Sony Cassette player

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Excellent
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Average
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Recahrgeable so save on battery power
Disadvantages:	Almost fifty quid for just a tape player

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Good things come in small packages, what more is there to say (think what you will of this, just remember in the words of Napoleon 'it isn't the size of your ship that matters, its the amount of seamen you have that counts').

Anyhow, as I was saying, this Sony cassette player is tiny, 11cm long, 8cm wide and 2cm thick. For something of such a small size, it delivers superb quality.

What does it do you may ask...

Have you asked it yet?

Why not?

Ask it...

Good.

Unlike other Walkmans, this one only plays cassettes, it does not have an in built radio or GPS or MP3 or coffee maker with milk frother. It’s obviously useless then! But, what it does do is to play the cassettes with superb quality.

The player has got 'soft touch' buttons, which means that you don't have to push down really hard on the buttons, or make them click into place to get the machine to work. They work very easily. The controls are the standard ones (play, reverse, fast forward and stop) but also feature a speed control playback, so you can increase the speed at which the tape plays back (obviously). This enables you to make Michael Jackson's voice sound like a woman’s. Nothing different there then, but you can make any male person's voice go higher pitched by playing it back at a high speed. Unfortunately though this is sadistically fun. Other controls include volume and bass boost.

There is a mini remote built into the headphone wire, which enables you to play, pause, stop, fast forward and rewind the tape. It also has a mini blue backlit LCD display, which says play etc as well as the time and will give a warning if the battery is low.

The special thing about this, the feature which stands out, the sperm that fertilises the egg, the star quality feature, the annoying way in which I wont just get to the point, is that it contains a rechargeable battery and has a charging stand. This means that you no longer have to go through pounds of batteries. The rechargeable battery is normal AA size. To charge it up all that you need to do is to plug in the charger, and slip the Walkman into the charger. And leave it for six to eight hours.

And that's it.

Complicated.

I know.

When the battery is fully charged it will give you about thirty-five hours of playback. The instructions say it is about sixty, but, like a lot of things in life, am yet to achieve this.

The headphones you get with this are the ones that clip around your ears, and are better than the bog standard ones that are usually included. They give a good, clear and crisp sound, with fairly good bass. They also avoid distorting at loud volumes, however after a long period of time at high volume, you would probably have damaged your ears too much to notice anyhow.

It came with instructions (surprisingly) that were easy to follow. I personally worked out the functions for myself... I still can't understand why, when I press the button with the square on the tape stops, must be a fault with the player. It also comes with a standard one-year guarantee in case anything was to go wrong.

Overall this is a very small tape player, with loads of functions. However considering the fifty-pound price tag and the lack of a radio, there are much better alternatives available. This is coupled with the fact that I can't remember the last time I bought a tape. Surely by now everyone is buying CDs, minidiscs or using digital formats, like MP3.