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For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com)
The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.
"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"
Really?
I loved buying Maxell XL-IIS blanks. That being said, I can't see buying and making tapes today. It'd be like buying an old Polaroid camera... oh wait I did that
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
For a Computer News Website, Spelling Is Just an Eight Letter Word
So, I don't get it: there is a son who turns to the Dark Side, lives on a Death Star, wears a black mask. And there is a rebel faction that wants to blow up the Death Star by targeting a specific area with X-Wing fighters. And there is a hero that uses the Force. So what is the difference in this movie versus the other one that came out 40 years ago? Is it a movie for the SJW crowd? The main character in the movie didn't look like she could beat up a kitten, but somehow defeated a Dark Lord one-on-one once she "discovered" the force 15 minutes previously. And this gets 98% on Rotten Tomatoes?
Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.
Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.
Only weirdos continue to make magtapes in the age of the mp3. Audio magtapes have shit quality (at least, typical audiocassette tape does) and degrade over time, and they break. The ONLY reason AT ALL that they still exist is for 4x4s. A cheap mp3 player often doesn't remember your song position. A cheap tape deck is even cheaper, if you don't cheat and just install an el cheapo amp with an mp3 player directly connected to it.
I went for mp3 in my 4x4 :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the hiss?
I think that Mozilla could learn a lot from this example: there's clearly a market for vintage technologies that just work, and this market is larger than most people would expect.
While we're talking about cassette tapes here, the same would hold true for web browsers.
Lately, Firefox has become a pile of shit with a broken UI and unwanted bloat like Hello and Pocket. They keep adding in features that nobody actually wants. And we see a browser like Pale Moon, which is basically Firefox without this shit, becoming increasingly popular.
Like this company has done with cassette tapes, Mozilla needs to take Firefox back to its roots. It needs to offer a version of Firefox without the bloat, without the cruft, and without the stupidity.
A vintage Firefox 3.6 experience is what Firefox users want, but with better security, better performance and less memory usage.
Mozilla needs to take modern Firefox and cut it down to what it was in days past. Call it Firefox Vintage for all I care! The important part is that Firefox needs to look to the past if it wants to have a future.
I miss the days when I could save a program I wrote on cassette tape. Things were much simpler back then.
Nobody is talking about the immediate death of all X, everywhere, instantaneously, forever.
Excepting downloads (and nobody with any ounce of sense said streaming would replace anything - that the idiocy of the *IAAs would prevent that from ever happening is and long has been base knowledge)...
All the shit you've listed is fucking over.
Over like Spanish rule of the Americas. Over like the US Civil War. Over like Hitler's aspirations for a thousand year reich. Over like Linux's chances of ever breaching the desktop market.
Sure, you can eat paella while bemoaning the Lost Cause of a racially pure computing environment where you can fuck about in Tux Racer. Go nuts.
But that shit is over. The world, in general, has moved on.
That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know the mix tape is still a thing if you are trying to impresses someone else's genitals. Or holdouts like my parents, their phone still has a cord and a wheel, the TV is made of wood, they would probably still get a block of ice delivered if that was an option. VHS still exists, poor man example of piracy? I still have books, does that make me a old fogey? Did you take ceramics in school? Why? Have you ever had to mine your own clay and bake it in a kiln in order to have something to eat off of?
I have a high end tape deck and a box of blank Type II and a number of blank Type IV cassettes but I haven't hooked up my tape deck to my new Elite AV receiver nor to my previous one. The last time I used it was around 2000 when I digitized a widow's late husband's demo tapes to clean up the audio and put it on CDs for her.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Who's buying these? The same crowd that thinks LPs offer a superior listening experience to digital? Sigh...
The guy buys a blank tape every day, over and over, because he forgets he already done it. Terrific repeat customer.
lucm, indeed.
I haven't bought in blank cassette tapes in 20 years, and I am not even part of the hipster mp3 crowd. I don't own any music on mp3 (very few people who have mp3s actually own it, but that is another tale for another day). I do have several hundred CDs.
