• Maxell is launching a Walkman-style cassette player with a built-in speaker
• The speaker is mono and 500mW
• Not everything from the 80s should come back

In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley wrote a cautionary tale about science: just because a scientist can make something doesn’t mean they should. I’m pretty sure she was thinking about the Maxell MXCP-P100S, which is frankly more terrifying than anything Dr Frankenstein ever darned.

The MXCP-P100S is a new version of the cute, Walkman-esque MXCP-P100 that we told you about last month, but it’s got a terrifying addition.

A speaker.

This portable player is just asking for trouble

The player itself is perfectly fine: it has Bluetooth 5.4 and a long-lasting battery delivering up to nine hours of playback, it works with Type-1 Normal tapes of up to 90 minutes, and it’s got a brass flywheel that Maxell says stablizes the sound. You can use it with wired or wireless headphones, and you should, because a tape player with a speaker like this one is an abomination.

The only good thing I can say about the speaker is that it’s just 500mW and unlikely to be hugely efficient, so it can’t go too loud when some clown decides to treat you to their cassette collection on the subway or on the bus.

But that’s also one of the worst things about it.

I don’t want to get too technical here, but when you push a 500mW mono speaker to its limits – which said clown will absolutely do when they’re in the seat behind you – it sounds freaking awful.

I know this because that’s the size of the speaker that was in the mono cassette recorder/players that I used to record songs from the radio back in the 1980s. And while I’ve got plenty of nostalgia for that decade there are some things – such as leg warmers, the Satanic Panic and the ever-present threat of global thermonuclear war – that we don’t need back.

And tinny little speakers in tape decks are one of those things. Trust me, you don’t want one of those anywhere near you when you’re stuck on public transport.

The MXCP-P100S will launch in Japan in August, and is expected to cost around $100. I’d be fine if it stayed it Japan, personally – though its non-speaker sibling, the MXCP-P100, looks more my speed.

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Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.