Cassette

The music may be horrible, but if you rub a tape head over these ties you can actually hear jumbled sound collages recorded from the NYC metro system. This is possible because the ties are 50 percent audio cassette tape.

If you have $90 to spend on one of the ties, and you are willing to sacrifice an old Walkman for the project, you can make this a fixture of your formal wardrobe. Of course, walking around with a broken Walkman asking every one to rub you with it is not recommended.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

No kid wants to be the one who blends into a crowd. That's why it's important to start young when setting your children up for a lifetime filled with the nostalgic irony that comes with being tragically hip. Of course, they may not like you when they grow older, but that's fashionable too, right?

Look at this f**king hipster

This Death Star cookie jar is fully operational

Cassette tape lamps light up your nostalgia

NES Controller Business Card shows you mean real geek business

Casio calculator watch. For realz. (Thanks, Sparkman!)

The iPhone’s best neo-retro game: Space Invaders Infinity Gene

Good Vibrations The Vibrator Museum

A propos (of) nothing Japanese auto-fogging glasses prevent eye strain

What the hell? Microsmores (thanks, Sheala)

Kill Me Wi-Fi scale notifies the internet of your lapsed diet… Read more

What's wrong with you?

Doesn't everybody have at least one of these things? I'm just curious, is there anyone out there who flat-out refuses to buy an iPod or Zune or whatever? Are you just bucking the trend? Oh, and please tell us how old you are. I want to know if there are any iPod-less kids reading the Audiophiliac.

I don't care how much you love the '80s, no one wants to listen to cassette tapes anymore. The wretched things are noisy, they wear out, and unless you've got one of those super-duper cassette decks, skipping tracks means riding the fast-forward button until you feel lucky.

For all their faults, though, there is one bright spot in the history of cassettes: the mixtape. There's just something awesome about a curated mix of music, tediously patched together, song by song, onto a hand-scrawled tape. A robot could burn a CD, but only a human (preferably a lovesick … Read more

Legend has it that on December 4, 1877, Thomas Edison was the first person to record and play back the human voice. Maybe not.

The Video Interchange site notes that "a possibility exists that Edison himself, in fact, might not have been the very first person to have recorded and played back the human voice. This was most likely made by his two key assistants: Charles Batchelor, his chief assistant, and John Kruesi, his head machinist."

You can see Edison's machine on the Video Interchange Web site. And while you're there, check out a few of the fascinating but obscure audio formats on display.

Video Interchange offers transfer services for a vast range of ancient and recent audio formats. For example, Video Interchange can transfer 78 rpm records to CD.

… Read more

Apparently the nostalgia bug has a stronger grip on people than we'd thought, at least where the cassette tape is concerned.

Only a few weeks ago we posted an item about an MP3 player disguised as one of the old-school cartridges, complete with USB port, memory card slot, and headphone jack. Now we learn of the "Flexii Bluetooth Cassette Adapter," which can be used to connect wirelessly to a mobile headset, media player, or even a PC.

There are plenty of other Bluetooth devices that can provide the same kind of function, but this one is designed … Read more

While other car stereo makers are trying to disguise their systems behind faceplates of yesteryear, this music player is taking a different approach to the retro game. The "Cassette MP3 Player" from ThinkGeek looks like a regular tape circa 1976, but its real purpose is to house an SD card carrying digital tunes.

The ersatz device can be used in any cassette player, recharging and hooking up to speakers through its USB port. And it needn't be a dashboard version, by the way--we're certain that some poor souls will insist on reliving their glory days with … Read more

Rafe and I enjoyed playing around with Muxtape yesterday (review), but were turned off by the uploader and potential limited life span of the service due to its lenient position on copyrights. If you're looking for a slightly more flashy experience, and one that works without having to upload 50MB of music from your hard drive, check out Mixwit. It lets you create gorgeous-looking Web mix tapes to share with others and pulls in media from various streaming services such as Seeqpod and SkreemR.

Maybe its greatest asset is that the players look like real compact cassette tapes, with … Read more

It's one thing for Sony to reminisce about the good old days when they ruled the music world, but at some point it's time to let go. That was our immediate thought, anyway, upon seeing this dual cassette tape recorder. That's right--tapes.

Akihabara News says many people still use them, though we'll have to take their word for it because we haven't known any since about 1989. It also has a CD player in case they want to experiment with some of that cutting-edge stuff, as well as an AM/FM radio. We're still … Read more