As our Vinyl Week coverage probably showed you, we love physical audio formats here at What Hi-Fi?, and cassettes are no different. So when I saw the Gadhouse Miko Bluetooth portable cassette player, I had to have a go.
Cassettes? With wireless? I was sold.
Article continues belowThe bulk of it
First things first: this thing is chunky. I had forgotten just how big cassette players were – even to my pre-teen hands, my Walkmans felt smaller than this. It's like the opposite of shrinkflation. But I could be remembering it wrong – it was a long time ago.
There's no belt clip, which I'm pretty sure came as standard on my Walkmans of old. There's no way you'll get this thing in a jeans pocket, and with the weather warming up, I wasn't going to wear a chunky coat just to accommodate it. Which leaves you clutching it as you walk around, like a door-to-door bible salesman.
You get all the usual controls (play, stop, fast forward and rewind), plus a record button that activates the built-in mic. I dimly recall recording my own pirate radio station onto tape as a child, but that was mixed on this brown and beige bad boy.
There's a satisfying clunkiness to the buttons, but I do have a couple of complaints. First, depressing the stop button doesn't pop open the tape compartment – you have to prise it open by hand, which feels like the wrong kind of retro. And second, you don't get the sped-up chipmunk effect when you fast-forward or rewind a tape, though that possibly only ever happened in films.
It's powered by two AA batteries. On the plus side, this maintains authenticity while also keeping the price down. On the downside, you have to buy batteries.
There is a USB-C port as well, which can power it. But it has to stay plugged in – there's no built-in battery to charge. And who listens to a portable tape player while staying within reach of a plug socket?
Hunting the hiss
The next problem I found was where to source some cassettes. I threw out my collection long ago (farewell, Gladiators soundtrack!) and it turns out my local charity shops aren't quite the treasure trove of tapes I was hoping. (Vinyl, however, is another matter.)
Short of time, I did what most people would do and turned to Amazon, which threw up the soundtrack to Guardians Of The Galaxy. If we're going retro, we may as well go all in.
Gadhouse sent me a pair of its Wesley on-ear headphones to use with it, which are certainly in keeping with the Miko's style. And with my Sony WF-C710N wireless earbuds also on hand, it was time for some listening.
The listening experience
Now bear in mind I haven't listened to a cassette in over 30 years. But as a child, almost all my listening was on tapes: not only music, but read-along story books too (the ones that said "When you hear this noise, turn the page"). So I was very much looking forward to it; one man's static hiss of cassette is another's pop and crackle of vinyl.
And there's an undeniable charm to it. Seeing the cassette's spokes revolve, and feeling the player's mechanism at work in your hand, makes it feel alive in a way that a solid-state device never will. It connects you to the medium as a physical thing, rather than a bunch of ones and zeroes flying through the air.
Listening wired, the sound has a certain warmth. Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky has suitable bounce and a nicely fuzzy low end, while Bowie's Moonage Daydream hangs together nicely. It's not bad for the money (the Miko costs £70). There's even a bit of warble distortion when you hit play straight after fast forwarding. Oh, the memories.
Sadly, it all falls apart when listening wirelessly over Bluetooth. Even through the Award-winning Sony C710N, it sounds tinny and washed out, with almost no bass. No sound came through the wireless headphones when I was fast-forwarding or rewinding either, which rather cut me off from the experience. I had to supply my own chipmunk effect.
But then I'm probably being a bit harsh. You don't buy a device like this for the sound quality, just as you don't buy a penny farthing for the handling. You do so for nostalgic reasons, because you love the original format and long to hear it again, and if it can have a modern twist, even better. But it just goes to show that just because you can add wireless functionality, that doesn't mean you should.
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