Fiio’s ode to the Sony Walkman is the strangest reveal at CES 2024 – and we love it
Forget it 1989 (Taylor’s version): We went back to 1979 (Fiio’s version) at CES 2024 and we love it. The audio company best known for its excellent and affordable high-tech hardware, including a selection of hi-res DACs, the excellent FT3 over-ear headphones, a hi-res audio keyboard (yes, keyboard) and most recently the R9 bijou screen The music streaming box has delivered a seriously impressive blast from the past: a love letter to the original Sony Walkman. We stuck with it – and we like it a lot.
The Fiio CP13 is a surprising product to see at CES 2024 given the show’s emphasis on the future of technology – see for example Samsung’s first transparent Micro LED TV, EssilorLuxottica’s Nuance Audio hearing aid glasses or the adorable Ottonomy draft beer robot, for example. But no, what we have here is a tribute to the iconic cassette player and it’s giving us some serious retro rush. It’s so old fashioned that it won’t work with your Bluetooth earbuds – because of course they didn’t exist back then. No, without Bluetooth on board you’ll have to feel the wind beneath your wires, just like you used to with a set of IEMs or cans with a 3.5mm jack – and here we want to point you to some of the best wired headphones.
Why the Fiio CP13 is a brilliant blast from the past
As much as we love Apple’s iPod Classic, the original Walkman changed music long before the iPod was a twinkle in Apple’s eye. It made music truly portable for the first time, and only a few early adopters were hit by buses. If you owned a Walkman, one of its successors or one of its many imitators, you’ll know the joy of it and the tactile sensation of it – and that’s something that Fiio has brought back beautifully here.
Forget touchscreens and high-tech everything. The Fiio CP13 has all the right buttons: play, stop, fast forward and even rewind (so for anyone who remembers, you don’t have to take out the tape and turn it over to go back to a previous track). Oh, and if your tape gets messy, you’ll need a pencil or ballpoint pen to rewind it. The only really modern thing you’ll see on the CP13 is the USB-C port, and that’s a welcome change from the retro vibe as it means you get up to 15 hours of battery life without having to keep putting in sets of AA batteries .
1979 wasn’t just a great year for music hardware. It was also a great year musically. David Bowie’s TenantDonna Summers Bad girlsThe healing Three imaginary boys, Van Halens 1979Blondes Eat to the beat. AC/DCs Highway to hell, That of the collision Call London…I could go for weeks without running out of great albums from that one year. Now that today’s pop stars also release cassette tapes, you can of course listen to them too. But there’s something about the CP13 that makes me want to listen to the same music that early Walkman wearers listened to.
If you’re into it, the Fiio CP13 will be available in early March for £129 (about $165 / AU$245) and you can choose between white, black or our favourite, the two-tone blue you can see in our photo. Be careful of buses.
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