But the cassette is more fragile and less beloved when viewed through a lens of nostalgia. In the battered Walkman I owned, the tape inside the cassette would often get wound around one of the spokes inside the player, forcing the tape to unravel from the shell of the cassette. Countless tapes were ruined this way, by having to hand-wind the tape back into the cassette’s plastic body, warping the insides and leaving a listener with a cacophony of only barely decipherable warbling.
