The Great Cassette Rewind continues, as more affordable tape-playing options capitalize on the love for collectible physical media, which has only grown in the wake of the vinyl revival.
Earlier in 2025, We Are Rewind announced a metal Walkman-like portable player that can play cassettes over Bluetooth or with the best wired headphones, and then followed it up with the We Are Rewind GB-001 boombox reinvention.
And yes, this goes all out at being a boombox just the way you remember it. It’s got a front-opening cassette deck, it’s got physical dials and buttons, it’s got a folding handle, it’s got twin VU meters on the front, it’s got two-way speakers on each side, and it’s slightly heavier than is really convenient.
There are two notable feature swaps from the boombox you had a few decades ago, though: the radio tuner is out and Bluetooth is in for wireless playback, and the battery is a built-in rechargeable option instead of needing a dozen cells each the size of a large hamster.
It’s got a guitar/mic input if you want to play or sing along with the music, and you can use this input to record to the cassette deck. Sadly, you can’t record to tape from the Bluetooth connection, and I wish it actually had two cassette decks so you could go really old school and record between them, but what’s here is probably the right balance for using it in the real world.
Speaking of which, I did get to test it out, though in a slightly odd situation: I was at a big audio trade show, and we couldn’t test it in the side room it was being shown off in, because there was a constant demo of much larger speakers.
So we just took it out into the public area, put it on the ground, and turned up the dial until I could enjoy my music and everyone around me was annoyed – the authentic public boombox experience!
Actually, I suspect that people were more curious than annoyed – they were at an audio trade show, after all, and this thing really stood out among all the more traditional hi-fi that dominated the show.
There is a deep, fundamental satisfaction that comes from turning up the volume and seeing physical VU meter needles start to jump higher and higher up their range; a reassuring supplement to what your ears are telling you, that rocking is about to happen.
Despite being at a hi-fi show, the GB-001’s sound is not exactly audiophile, which will not be a shock to anyone – and is not what we really want from it anyway. Because I was listening to it on a noisy trade-show floor, obviously my assessment of its sound is very much limited, but it is at least representative of using the thing in the real world, where other sounds around you will conflict with it.
It’s heavy through the low-end, which is common among outdoor speakers, because bass is easily lost when traveling through open air. It seems to know what it’s doing with this bass, which felt fairly controlled and lively – the risk with going strong on bass is that it starts to become flat and lands with a thud, but this felt like it had bounce.
The mids felt a little lost among the sound around me even when I’d turned the volume pretty high, but the treble comes across, and again I feel like this is what you expect from this kind of speaker in this environment – all the movement and conversation around me is heavily in the mid-range and is most likely to overwhelm the audio, but I could still hear all the core essence of songs, and definitely the beat.
I couldn’t tell you much about its delivery of detail in that environment, but I genuinely do feel like this asking the wrong question of a boombox.
One thing to note is that it delivers a notably broader sound over Bluetooth than it does from cassettes. It’s one big reason why I don’t think the tape revolution will ever take off in the same way as the vinyl revival. I know some people love them, but really cassettes were the best solution to a portability problem at the time, and basically every solution since then has been superior.
But there is a genuine charm to them outside of the sound, which is the same with vinyl. The physical ritual of opening a box, sliding out the cassette, and sliding it into the boombox’s caddy is deliberate and satisfying.
The chunk of pressing the mechanical buttons tickles the right part of the brain. The click and silence of a successful rewind delivers anticipation that you’re about to dig into something good.
And I’ve written about this before, but I genuinely miss the creativity of the mixtape era, and both of We Are Rewind’s products have that in mind, both including a line-in option to record something personal to tape and share it with your crush/best fried, or sibling, or favorite artist you waited ages at the stage door to see who’s definitely going to love your stuff and will be your big break.
Even with all that acknowledged, it’s the light-up twin VU meters that are my favorite part of the whole thing. They’re another element that adds anticipation; when the lights come on and the needle twitches, you’re about to kick off a good time.
My next home hi-fi upgrade will be genuinely influenced by the presence of features like this, because now that it’s possible to play all the music in the world in high quality with almost no equipment whatsoever (just some of the best earbuds and your phone), if you’re going to invest in big physical units to provide pleasing playback, they should make you as happy physically as they do sonically.
I think the GB-001 gets this – it’s about the ritual of music, at home or out at the skate park.
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