custom portable retro lo-fi player with cassette tape Iulius Curt creates a custom portable retro player with a cassette tape that records lo-fi songs from streaming apps and smartphones. In a nutshell, the user’s smartphone sends music wirelessly to the machine, which then records it onto a moving loop of tape, the same way a cassette worked in the 1980s. Then, a second read head picks the sound back up a moment later and plays it through a speaker. This machine starts its life as a Privileg TC 183, a mid-weight Japanese cassette deck. The designer kept the recording circuitry, from the bias oscillator and erase head to the tape equalisation, because redesigning those from scratch would have taken months. Then, he replaced it with a tape loop one so that it doesn’t run out like a standard cassette does. Using a set of orange 3D-printed brackets, the loop erases, records, travels, and plays back continuously, with no rewinding and no end.…