The Elbow Revitalizes Your Old Cassette Collection

Why anyone’s inventing things for cassette tapes is a mystery to us, but we appreciate good design when we see it, so we couldn’t let The Elbow slip by us without a post. The basic idea of The Elbow is to play cassette tapes without the bulky stereo system they used to be surrounded by. Instead, you flip the player up to accept a tape and fit a single pulley in one of the wheels for playback. Presumably this is something you’d use as a portable music device, maybe clipped to a belt the way the Walkman used to, and if we’re being honest, we’re not totally opposed to that idea. We’re a little rusty, but making tapes was something we liked back when it was relevant, and it’s a little more satisfying than a playlist. The Elbow is just a concept right now, but BrainMonk created a PDF that lays out what you’d need to build it and are themselves looking into producing the throwback. If it does end up releasing, we’re not totally ruling it out as something we’d buy.