What got me wondering is that I have bought much more recently, backup drive tapes in different formats. That got me wondering if perhaps this company is doing a lot of volume in DAT, DLT or other formats, and maybe not so much in classic cassette tapes.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You can feel the weight balance to tell how much of the tape is on one reel versus the other. You can rewind and fastforward by gut-feeling, with no display. Every operation of the player is tactile, and there are no hidden options menus, touchscreens, or any of that crap.
Don't you know that electrons flow differently through silicon compared to vacuum? Silicon is too cold and you can hear that. Just give me an old tube amp hooked up to an old AM tube radio and feel the warmth.........
In the UK, as a kid I used to record the top 40 chart off radio 1 onto cassette. And then shove the tape in a walkman! That is 3 button presses - Record, rewind, play. Nothing comes close in convenience today. All they need to do is change the radio cassette player and walkman to record to tape using a 16 bit, 24khz digital recording format, and it would easily compete with CD/IPOD
Don't know about wax, but for stone tablets see any cemetery...or look at a lot of the markers for house numbers in my neighborhood...many are stone tablets. They last a long time...odds are they will renumber the house before the tablet goes bad.
We used cassette tapes for other purposes too... http://www.oldcomputers.net/hp... We'd save off a program to cassette for storage, and it usually worked the next time you tried to load the program. Follow the link and check out the three people in the picture, ready to get to work!
The first time I found ample access to a computer (HP 9830A desktop calculator) was at Texas A&M in '76-'77. Its hard to believe that I spent entire nights from dusk to dawn in the math building on campus, learning BASIC, including a Star Trek game. There's no telling how much thermal paper I ran through the printer.
I read TFA last night from ARS itself...
As soon as I read the summary, I realized they got it backwards.
From TFA:
''In a September article, Bloomberg reported that NAC “has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company's sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes.” ''
70% pre-recorded; 30% blanks.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Lived her 30+ years, that company has grown I think every year
Anyone who buys one might still need tapes.
I was just busy setting up my C64 and to my surprise, most of my tape data is still there, 30 years later. So yes, this business makes sense to me. All thanks to Philips, Netherlands - of course !
http://www.sharpmz.org/mz-700/... My kids still use it -- seriously!
I grew up in the golden age of audio cassettes. They had lots of great audio features:
- Tape decks routinely came with specs stating the level of "wow" and "flutter" effects you could expect from the deck, caused by variations in the motor speed and gearing system.
- Left and right channel tracks routinely bled into each other.
- Tapes stretched and degraded with each use, further distorting the sound quality.
- And the hiss...the ever-present hiss! You could turn on Dolby NR, which eliminated a lot of the hiss, but also deadened the sound.
No, I have no desire to go back to the "good old days" of audio cassettes. Warm subtleties? Maybe, if you are willing to put with all the extra racket to get that precious warmth. No thanks!
Just because a new technology comes along, the older one does not automatically become useless. There are often corner cases which are important for hundreds of thousands of users, or an established user base for which technology works good enough.
What tapes, floppies, Polaroid or Yahoo's curated internet directory could not fulfil is manyfold growth over short term expected by stock market. We live in a crazy world where a company can make a useful product, provide a living for tens of thousands of employees and post consistent year over year growth in profits. Yet, it gets forced into quality-killing cost cutting or unnecessary risks by shareholders who expect it to justify 100x price/earning ratio. Then it really dies because the product is crap, not because it's intrinsically useless.
The latest round of silliness is "PC is dying". Of course it is not. It is just been around for enough time for everyone to have one, and people are just in the market for a replacement every few years, where "few" can be as much as a decade for a desktop with a simple use case like balancing the books. But this is too boring for investors, so I am sure I will be forced into doing taxes on my watch when my laptop dies.
Theresa Caputo, the "Long Island Medium", records each of her "readings" with her clients on standard cassette tape using an old-school cassette recorder.
www.tlc.com/tv-shows/long-island-medium/videos/about-a-tape-recorder/
Maybe I should buy a few and boot up my old VIC 20...
Stone tablets are used as tombstones.
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Steve Stites
... let them have it. It's not as if music is of interest to anyone important.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"