Fiio CP-13: the best of a bad situation

Cassettes have been out of the lime light for a while, so how's this attampt at reviving it?

Nostalgia has not been kind to the cassette. No one seems to have fond memories of them and it’s easy to see why. They hissed, they jammed, they died if they got near a magnet. But now that we are in an era where algorithms and AI drive music consumption (and in the worst instances, create it) I and many others are reassessing old media formats.
After the cultural victory of the Hipster in the mid-2010s vinyl has taken the spot as the best selling physical media format in the West. In Japan, CDs remain a popular format only recently surpassed by streaming.

But it stands to reason that these formats survive as they have clear subjective and objective advantages. Cassettes however, have basically no advantages. The only memory I have of using cassettes as a young child was them breaking. Now admittedly, a ham handed five year old nitwit can usually find a way to break anything, but I was not alone. Even nitwit adults found their machines eating their tapes.

Enter: 80s nostalgia

Say what you will about the show Stranger Things, people certainly watched it. And it was this Silent Hill for stupid people that acted as the harbinger or 80s nostalgia. This also coincided with a huge boom in the populatiry of 80s music (or more so, modern music that shounds like what Gen Z thought the 80s sounded like). So with that cultural background, why not give cassettes a go?ctual

Then came the issue of actually finding a player. The first thing to know is that almost all cassette players operate with a rubber drive belt, and these belts are never long for this earth. They snap, stiffen, and decay very quickly. For most people, this ruled out purchasing a classic player like a Sony Walkman. Of course, these belts are trivially easy to replace, but in our modern times of disposable everything, a broken belt often meant a trip to the dump.

So what about modern players? Well, options were slim... and bad. There is only one type of tape mechanism still mass produced today that collectors call the "Tanashit", sorry "Tanashin", named after the company that first produced them. In truth, the mechanism itself is a little ugly, but produced correctly there's really not much to complain about. But note thatI said "produced correctly". With interest in cassettes all dried up, no manufacturer was going to spend good money on a gimmick product. The result is a glut of horrendously unreliable and noisy pieces of crap. It would be better if the Aliexpress vendors would do us a favour and just send these directly to the landfill and save everyone the trouble.

WAR

Ener We Are Rewind (WAR), who wanted to do something about this. Unfortunatly, would could be done, was limited. Cassette simple does not have the production capabilities it once had. Various features once thought mandatory for a decent cassettea player are basically impossible to produce, such as the ability to play chromium oxide tapes, full auto-stop and Dolby noise reduction. The current WAR player dropped in 2023 to polarising responses. Those familiar with older players were disapointed by it's lack of features and Tanashian mechanism (even the higher quality version in the WAR was pretty poor) while new users seemed to enjoy the novelty and found the audio quality good enough. Chinese manufacturer followed up in 2024 with their Fiio CP-13. Fiio has been building a name for itself recently for impressive quality at budget prices, I myself own a CP-13 and their CD transport the DM-13, and I'm fairly pleased with each (but only the DM-13 is really a full feature product). General sentiment seems to be the CP-13 has better sounds quality than the WAR, with no recording abilities, but rally no one should be recording music on a portable device.

The nightmare of old Hi-Fi

For recording purposes I've purchased 2 cassette decks. Both are broken in a manner I'm not able to fix. The first, a Toshiba PC-X10, whose favourite past time is eating tapes due to a broken idler gear (just as an aside, what a fuck up, the idler's ONLY job is to spin there under the capstan's power, this fucking guy couldn't even just do nothing correctly!). The second, a no name Philips set, has a motor that would jam up and make an awful screaching noise. There was, of course, no replacement parts for these devices anymore.

This is, currently, the main barrier to an actual Cassette Culture revival, a decent device. Right now the only way is to take a chance on old stock or buy a subpar-to-awful modern player. For what it's worth, to a person with no skill tinkering with electronics,a CP-13 is probably your best bet. They're also much cheaper than the WAR.

a note on location

a reader from Europe or North America may wondering what exactly I'm talking about when I say the second hand market is weak, please remember I am in Australia, the situation here is not the same. We area very small, very isolated market. Importing from the US is also prohibitivly expensive (I don't care if it's being delivered from Neptune, I'm not paying $400 postage and handling!) Even in the US context, the majority of consumers would accept a product market as unreliable as old audio equipment.

First edition 25/12/04