Head back to the future

USB Mix Tape £19.95
Ah, the good old days when you could take a blank cassette and make a compilation tape of your favourite tracks, lovingly indexing the titles and artists in the card. Trickier in these digital days, no? Not when you have the USB version. Looks like a cassette with all the card space you need, but cunningly sneaked into the middle is a USB stick designed for an hour of MP3 tracks, just like it was a C60 tape. www.suck.uk.com

USB turntable £79.95
If you still have some old records but don’t find them quite as easy to carry around as an MP3 player, this turntable is a genius idea. Plug it into your laptop and turn the records into digital music. This model even has Gracenote software to automatically identify the music. You can clean up music that’s crackly and then export it as MP3 files to your computer before you put it onto your digital music player. There’s even a new model with an iPod dock built in, so you can transfer it straight to the player (this costs £129.95).The turntable itself is also brilliant because it reminds you how enjoyable it is to physically put stylus to vinyl. www.firebox.com

Roberts Revival DAB radio £149.99
For something that looks supremely traditional but handles the scores of extra stations and crystal clarity of DAB radio, the Revival uses much the same design as when it was released in the Fifties. Of course, the LCD screen on top is new, as are Auto Tune and PausePlus, which lets you pause what’s playing for up to 40 minutes. It comes in a choice of pastel colours, and if you slip out of DAB coverage area, there’s an FM tuner built in, too. www.robertsradio.co.uk

Fatman iTube ValveDock £199
If you want the convenience of using an MP3 player but miss the warm sound that digital music can’t match, this gloriously retro device provides a rich aural experience and looks pretty cool into the bargain. It’s fully compatible with any iPod (except the shuffle and the iPhone) and because of the three built-in valves it delivers a much smoother sound than you could otherwise expect from compressed MP3 files. It’s available in a new carbon finish and you can buy it without speakers; you can connect a CD player to warm those tracks up, too. Originally cost £500, so it is more of a bargain now. www.fat-man.co.uk

Edifier i-F200 iPod alarm clock £39.95
An alarm clock with twin-bell speakers looks cosy and familiar. If you like that, the silhouette of this clock should comfort you. Look more closely, though, and you’ll see the bells are actually speakers and there’s no clock, just a dock for the iPod. Once connected, you can set it to wake you up to any track you have on board. It comes in three different styles and works with the classic, Nano, Touch and mini versions of the iPod. www.paramountzone.com

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