It's the discovery of websites like bridde.com that justifies all those hours you spend wandering around the internet. It gathers the work of Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Ukrainian designers and architects to display some wonderfully inventive, ingenious and beautiful stuff, including a seriously clever idea for playing cassette tapes. You'd say it's enough to make cassettes cool again, except that from the moment they were launched in the mid-1960s cassettes have never been cool.
Cassettes are a lot like MP3: from day one they have been the poor relation of "proper" audio. The tape is only 3.8mm wide, compared with the 6.4mm of reel-to-reel tape. This means each of the four tracks recorded thereon receives a wafer-like strip of real estate 0.6mm wide, and added to the often poor quality of tape used in many cassettes, the slow tape speed and the great bulk of cassette decks being pretty crook, music lovers turn their noses high. It wasn't until Dolby noise reduction, chrome and, later, metal tape, and the entry of premium decks from brands such as Nakamichi that cassette recording became a serious proposition. As long as you took the time to do it carefully.
Most cassette recordings sound dreadful, not just because of the hardware; many people recorded from AM radio or records that had never been cleaned. And they had no idea how to read a VU meter. Thus cassettes garnered a bad reputation, which is unarguably the biggest hurdle facing the deliciously cool Elbow cassette player created by Lithuanian designers Andrius Zemaitis and Marius Maulikas. The Elbow is a brilliant idea beautifully executed.
It's just seven centimetres high by three wide and 3.5 deep, consisting of a body with an arm. The arm hinges out from the body and also swings through 63 degrees. Lift it to click the cassette into to the body. Swing the arm to the take-up reel of the cassette and hinge it back down to engage the drive sprocket. The tape is then driven past the head, which is contained inside the joint of body and arm. Plug in your headphones, and there's the music. The Elbow's battery is charged through a mini USB port, and a charge may not last long given that moving parts are involved.
The arm carries a dial that, twisted clockwise, increases volume, anti-clockwise it fast-forwards. There is no tape counter to keep track of where you are. This may possibly rely on a visual check of the take-up reel or maybe there will be audible clues or a sensor for the gaps between tracks. Given the designers aim to control tape speed with an optical sensor, an additional track sensor is entirely possible.
The idea is not yet at prototype stage and the BrainMonk organisation, formed by Žemaitis and Paulikas, is looking for backers for the idea. When I emailed asking for specifications (there are none yet) their reply ended: "If you have any suggestions or contacts that would help get us funded, please share with us!"
The Elbow is a player and doesn't record, and logic suggests it will appeal to folk who have a collection of cassettes or who see them stacked at garage sales at $5 for the lot. But logic will have nothing to do with the purchase of an Elbow, it will sell to anyone who wants to be uber-analogue and uber-cool. There's even a pin to attach it to clothing. People under 30 will ask, 'What the hell?'Â People over 30 will ask, "Why the hell?"
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