Cassettes are selling again, which means more people own tapes and have nowhere sensible to put them. US buyers picked up 436,400 cassettes in 2023 according to Luminate, up from about 80,000 in 2015, and storage has mostly stayed stuck in the plastic-rack era. Love Hultén’s fix is a wall-mounted unit built for a client named Melted Veldt, combining a rack for around 54 tapes with a player built from a late-1990s Sony Walkman WM-EX655. Up top, a brushed aluminum panel holds a tiny oscilloscope screen, a speaker grille, and keyboard-style transport keys. Hang it up, slide in a tape, and your music collection becomes the decor.
Hultén works out of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has spent years turning old tech into handmade wooden oddities, from an to a . This piece is calmer than most of his work, but the details are pure Hultén. Engraved lines on the faceplate connect the knobs and buttons like a circuit diagram. The oscilloscope wiggles along to whatever’s playing, which is useless in the best possible way. A slot under the screen shows off the current tape’s J-card, so guests know exactly what you’re making them listen to.
Designer: Love Hultén
Sony built the WM-EX655 between 1997 and 1999, wrapping it in a diamond-patterned aluminum shell it claimed was 2.8 times tougher than its predecessor’s. It also packed auto reverse and Dolby B, a noise reduction system that tamed the hiss every tape fan knows by heart. Hultén mounts the mechanism behind a rounded window, so you can watch the reels spin while the music plays. He said this would probably be his last such build, since grade-A Walkmans are getting hard to source. Battery figures for this unit aren’t public, though his original reportedly managed more than 40 hours per charge, which is long enough to forget where the cable lives.
Brushed aluminum, a gridded speaker grille, and a screen with rounded corners recall 1960s and 1970s electronics, when Braun radios and portable TVs made metal panels feel like the future. The transport keys are sculpted like mechanical keyboard caps, three in gray and one colored play key that stands out at a glance. Two toggle switches marked PW-ON and CH-ON sit above them, next to a red indicator LED. Two small aluminum knobs sit under the screen, each set into an engraved dial reminiscent of an old TV’s tuning controls. The panel looks complicated from across the room, but up close, the controls are straightforward.
Below the deck, three columns of slots hold roughly 54 cassettes, each lying flat with its spine facing out. Hultén made a point of the horizontal storage in his post, and it turns the collection into something you browse like a bookshelf. Judging by the standard cassette cases, I estimate the whole unit stands about 25 inches tall and 15 inches wide (roughly 65 x 38 cm). That makes it a bit shorter than the C-52, which measured about 31 x 14 x 3 inches (78 x 35 x 7 cm) and used dual round speakers instead of a single grille. The flat top doubles as a tiny shelf, already home to a vase and a spare clear tape.
If you just want to play tapes, FiiO’s CP13 costs around $90, with an aluminum shell that nods to Sony’s original 1979 TPS-L2 Walkman. Your tapes still need somewhere to go, though. Hultén’s piece keeps the player and the collection together, with every spine on display. This one is a one-off commission for Melted Veldt and isn’t for sale, but if cassettes keep selling like this, I hope somebody builds a production version and copies the keycaps exactly.
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