This is the Curtis GB-001 Boombox from the team at We Are Rewind, it’s a retro portable hifi capable of playing cassettes, but it also has full Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity to play music from your phone, and it can even work as a guitar amp.
The GB-001 Boombox is the second retro boombox design from the European company, it’s a significant step up over its predecessor, and it offers genuinely good sound quality for what it is.
This is the Curtis GB-001 Boombox from the team at We Are Rewind, it’s a retro portable hifi capable of playing cassettes, but it also has full Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity to play music from your phone, and it can even work as a guitar amp.
History Speedrun: We Are Rewind
We Are Rewind is a French audio company that was founded in 2016 by Romain Boudruche. Based in Paris, the company was established with a somewhat unusual goal – to design and manufacture a brand-new, high-quality portable cassette tape player for the modern era – the first of its kind to enter production in years.
The idea was born out of the wave of ’80s nostalgia that swept pop culture in the mid-2010s, catalysed in particular by the prominent use of cassette tapes in the film Guardians of the Galaxy and the Netflix series Stranger Things.
Boudruche recognised that while cassette tape sales had been climbing steadily since around 2012, there was no new-production portable player on the market worthy of the format. The vintage players that remained in circulation were decades old, often unreliable, and dependent on disposable batteries.
To bring the project to life, Boudruche partnered with ORA, a French company specialising in high-end audio and sound equipment development, and enlisted the support of French engineers with over 40 years of experience in analog audio technology, many of them veterans of the Thomson company.
Together, they faced a key challenge that nearly killed the project before it had a chance to really begin – nearly all of the factories that had once produced the mechanical parts required for cassette player manufacture had closed their doors more than a decade earlier.
After several months of development, the team arrived at a clean, deliberately minimalist design. The broader aesthetic drew on the legacy of the original Sony Walkman, but the specific design language was also influenced by the work of legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams, who had also been a major influence on Apple with their iPod and iPhone designs.
The GB-001 Boombox is the second retro boombox design from the European company, it’s a significant step up over its predecessor, and it offers genuinely good sound quality for what it is.
The design avoided plastic almost entirely, opting instead for an aluminum case to provide a high-end feel and much longer lasting durability. On the technology side, We Are Rewind introduced two features the company describes as world firsts for a portable cassette player – a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery (as opposed to disposable batteries) and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, allowing users to stream audio from their phones to the player.
It also has a stereo recording function via 3.5 mm input, enabling users to create mixtapes of their own from any external audio source.
The player launched via a Kickstarter campaign in November of 2022, with commercial availability following shortly thereafter. It’s available in several colour variants, each named after a music icon – Serge (orange), Kurt (blue), Keith (grey), Amy (black and yellow), and Edith (pink and green), along with limited-edition collaborations including an Elvis model and, more recently, a Duran Duran special edition produced in partnership with the band.
In 2025, We Are Rewind grew its product line significantly with the Blaster Curtis (model GB-001), a neo-retro boombox delivering 104 watts through four hifi-class speakers, with a substantially upgraded cassette deck mechanism with support for Type I and Type II tapes, Bluetooth 5.4, backlit VU meters, and a rechargeable replaceable battery. The unit marked the company’s move from portable personal players into a higher-end section of the market.
The Curtis GB-001 Boombox
The GB-001 Curtis is We Are Rewind’s second major product, it’s a neo-retro boombox that is a significant step up from the company’s earlier WE-001 portable cassette player – both in sophistication and price. Announced in 2025 and priced at $579 USD, it takes the form of a modernized 1980s-style boombox built around a brushed aluminum chassis with a folding carry handle, front-loading cassette doors, twin backlit VU meters, and physical rotary controls on the top panel for volume, bass, treble, balance, source selection, and tape-type switching.
The speaker system includes four hifi-class drivers arranged as a two-way stereo pair – two woofers driven by 32W RMS Class D amplifiers (4 ohms) and two soft-dome tweeters driven by 20W RMS Class D amplifiers (6 ohms), giving a total rated output of 104W RMS.
The full-range speaker frequency response is quoted at 40 to 20,000 Hz. We Are Rewind has built in dynamic power control to limit distortion, along with what the company describes as a refined equalisation curve for a natural house sound signature and a spatialisation function intended to widen the stereo image.
The cassette deck is substantially more capable than the mechanism in the portable WE-001. It has a user-adjustable motor with internal speed regulation, and a rear-panel pitch adjustment screw – an unusual feature for a portable unit. It supports both Type I (normal) and Type II (chrome) cassettes with optimised biasing, and uses an active AC erasing head for low-noise recording and improved frequency response.
Connectivity includes Bluetooth 5.4 for wireless streaming from phones, tablets, or other devices, a 3.5 mm stereo line input, a 3.5 mm stereo headphone output, and a mono microphone input with adjustable level. Unusually, it can also function as a guitar amplifier, and We Are Rewind states that two wireless microphones can be connected simultaneously.
The GB-001 Curtis is We Are Rewind’s second major product, it’s a neo-retro boombox that is a significant step up from the company’s earlier WE-001 portable cassette player – both in sophistication and price.
Power comes from a user-replaceable 14.8V, 3,000 mAh lithium-ion battery pack, with the company quoting approximately 10 hours of battery life in tape mode on speakers, up to 15 hours in aux mode on speakers, and up to 28 hours in aux mode on headphones. A mains power supply (18V/4A) is included and the whole unit weighs 6.81 kgs (15 lbs) and measures in at 50.6 × 25.1 × 17.9cm including the handle.
The GB-001 Boombox is now available to bug direct from the official We Are Rewind Amazon store here.
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.
