The early 2000s were the halcyon days of physical media. While not as svelte as MP3 players became, why are those early 2000s machines smaller than all the new models popping up amidst the retro audio craze?

We’ve bemoaned the end of the electromechanical era before, and the Verge recently interviewed the people at We Are Rewind and Filo to get the skinny on just why these newer cassette and CD players aren’t as small as their predecessors. It turns out that all currently produced cassette players use the same mechanism with some small tweaks in materials (like metal flywheels in these higher quality models) because the engineering required to design a smaller and better sounding alternative isn’t warranted by the niche nature of the cassette resurgence.

A similar fate has befallen the laser head of CD mechanisms, which is why we don’t have those smooth, rounded players anymore. Economies of scale in the early 2000s mean that even a cheap player from that era can outperform a lot of the newer ones, although you won’t have newer features like Bluetooth to scandalize your audiophile friends. A new Minidisc player is certainly out of the question, although production of discs only ended this February.

If you’re looking to get back into cassettes, this masterclass is a good place to start. If you don’t fancy any of the players the Verge looked at, how about rolling your own incarnation with the guts from a vintage machine or just going for the aesthetic if cassettes aren’t your jam?

Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].

The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.

[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.