Nostalgic MixxTape Pseudo Cassette Bring Hi-Res and Bluetooth to Old Boomboxes

Stephen Burns from Dallas, Texas, as part of the Mixxim project, decided to take care of the owners of the still working cassette players by proposing the MixxTape high-definition audio player project on Kickstarter. Judging by its appearance, it really is a compact cassette – you just want to get out the hexagonal handle and rewind the tape. But this will not work, since we have before us a sample of modern digital electronics.

MixxTape (the 4th generation of the device was presented on Kickstarter, which appeared back in 2013) is a portable player in a compact cassette form factor that supports resolutions up to 24 bit / 192 kHz. On board – an inch full-color TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 240×240 pixels, Bluetooth, 4.8 GB of internal memory, expandable up to 512 GB with a microSD card.

The novelty can be used without a cassette recorder, for which it has a headphone jack. But in a tape recorder, MixxTape will transmit the signal to the playback head – much like a cassette tape. It is not entirely clear how the hitchhiking will behave in this case, which is triggered when the left reel unit of the cassette is stationary – but these are already details.

For charging the built-in 300 mAh battery (up to 5 hours of playback) and connecting to a computer, MixxTape provides a USB-C port. The novelty reproduces FLAC (24-bit), MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG, APE, WAV, AAC-LC and ACELP, on the screen – a multilingual interface.

A month before the end of the project, with $50,000 declared for its successful implementation, MixxTape has already raised $11,000.

On Kickstarter, MixxTape will cost $76 (at full price after completion of the project at $120).