Chances are it was the early- to mid-90s.

The best thing about the cassette tape for a long time was the fact that it was so easy to record your own audio onto it. In fact, we still talk about the “mix tape” even though now you can burn it to a CD or DVD or simply store it digitally in iTunes or stream it from Spotify.

Looking back, though, that was about all that was good about the tape (if you’re feeling nostalgic, take a look at some Walkman photos back in the day when they played tapes).

The quality was inferior to vinyl, right from the start, and it deteriorated the more you played them. Try to play a duff tape in a dodgy player and it soon turned into brown ferric spaghetti.

Some manufacturers must think that there’s still some demand for the cassette. Take Pioneer, still making its CT-W606DR double auto-reverse cassette deck available.

Yeah. Double. High-speed dubbing FTW!

Perhaps there are people who still have cassettes lying around. My advice would be to get them transferred to digital storage as soon as possible. Maybe Pioneer’s solution is the way to do it, but at $229 it’s not a cheap way of doing it.

Other features include a ton of Dolby noise reduction, a music search (ahhh, the whirring of cassette tape being fast forwarded or rewound).

The nineties flavour continues:

“includes CD-Deck Synchro for easy recording from a CD player”

Yes, recording from a CD player.

Tape lives!

Product page (Via)

The great thing is that each unit — a glorious mix of new and old — is likely to be unique, given that they’re made up from any old cassettes left lying around.

Each one fits a 4th generation iPod nano inside. Any of the larger models just aren’t going to fit inside. Maybe a DIY project: alternatively pick one up for $41 (Via).