Before the age where the best music streaming services redefined our listening habits, I’ve been a collector of physical media.
Throughout my childhood the living room cabinets and car glove box were packed with an endless roster of CDs which is where my love for music began, and I started vinyl collecting at the turn of my 17th birthday. But as far as cassette tapes go, I’ve never touched them until the age of 26, when I got my hands on the Miko cassette player by Gadhouse.
Blending the classic analog music player with modern connectivity features, the Miko cassette player shows off the best of what 1980s Japanese audio tech was all about. But now that more people are beginning to ditch the algorithms and revert to traditional ways of listening and collecting, the cassette player as an entity is gaining currency again — and I was sold from the first push of the play button.
For someone who’s never listened to music via cassette tapes, the Miko cassette player was actually very easy to navigate right off the bat. It runs on two AA batteries, has an on/ off switch for Bluetooth connectivity, a headphone and aux jack, and volume wheel. Just like a traditional cassette player, there are five buttons on the top; play, stop, fast-forward, rewind, and one to record audio.
But one big difference with the Miko is fast-forwarding and rewinding tapes — it doesn’t speed up the playback or play it in reverse like a cassette player from back in the day. I can see why some users would miss this, it makes skipping through songs a lot easier, but I didn’t run into any issues with it.
That said, what would really take the Miko to a 10 is the addition of a clip so you can attach it to your waistband, which I would really take advantage of — purely as a means of showing off to others.
Like finding a new best friend
Immediately after I finished listening to the first cassettes I bought (I snagged Whitney Houston’s Whitney and Tina Turner’s Foreign Affair from my local music store), I knew an obsession was brewing.
Essentially, listening via cassette felt like an extension of vinyl. I love listening to vinyl records, and listening via cassette filled me with that same feeling I get when I put an album to spin on the turntable, but you can’t exactly take your vinyl player on a commute. That's the beauty of cassettes — they’re compact — and whipping out the Miko on my bus journeys and walks through the park made me feel like a modish ‘80s character in a 21st-century world.
Digital streaming has its perks, but as far as intentional listening goes, it’s easy to get distracted. Miko forces you to sit with albums in their entirety — the way it should always be. Skipping tracks is tedious, though not impossible, but that means you’re more likely to listen to an artist’s deep cuts as you make your way through the tape.
But one thing I completely forgot about until I picked up the cassette player was how fun compilation albums are — something I haven’t listened to since I was a child. In my youth it was all about Pop Party and Now That’s What I Call Music! CDs until they stopped evolving with growing music consumption habits, but oh how I missed indulging in the sonic summaries of summer 2006, or the top songs of 1993.
When it comes to modern revisions of classic analog devices, it’s inevitable that they’ll also come fitted with digital ways of listening. In the case of Miko, it’s Bluetooth connectivity. While I think it’s handy having wired and wireless options, I spent 99% of my time with the Miko using wired earbuds — it was the only way for me for a few reasons.
There's just something about plugging a good pair of the best wired earbuds or top wired headphones into your cassette player that feels like some kind of moral obligation, as if you’re honoring the slightly crunchy way older generations had to enjoy music. And there are the aesthetics, of course. Who could deny how good it looks on you?
Aside from that, there were some Bluetooth connectivity issues that persisted. Though I managed to connect my headphones to the Miko very briefly, coming back to this proved to be a bit of a hassle. I’d hear the static, but as soon as I pressed play it would disappear, and no music would follow. Besides, you don’t get to listen to the satisfying crackling and warm, magnetic hiss of a cassette player using wireless headphones quite like wired connectivity. It’s not a huge gripe, if anything it actually forced me to have to break from my Sony WH-1000XM5s.
For a first hands-on with a cassette player, it’s fair to say that it went swimmingly, but I do fear it’s unleashed an urge within me to harbor another physical media collection I know for a fact I don’t have the space for. Saying that, given the price you can pay for a tape in good condition compared to a vinyl record, who could say no?
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