Cassette Tapes On The Wane

jonerik writes "The BBC has an article on the current status of the once-popular cassette tape in the UK and elsewhere. It's been a long climb up and a long fall down for the audio format introduced by Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1963. Having sold 83 million units in the UK at their 1989 peak, cassettes sold just 900,000 units in the UK last year. And yet the cassette soldiers on in the West in niche applications - particularly in the audio book market - and in other countries where CD and MP3 penetration hasn't been as extensive. From the article: 'Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.'"

Comments

Yay!

[RickPartin]

Good riddance! Cassette tapes allowed easy duplication of music between friends that destroyed the music industry! Oh wait no it didn't.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Cobralisk]

CDs can be nice, but I'm really sick of losing media to scratches. DVDs doubly so. I still have most of my VHS and audio cassettes from the mid eighties that work fine. Of course, its not like you had to carry a wad of tape to feed into a player, and manually wind it onto spools (most of the time). I'd like just one good reason why optical media has to be handled and exposed to the elements like this.

the lost art of the mix tape

[CoffeeJedi]

A friend and i were just discussing the mix tapes of our youth the other day. When you'd strive to make sure the song was cut in EXACTLY. How you'd try to fill to the exact end of the tape. How you could fill in with sound effects from tv shows. Waiting for hours for your favorite song to come on the radio, then carefully editing around the dj chatter. Giving or recieving a mixtape as a gift really MEANT something.

CD's are just too easy, a few minutes on P2P or the iTunes store, and you're done. You kids don't know how good you got it! We had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the tape recorder, and.....

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[grungebox]

In Soviet Russia, cassette tapes you!

Since you're new, I'll forgive you. But here are your problems:
1) The previous statement said "Turkey sells 88 million casettes..." Your retort is not parallel. The correct response is, "In Soviet Russia, casette sells you!" or something equivalent.
2) I noticed you're sitting pretty a score of 1. To increase that score, you nowadays can't just make a lame Soviet Russia joke. Throw in those now-popular old people in Korea, perhaps. Maybe write "I know I'll get modded down for thus but..." and then whatever. That's a surefire way to get to 5. Or you could say something that alludes to "In Soviet Russia" without actually writing it. For example, "You know the editors are just baiting us by saying 'In Saudi Arabia...'", except say something funny instead of that.

By the way, I know I'll get modded down for this whole spiel.

Cassettes

[jd]

Type IV cassettes were comparable in quality to a CD and about the same sort of price, although most stereos didn't have the ability to take advantage of anything above a Type II.

They were a lot more durable, too. CDs scratch a lot more easily, and you can't repair them with scotch tape.

Because they were analogue devices, you could play them at variable speed or even in reverse, which meant you could get some really strange effects if you tried. You can't really do that with a physical digital system, you'd have to read the information into RAM and then vary the sample speed.

CDs and DVDs decay rapidly in UV light, which means they are worse than useless for long-term storage. Tape, on the other hand, can remain in extremely good shape for decades.

Finally, tape systems are simpler and mechanical, which means that they can be maintained in countries that have little or no technology. I would really not want to try to replace a 16-bit DAC chip in a CD player in the middle of the Sahara desert, but unclogging a jammed lever would be relatively easy.

(For that matter, given the choice of making a DAC chip from scratch, or winding copper to make a motor, it's fairly obvious as to what the minimum level of technology you'd need would be.)

That's not to say that digital formats suck. Well, most do - they're low-cost and low-grade - but that's because manufacturers are cheapskates and not because the concept is flawed. Digital formats should be "better than live", because stage microphones are generally poorer than studio microphones, studio power should be a great deal "cleaner", and RFI interference should be much more controllable.

In reality, CDs are 16-bit 44.1 KHz lossy recordings on aluminium disks (the cheapest type you can go for, which means there may well be errors in the recordings, as well as having no meaningful life-expectancy). Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s. (Though damn-near lossless high-end analogue amplifiers have been around about as long.)

What we're getting is third-rate crap that only rich corporations can even maintain, which means most consumers treat such devices as disposable. And then people wonder why those who can't afford, or don't even have access to, those rich corporations opt for something that - for all intents and purposes - is just as good but much more useful to them.

For further notes on this, you might want to check out the clockwork radio (1 hour+ of listening time) that is popular in Africa. When you can't go round the corner for batteries, low-tech solutions that produce high-tech results are going to be popular.