The boom box is back: cassette tape revival is fuelled by Hong Kong collector and record label

Several items are synonymous with the golden age of hip hop in the 1980s: thick gold rope chains, fuzzy Kangol caps and enormous boom boxes. It was this train of thought that led Dreams Chow Yin-chi to buy his first boom box in 2015.

“I was looking for something physical that represented hip-hop culture and came across this old boom box in a stall in Sham Shui Po. I thought it was cool, so I bought it for HK$500 [US$64], but I wasn’t thinking about starting a collection,” he said. However, that one boom box quickly became two, then three, and today he has nearly 90.

The portable cassette player was introduced to the world by Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1966, allowing radio broadcasts to be recorded on cassette tape without any cables or microphones for the first time.

Its popularity grew in Japan in the early 1970s after a number of domestic companies released their own versions, and the trend had spread to the United States by the late 1970s, with music lovers attracted by the boom box’s portability and its loud volume, especially those in the budding hip-hop and b-boy communities. The boom box became be a fixture at block parties, while rap MCs used them to record their music onto cassettes to share.

In the beginning, Chow mainly looked for boom boxes in good condition on second-hand stalls in the street markets of Sham Shui Po in Kowloon, Hong Kong. However, as his collection grew, he started snapping up boom boxes that played an important role in hip-hop history, such as the JVC RC-M90 -seen on the cover of the LL Cool J hip-hop classic Radio – as well as harder-to-find models. He mostly searched for these on websites such as eBay.