This is the new Boombox by We Are Rewind, it’s a 21st century take on the classic boombox design that can play regular cassettes – but it can also play from a Bluetooth connection to your smartphone, a 3.5 mm aux line in, or a microphone input.
Boomboxes became a must-have item back in the 1970s and only saw their popularity grow into the 1980s, in some respects they were the iPhone equivalent of their time. They helped breakdancing become an international phenomenon, and allowed people to create their own mixtapes by recording songs off the radio.
The Boombox has a minimalist layout with a single cassette player front and center, with a row of buttons underneath and a pair of backlit Volume Unit meters (VU meters) above.
The Boombox By We Are Rewind
We Are Rewind is a French company based in Paris that was founded specifically to bring back both the classic 1970s-era boombox, and the humble cassette tape. The first hurdle they faced was finding a manufacturer would could still make the components required to create a cassette player – almost all of them had shut down operation a decade or more ago.
Once that problem had been solved, the design team developed a new boombox design that was directly influenced by the original Sony Walkman from the late 1970s. It has a minimalist layout with a single cassette player front and center, with a row of buttons underneath and a pair of backlit Volume Unit meters (VU meters) above.
Sound comes from four Hi-fi class loudspeakers, two woofers and two soft dome tweeters, with 104 Watts of total power output and a frequency response: of 40 to 20,000 Hz. Inside you’ll find 4 x Ohms Class D amplifiers for the woofers and 6 x Ohms Class D amplifiers for tweeters.
Power is provided by a user replaceable, built-in 14.8 volt 3,000 mAH lithium-ion battery pack which offers up to ~10 hours of playback in tape mode and up to ~15 hours in aux mode. The Boombox offers full stereo recording off the radio onto the cassette – so you can make those personalized mixtapes for your significant other just like we all did back in the 80s and 90s.
It seems likely that most Boombox owners will use the built-in Bluetooth 5.4 connection for streaming directly from their smartphone, though some will doubtless get plenty of mileage out of the cassette player give how many unwanted cassettes seem to be in every thrift shop.
It seems likely that most Boombox owners will use the built-in Bluetooth 5.4 connection for streaming directly from their smartphone, though some will doubtless get plenty of mileage out of the cassette player give how many unwanted cassettes seem to be in every thrift shop.
The We Are Rewind Boombox is due to go live for pre-order soon, if you want to snag one you can read more about it here and sign up for email alerts about its availability.
Images courtesy of We Are Rewind
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
