In retro niche way, It’s OK

What to do with cherished mixtapes and those sentimentally valuable Dirty Dancing cassettes?

The It’s OK portable tape deck, left, lets you ditch the chronically tangled wires of the old-school Walkman. Picture: F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal

It triggered the mixtape craze, foreshadowing our deeply personal relationships with playlists. Its foamy headphones help shut out the world, an escape route we increasingly value. And as our obsession with retro tech grows (see also: the Nintendo Classic), cassette tapes are enjoying a cultish renaissance.

Unfortunately, appreciating this old-school music medium usually comes with strings attached, in the form of headphone wires that catch on door handles or mysteriously tie themselves in knots when left in a bag. Meanwhile, Bluetooth earbuds for digital devices have rapidly gotten better, becoming more affordable and more fashionable.

What to do with cherished mixtapes and those sentimentally valuable Dirty Dancing cassettes? An unlikely answer comes from Hong Kong-based NINM Lab, whose It’s OK Bluetooth-enabled personal cassette player is explicitly styled after 1980s Walkman iterations. Selling for about $130, its chunky design comes complete with mechanical, satisfyingly resistant buttons, a transparent front flap — all the better to show off your impeccable music taste — and a clip for attaching it to your pocket.

Cassette tapes and other retro teach are enjoying a cultish renaissance.

The It’s OK is available in three colours — white Cloud, soft-pink Sakura and navy-blue Evening. An included blank cassette and a built-in mic let you record notes-to-self or interviews, but don’t bother using it to make that special someone a mixtape.

The It’s OK exploits the latest advances in Bluetooth 5.0 capability, letting you transmit crackling analog audio to wireless earbuds or a portable speaker sitting up to 240m away. I enjoyed listening to a worn Public Enemy cassette on my Bose SoundLink Color II speaker.

And for the truly old-school, or for those smartly carrying a pair of wired phones in case their Apple AirPods lose their charge, the It’s OK still includes a headphone jack.

NINM Labs has failed to smooth out some other annoying throwback quirks, however.

First, rather than using a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, the It’s OK requires two AAs. Also, the volume output to any device is frustratingly low no matter how hard I tried to crank it up using the dinky plastic dial.

And when I took Kenny Rogers’s Songs of Love out for a jog, the bouncing It’s OK warped the magnetic tape, transforming the silky crooner’s voice into a dissonant warble out of a David Lynch-ian nightmare.

The It’s OK deck isn’t likely to lure outsiders to the cult of cassettes — it’s more an ultra-niche solution for a very particular, very stationary type of tapehead.

The Wall Street Journal