The Return of the Walkman
Maybe not quite this specific cassette player but, dedicated music players are making a comeback.
The other day I was scrolling my YouTube feed and the algorithm fed me a video of someone modding an old iPod. It seemed interesting enough at the time but I had no idea the rabbit hole I was about to descend. Dozens of videos, each with unique mods, a home-brew community that already figured out drag & drop music files for these modded iPods, updated LCDs. The works.
There’s a whole corner of the internet that isn’t just modding old iPods, they’ve BEEN using dedicated music players (now called DAPs - digital audio players). And I think this is all related to the return of wired headphones. People just want to disconnect. But if you’re curious, here’s some of the stuff I’ve found.
The new stuff
Sony never really stopped making Walkmans. The NW-A306 has quietly become the gold standard for audiophiles — it feels modern without being oversized, runs Android so streaming apps work, and holds its own as an offline library when you load it up with a large microSD card. Sound is refined, battery life is solid, and while it does clock in at a premium, you can just plug in your good headphones without needing to get another portable DAC or Amplifier. It's the "I just want a thing that plays music well" answer.
FiiO is the other name worth knowing. They're the cost efficient leader in the audiophile-adjacent space, and their range covers everything from genuinely affordable entry-level players to serious DAP territory. The Snowsky Echo Mini in particular is worth a look — it's a $60 player that takes visual cues from the original cassette Walkman, right down to a mini screen that stands in for the tape window, but underneath it'll play practically any audio file format you throw at it, up to 24-bit/192kHz. It's a fun piece of kit.
If you want to go further up the chain, Astell & Kern is where the serious money lives — the SR35 gives demanding listeners a more polished interface and sound quality that scales well with better headphones. Not for everyone, but worth knowing the ceiling exists. For like, $1000. No affiliate link for this one, it’s wild, but look it up, seriously. They even have one for $4k. I will admit this is where it becomes more of a stunt than actual discernible quality improvement.
The Modded Stuff
This is where it gets genuinely interesting.
Apple discontinued the iPod line in May 2022 — which, rather than killing demand, seems to have created an entire cottage industry around bringing them back to life. People are pulling the spinning hard drives out of iPod Classics and replacing them with flash storage using iFlash adapters, swapping in new batteries with 3-4x the original capacity, slapping on fresh shells in colors Apple never made, and flashing custom firmware called Rockbox — an open-source replacement that's been in active development since 2002, with a stable 4.0 release dropping as recently as April 2025.
The appeal isn't complicated. A modded 5th gen iPod Video gives you the legendary Wolfson DAC — widely considered one of the best-sounding chips Apple ever used — in a form factor you can load with up to 2TB of music. Rockbox adds FLAC support and drag-and-drop file management. The result is a player that sounds better than most things you can buy new, costs maybe $50-100 in parts depending on how you source it, and has exactly zero apps trying to sell you things.
There's a whole community around this — r/ipod on Reddit, hundreds of videos with millions of views on YouTube if you want someone to walk you through it. It's not for everyone, but the fact that it exists and is thriving says something.
Why Now?
I think the simple answer is that your phone is too good at being a phone. Music is on it, but so is everything else, and the context collapse is exhausting. A dedicated player solves that by being boring on purpose — it does one thing, it does it well, and it doesn't have a feed.
This is the same logic driving the wired headphones thing, the record player thing, the "I want to own my music" thing. It's just a specific relationship with technology that feels increasingly worth having.
FAIR WARNING: going down the modded iPod rabbit hole is almost a hobby on its own. Budget your time accordingly.
