The Maxell MXCP-P100 is a portable music player that mixes old-school and modern features. Like any good modern device, it has a built-in rechargeable battery and a USB Type-C port for charging. And it has both a headphone jack and support for Bluetooth 5.4, allowing you to use wired or wireless headphones or speakers.
But this isn’t an MP3 player. It’s a portable cassette player. The MXCP-P100 is launching exclusively in Japan at launch, where it sells for ¥13,000 (about $90). It’s unclear if or when it will be sold in other markets, but if it does, Maxell wouldn’t be the first company to launch wouldn’t be the first company in recent years.
At a time when smartphones with access to music streaming services gives us access to millions of songs on-demand at any time, there’s something charming about physical media like CDs, vinyl records, and tape cassettes that can only hold an hour or two of music. And while vinyl has never gone completely out of fashion, tape cassettes have been making a bit of a comeback in recent years as well, likely because they provide a cheap and easy way for musicians to distribute their recordings or for music fans to make mixtapes.
Maxell’s portable cassette player provides a way to listen to those tapes at home or on the go. It has a pretty basic design that lets you pop open a door to insert, remove, or flip around a tape to listen to the other side. There are play, stop, fast forward, and rewind buttons on top and a volume dial and Bluetooth button on the side, along with a headphone jack and USB-C port.
The MXCP-P100 measures 122 x 91 x 38mm (4.8″ x 3.6″ x 1.5″) and weighs 210 (7.4 ounces), not including the weight of a tape. The player supports stereo audio, and offers up to 9 hours of battery life when using wired headphones or 7 hours when using Bluetooth. It takes about 2 hours to fully charge the battery using a 5V/1.5A USB-C power adapter. And the cassette player comes in black or white color options.
That’s pretty much all there is to this device. You cannot use it as an audio recorder. It won’t play MP3 files or any other digital format. And it only officially supports cassette tapes that hold up to 90 minutes of audio (45 minutes on each side).
via Yanko Design
Tape sucks as a storage material, whether digital or analog, music or data.
The highest priority is obviously to sell some sort of retro cool device regardless of its obvious quality/reliability shortcomings, the rest is just lame storytelling/marketing.
No one needs to try it to know it’s going to be awful compared to a budget device from 20 years ago.
It’s almost certainly using the same terrible cheap mechanism and head as the sub $20 machines on AliExpress – because they’re the only ones available.
If nothing changed about modern “retro” K7 players of the most recent batch, I’ll just go ahead an tell you exactly what is the major issue with this one and any other model you’ll find new in the market – the internal components of K7 players these days, magnetic playback head in particular, only comes from a single mass manufacturing plant – and it’s pretty poor quality.
And I mean poor quality in comparison to the last models from big brands around the time the format died.
Likely also the reason why you don’t see any of the technical stuff that usually came with cassette players of the time. Those old enough to have owned models before CDs and MP3 took over, will know about the letter and number salad. UX Chrome, DX yadda yadda.
Portable, boombox, micro-system doesn’t matter what format it comes, the internals all come from the same place, because all competition died off and closed manufacturing, and it isn’t worth spending anything on development anymore.
This is why most “new” players will focus heavily on modern features and whatnot. It’s pretty cheap to add stuff like Bluetooth, USB-C charging and those things that lives on separate modules.
Recent hype might have changed this, but I highly doubt it.
So, if you really want or need a good quality K7 player, you might just get better luck in the used market. Models up to 2000s or so, perhaps you’ll need to change some belts, clean it up, fix something. But you can’t really pay for new great quality K7 players these days anymore, simply because they just aren’t made anymore.
For anyone else who was confused and had never encountered this before, “K7” is French slang for cassette. “Ka” “Sept”. Cassette. Clever.
I could consider this if it had some advanced features that you would find on some of the more high end features that you would find on expensive cassette players in the 80s and 90s. Like direct drive, Dolby noise reduction, auto reverse, or track seeking (yes there were cassette players that could find the beginning and end of tracks).
As far as i can tell, this is about as basic as cassette players come.
To me, nostalgia isn’t worth it unless I can get the things that were out of reach for me the first time around.
No thanks. I am old enough to have dealt with cassette tapes when they were new technology. Dolby B, Dolby C, DBX, nothing really got rid of tape hiss. I jumped to CDs as soon as I could afford the cheapest CD player available, which still sounded better than the most expensive tape deck!
wow. I need this
where I can buy cassete? (I need 18650 battery!)
Surprised cassettes still exist.
Nice, should work great with Bluetooth to cassette adapters from Ali!
Bluetooth to cassette adapter in a cassette to Bluetooth adapter, why not. Pair it with itself and let us know what happens.
Ahaha, nice idea. Delay machine? Somehow reminds me a story about some Asian or LATAM country where “wired” lightning headphones in fact use Bluetooth, and only draw power through cable.