Fiio, the Chinese audio company best known for making affordable DACs and headphone amps that audiophiles actually respect, just announced something genuinely weird: a brand-new portable cassette player. In 2026.
The CP11 is exactly what it sounds like—a pocketable tape deck with modern flourishes. It's got Bluetooth built in, so you can wirelessly pipe that warm analog hiss straight to your AirPods if you want. Fiio says it features a completely redesigned ultra-thin mechanism, a higher-quality magnetic head, a brushless motor, and updated motor servo drive circuitry. All the specs you'd expect if you were, say, shopping for a cassette player in 1995.
The company hasn't announced official pricing yet, but industry chatter suggests it'll land around $100 when it ships later this year. That's not cheap for what's essentially a nostalgia play, but it's also not outrageous given the niche audience and the fact that cassette manufacturing basically died two decades ago.
So who's this for? The obvious answer is the same crowd buying new vinyl and hoarding CDs again—people who want the ritual and physicality of old media formats, plus maybe a dash of lo-fi warmth that digital can't replicate. Cassettes have had a modest resurgence among indie musicians and collectors, and the format has a certain DIY charm that vinyl, with its expensive pressing costs, can't match.
But here's the thing: the portable cassette market died for good reasons. Tapes degrade, they tangle, they sound objectively worse than digital, and the Walkman died because the iPod was better in every measurable way. Bluetooth is a nice touch, but it feels like putting racing stripes on a horse-drawn carriage.
Still, Fiio clearly thinks there's a market, and the company has a track record of making products for audio niches that bigger brands ignore. If you've been holding onto a box of mixtapes from high school and want something better than a thrift-store Sony from 1988, the CP11 might be your only new option. Whether that's enough to justify its existence is another question entirely.