I ordered this to listen to some old family conversation cassettes.  It works perfectly.
The sound is very clear even with the headphones.  Though the forward and reverse are a bit slow.
Two issues for me are:
1) the headphones are a bit big for my ears
2) when you hold the player as if you are putting in a cassette the buttons for play, forward, reverse, stop, record are upside down.  It took me a couple minutes to figure which was forward and which was reverse.