We Are Rewind WE-001 Review

Design

• Hefty aluminium frame
• Fetching orange colourway
• Tactile controls

The WE-001 is a bit big in weight and size, tipping the scales at 404g, and significantly bigger than the last run of cassette players when the likes of Sony were manufacturing them.

Part of the reason this We Are Rewind player is so large is that there’s only one real cassette mechanism available these days from one supplier, and if you want to build a modern cassette player, it’s the only one to use.

Another reason it’s as big as it is because the design of this orange lad is based on Sony’s first-ever Walkman cassette player – the TPS-L2 – from 1979. Where Sony’s was plastic, the WE-001 is aluminium, contributing both to a quality feel in-hand and to its heavyweight nature.

There’s a pleasant We Are Rewind logo on the front, plus a small circular window in the door that you have to manually open from the top. The old Sony it’s based on had a rectangular window, for what it’s worth. On the top side are the cassette player’s controls, which are oddly the wrong way around as you look at the player, as indicated by the play button triangle facing to the right, so you have to turn the unit around.

The controls from left to right in the correct orientation are as follows – battery and Bluetooth pairing indicator LEDs, a Bluetooth pairing button, a yellow record button, play, rewind, fast forward and stop. The buttons aren’t soft-touch and have a pleasant tactile finish when pressed

The right side houses the WE-001’s ports, with a USB-C port for charging (charging only, and no power for an external USB-C DAC such as the iFi Go Link Max for listening to higher power headphones), two 3.5mm headphone jacks – one for recording and the other for listening, plus a volume wheel. The rear of the unit also has a small hole for motor speed adjustment.

It looks fetching in the ‘Serge’ orange colour (named for Serge Gainsbourg) I have, although is available in ‘Kurt’ (Cobain – light blue) and ‘Keith’ (Richards – black) colours if you prefer, plus special editions for Elvis and Duran Duran in more recent times.

Specification

• Bluetooth 5.1 support with no specific codec mentioned
• Headphone jack is suitable for easy-to-drive, low impedance cans
• Reasonable battery life

The WE-001’s spec sheet is threadbare, but there are some things worth talking about. It works with all kinds of cassettes, with Type I through IV all supported. Any tapes you have should be okay, all being well.

The cassette player features a 30Hz to 12500Hz frequency range, and supports Bluetooth 5.1. No specific codec support is listed whether it’s SBC or AAC, or even something more advanced, such as aptX HD. Quite frankly, the fact that it supports Bluetooth in any guise seems like a bit of a novelty, but it paired okay with both my Focal Bathys and Audio Pro C10 MKII during testing.

The spec sheet is also very specific about this cassette player not being ‘compatible’ with earbuds, although I also used a pair of FiiO FH19 IEMs with the WE-001 and they worked fine. Maybe it goes against We Are Rewind’s advice, but I am a rebel at heart.

The output of the headphone jack isn’t powerful, with 2mW per channel into 32 ohms, making this We Are Rewind cassette player suitable for easy-to-drive headphones, rather than more difficult ones that would usually need their own amp or DAC.

That being said, I did try to use a set of Drop x Sennheiser HD6XXs for a reference point, and they worked – I just had to turn the volume up a lot to get to a listenable volume. You’re better off going for easier-to-drive ones for a more optimal experience, though.

As opposed to running on AA batteries as cassette players of old did, the WE-001 features its own built-in lithium ion battery that’s rechargeable. It has a 2000mAh capacity, and We Are Rewind quotes it for between ten and 12 hours on a charge. In my testing, that seems about right.

Performance

• Warmer tones than streaming
• Compression and saturation seem part of the experience
• Auto-stop would have been nice

Normally, when reviewing audio gear and such, it can be very easy to be analytical and scientific as to how a product sounds, with lots of jargon thrown around. I’m as guilty of that as the next man.

With the WE-001, though, it felt right to take a different approach for a key reason. Cassettes weren’t the be-all-and-end-all of fidelity when they were new, and using them again in 2026 is more of an experiential undertaking than a scientific one. Therefore, it warrants a different kind of perspective.

For testing, I took an album I know like the back of my hand (and ironically one of the only cassettes I own), an Abbey Road real-time cassette copy of Marillion’s Afraid of Sunlight that I suspect hasn’t been played for thirty years since the album’s release, and listened to it all the way through on the WE-001 on my Focal Bathys via the 3.5mm jack. I then listened to the original 1995 mix using my Honor Magic V3 and an iFi Go Link Max I had lying around over Tidal for a ‘modern’ equivalent.

Naturally, listening to it in digital results in a cleaner, more expansive recording than the analogue form a cassette takes. The apparent benefit of listening to cassette are the very shortcomings that caused us to move to hi-res digital music when the option became available – the warmth and saturation of an analogue sound, complete with some very slight tape hiss in the background.

It’s a completely different listening experience with Afraid of Sunlight on cassette to even CD or a streaming version due to the warmth of the medium. Granted, the soundstage isn’t too wide, and things can sound quite congested against listening on digital means, but there is a strange appeal to it. 

The WE-001 is quite a meaty player in itself, with its tuning prioritising some low end, even though it only goes down to 30Hz. The potent bass line on Cannibal Surf Babe and the gritty guitar lines are quite prominent throughout the track, suit the way this player sounds, and there was a strange satisfaction to listen to it in this compressed means. Maybe it’s the weird nostalgia for a medium I didn’t experience first time around talking, but it’s an interesting point.

It isn’t a fatiguing listen either, arguably due to some treble elements, such as cymbal hits and piano notes being smoothed over. This tape player doesn’t have any form of Dolby Noise Reduction built in, although I didn’t necessarily hear much in the way of tape hiss or speed variations with the Afraid of Sunlight tape, or another Abbey Road tape of Fish’s Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.

What listening to cassettes in the way they were intended does is revive the linearity of music that I think has been lost with the age of instant access provided by streaming. If you went out and bought an album, that’s what you listened to, rather than getting bored with it halfway through and finding something else.

In addition, you purchased and owned an album for one price, and that’s what you had to listen to, rather than paying a monthly subscription fee for thousands of albums that you’re paying for the chance to listen to, as long as you keep payments rolling. Therefore, you were more inclined to listen to the full duration of what you’d spent hard-earned money on, which I think is slowly becoming a lost art. It’s nice to be reminded of that experience.

Maybe it’s because of my older-leaning tastes, but as much as I have a ridiculous playlist of several thousand songs on Spotify and Tidal that gets put on every so often, I do listen to music in album-sized chunks, which I know a lot of folks my age don’t. That workflow didn’t necessarily change when using this We Are Rewind player in my experience, but it just provided more of an analogue feel that I can partially see the appeal of.

One small nitpick I have with the WE-001 is the lack of an auto-stop for either fast-forwarding or rewinding when the cassette has reached either end of its tape, leading to a horrible motor whine from the internal mechanism. This would have been helpful for quality-of-life purposes and for safeguarding your tapes.

Should you buy it?