is low on battery.
Following the corner to the next face, we find a retro volume wheel and two 3.5mm ports – one for headphones and the other for input. To the right is a 5V DC USB-C charging port. It is a testament to its design that despite being completely out of place, this USB-C port fits right in, 80s style.
The other faces are largely unremarkable, with the rear featuring a large We Are Rewind logo and the bottom containing some regulatory information.
Hopefully the included photos give a good impression of the minimalist modern retro chic We Are Rewind have created. In real life, this clean design is just stunning and handling it is a real joy. It’s a bit like watching your favourite 80’s movie, remastered, cleaned up and presented in crystal clear 4K.
USAGE
Having Bowers & Wilkins’s phenomenal Pi8’s on hand, we followed the Quick Start guide and effortlessly paired them to the Amy. Like most 80’s technology, no other real setup was required.. other than digging through some boxes to find our dust covered vintage cassettes!
With the new Pi8’s paired via Bluetooth, and a dozen or so cassettes in hand, I literally spent the next few hours sat listening to my old mix tapes. And yes, my cheap Type I Sony HF90 tapes hissed and whirred like they always did but those sexy TDK MA-XGs sounded.. well, really good.
I should really qualify that statement: For cassettes, the sound was really good. Despite my mix tapes being recorded on a fairly good 80s Kenwood hi-fi stereo, there is no way they can compete with the clarity and range of a modern digital audio file. While my memory is distant now – and I can’t discount nostalgia providing some bias – I honestly don’t ever remember these cassettes sounding quite this good!
The 10-12 hour battery life was accurate and while no charger was included, we found that connecting the Amy to our laptop to charge via the included USB-C cable worked well enough.
While I have already touched on it, it is really interesting to describe the sound quality because it is so dependent on both the original source; the way it was recorded and also how good the media was (cassette tapes) that it was recorded on. And that’s before we add earbuds/headphones into the mix.
As mentioned earlier, the cheaper Type I tapes sounded pretty much as good as they sounded in 1980s which was, well.. pretty poor by today’s standards. Lots of hiss and muddiness. The items recorded onto my Type IV MA-XG’s however, sounded quite remarkable. There was still a very minimal hiss in the background but it was only really audible between tracks.
Of course, like many retro renaissances, the unique sound that cassette’s produce is all part of the charm. In this respect, the Amy delivers an accurate experience, with both high quality tapes and poor quality tapes producing nostalgically familiar sounds.
The Amy was very quiet when operating and unless my ear was pressed hard up against the player, I couldn’t hear it while it was in operation. While some may give the Amy a zonk for it, I actually found it quaint that no dual side playback was included. Like records, when you get to the end of a cassette’s side, you need to flip it over!
On this, when the Amy gets to the end of a side it features an auto-stop function but this does not operate when fast forwarding or rewinding which is something you need to be mindful of when using these functions.
Beyond this, the only other negatives I can mention are that the Amy is not able to record to Type IV tapes like the MA-XG cassettes I have been harping on about and the omission of any Dolby noise reduction. It can playback all cassette types but recording is limited to Type I only. While I can forgive it, considering the 3.5mm input port, this omission is a bit of a shame.
Unfortunately, as I didn’t have any blank tapes on hand and we weren’t keen on recording over our 80s mixtapes, I was unable to test the recording function. If I can get our hands on some actual blank cassettes, I will update the review accordingly.
SELECTED SPECS
Playback
Two track stereo playback, Types I-IV.
Frequency response: 30Hz – 12500Hz (with Type I cassette)
Signal-to-noise ratio: 50dB
Distortion: 0.3% (typical)
Wow & Flutter: 0.2% (typical)
Headphones output power: 2x2mW into 32 ohms
Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.1.
Recording
Stereo recording via 3.5mm RCA jack, Type I cassettes only.
Input level: 50mVrms to 200mVrms (typical)
Frequency response: 30Hz – 10000Hz
Signal-to-noise ratio: 45dB
Distortion: 1% (typical).
Power
Built-in Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery
Nominal capacity: 2000mAh
Battery life: Approximately 10 to 12 hours.
For a full list of technical specifications, please visit We Are Rewind’s Product Specification’s page.
CONCLUSION
The Amy is a thing of beauty. While I am no audiophile, I can say that the Amy produces sound that isn’t particularly hi-fidelity compared to modern digital music players.. but if that’s what you expect, you’re really missing the point.
The Amy plays back cassettes in all their hissy, muddy, low-fi glory in a package that looks and feels fantastic. Good old tapes sound more than acceptable while poor old tapes sound like they always did. To this end, the Amy does exactly what it sets out to do.
Close your eyes, press play and go back to a better time.
We Are Rewind offers cassette players in various colour options along with accessories such as a belt clip and retro styled Bluetooth headphones. As tested, the Amy Cassette player retails for $250AUD and can be purchased directly from We Are Rewind.
And for the record, that small pencil that is included in the package is for re-winding the tape back into its cassette should you ever have an unfortunate tape spooling issue.
