A Steady Vacuum For The Fastest Cassette Tape Drive Ever | Hackaday
This is a quest to get the fast possible loading speed from a cassette by implementing a vacuum loop. Mainframe tape drives used them to mitigate the stop-start inertia of the reels.
This is, of course, highly impractical and solves no immediate purpose. And that’s why I love it so.
Of course this solves an immediate purpose, namely, the right sounds! 
And I love it, as well.
PS: I just had a lot of fun watching the various PET related videos on this channel.
That is the wrong tape. He needs one that looks like tiny tape reels.
I hope he can find quality media (digital?),as that was the problem with cassette IO
I found.
Something along these lines (actual tiny reels in a chassis)?
While probably rather fiddly to handle, you’d have to modify the chassis only once…
Oh my: what an intriguingly terrible concept.
And yet we have U+2707 TAPE DRIVE (✇) in Unicode
I’ve a key with that on one of my keyboards…
(It’s a custom keyboard for an old PowerMac, and it’s the key that opens the CD drive. Not technically correct, but endearing. Still, something about storage media, etc, mumble…)