This story is a review of FIIO ’s new CP13, a stylish portable cassette deck that has just been released; but before we get to the review, you might be asking yourself why would I be so excited to own a cassette deck and why on earth would it warrant a review? After all, nobody listens to cassettes, right? Here’s the back story:
The Backstory
Last summer I spent more weekends than I care to admit travelling to U.S cities to attend Dead & Company concerts, a band that includes some of the original members of The Grateful Dead who have become the guardian of all things Grateful Dead, including summer touring. If you are thinking ‘how niche can you get’, just keep in mind that Dead & Company’s Sphere concerts that just concluded in Las Vegas sold 500,000 tickets across the month-long residency, grossing the band over $150 million. In 2023 according to Pollstar, Dead & Co. played 28 shows selling 845,000 tickets, netting $114 million and ranking the band 5th highest grossing concert tour for the year. Not too shabby for what haters like to call a glorified Grateful Dead cover band.
If you have been to a Dead & Co. show you don’t need to be reminded on just how happy the experience can be surrounded by stoned tie-dyed hippies reliving their youth spent following the original Grateful Dead during the ‘70s and ‘80s, but this time with their kids and grandkids in tow.
One of my summer stops took me to Saratoga Springs, in Upper State New York, an easy drive from Montreal. While my wife Cathy will join me for some shows, she’s not a believer, and once yelled at me, halfway through a 23-minute version of a Grateful Dead song that if there “was a choice between listening to Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir singing in harmony or raccoons screaming in the back yard, she’d pick the raccoons since at least they would be in tune.” What can you do? Haters are gonna hate!
Cathy’s a good sport and in return for her enduring the three-hour concerts (she only goes to one of the three weekend Friday, Saturday and Sunday shows!), I have made sure that we travel to the good tour stops like Chicago, Boston and Upper State New York. This of course is a bribe, but in the end becomes a win-win.
Our adventure to Saratoga Springs brought us further south to the charming hipster town of Hudson, New York, a weekend getaway town for stylish New York City residents with great restaurants, fabulous antique shops and wait for it, an incredible record store that just so happened to have received a whole collection of cassette recordings of past Grateful Dead shows. Turns out, some Deadhead passed away and his spouse dropped off the tapes as part of the estate clean up.
The Grateful Dead were a rarity in allowing their fans to record their shows. Folklore has it that there are some 2,800 live recordings of Dead shows from the late 1960s until Jerry Garcia’s passing in 1995, all taped by fans. These tapes would be traded and shared among Grateful Dead fans that were known as “tapers.” I had never seen a live Dead cassette before, but there I was in Hudson, NY, staring at a box filled with Dead shows between 1976 and 1989!
In my hands were shows from iconic venues such as the Nassau Coliseum, the Capitol Theatre, The Fillmore and The Greek Theatre, all dated with their setlists. What a score! At $5 bucks a tape I bought 20 giving most away as presents to my Deadhead friends. For over a year, the cassettes have sat on my desk, a gateway to history but unable to be played. Somebody was at these shows and recorded them and now their meticulous work sat on my desk, but with no way to be listened to, because well, its 2023-24 and nobody has a cassette deck and tapes have not had the resurgence like vinyl because let’s face it, tapes usually sound pretty bad.
Cassette decks have many moving parts that wear out, so buying a 40-year-old flea market player would all but guarantee an expected awful result not only in sound but probably in destroying the tape. Finally, we have arrived back at the Fiio CP13 review, my gateway purchase that unlocked the mystery of those Dead tapes on my desk and transported me back to June 21,1984 to the venue of my first Dead show at the Kingswood Music Theatre, Toronto.
The Review
Let me start by saying purchasing the FIIO CP13 was not premeditated. I just happened to be walking past the window of Layton Audio on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal, where the retailer had the portable deck in the window. I bought the robin’s egg blue colour dropping $150 on the spot (a tech reviewer actually buying something, instead of waiting for a sample!)
FIIO, the brand name for Guangzhou FIIO Electronics Technology Co. Ltd. is a Chinese manufacturer of portable digital players. Founded in 2007, FIIO, the “FI” standing for high fidelity and the “IO” being a play on one’s and zero’s, the information in a digital file, has earned an excellent reputation for building high-resolution portable audio players earning multiple Reddot and EISA awards for design and quality excellence. FIIO is not a name that aligns with analog, especially old-school analog like a cassette deck, but anything the company manufacturers they do it well.
The FIIO CP13 features an oversized copper fly wheel to minimize “wow and flutter” – the wobbly sound when the tape becomes unbalanced impacting the sound – as low as possible, a custom balanced amplification head, a high voltage power supply that ensures motor stability during cassette playback and performs with a 13-hour battery life. FIIO are the first to admit that this passion project was at risk of never making it off the concept floor due to a nearly non-existent supply chain for cassette deck parts. After much trial and error, the company moved forward, but designed the movement of the CP13 as simple as possible by removing recording and auto-reverse functions, “high-tech” features that were introduced to cassette players in the 1980s.
The FIIO CP13 is a stunning all-aluminium object, rectangular in a size that is of course determined by the physical size of a cassette tape. Classic ‘70s inspired buttons for play, stop, forward and reverse operate the player, while a side circular dial on the side of the player controls volume. The only way you’d notice that this is a 2024 release is that the player has a USB-C input for high-speed charging. A 3.5mm balanced port connects to headphones.
FIIO prides itself on the CP13 being a 100% analog player with everything from the magnetic tape head to the signal amplification and audio circuit being pure analog built around what was once called the “king of operational-amps,” the JRC5532 amplifier, that gives that classic “warm sound” that is often referenced when listing to an analog source.
You can tell that there is a nervousness from FIIO releasing an analog cassette deck when their expertise is in high-resolution digital playback, so the player comes with an orange cardboard paper labeled WARNING! that reminds owners that due to limitations in source material (tapes) and the nature of analog playback, that hiss and background noise may be noticeable when compared to digital players. No kidding.
Back home and the FIIO CP13 fully charged, I chose a Grateful Dead tape from July 14th 1986, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo with the show opening with the crowd-pleasing song “Cold Rain and Snow, followed by classic Dead song “Fire on the Mountain.” (All the tapes that I bought were Maxell XLII 90 minute). My expectations were low, half expecting that the tapes may have even been blank (joke on me), an unnecessary fear alleviated with the classic familiarity of Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing followed by the eruption of the crowd. The hiss, while audible, was slight and the recording by this unknown taper was definitely professional.
While digital remastered recordings are available of that very show, the nostalgia coming from listening to a live recording produced by a Dead fan almost 40 years ago sent goose bumps down my arms and immediately brought me back to my very first live ‘80s Dead show with my brother. A trip down memory lane well worth the price of a $5 used cassette played on a $150 player.
Somewhere in the house are cassette tapes that Cathy sent me when we were dating that include her playing piano and telling me about her day. I was living in Antigua working on a yacht at the time and she would mail the tapes to me as an audible letter from university. I bet our kids (now around the same age Cathy was when she recorded these tapes) would get a kick out of hearing their mother’s voice. In a twist of history repeating itself, our youngest daughter now lives in the Caribbean also working on a yacht.
There’s something really great about taking a trip down memory lane and FIIO’s CP13 is a beautifully constructed analog player. Even if it sits on my desk next to those cassettes more than it’s played, it will still be the best $150 bucks I have spent in a long time. It is a beautiful product to admire and a modern take on a dated technology that still has value, even if it’s to trigger old memories long forgotten.