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.

Comments

Really?

[ledow]

"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"

Really?

Re:Really?

[rockout]

How great is it that they spelled it wrong but got the letter count of the correct spelling?

Re:Really?

[lucm]

Christmas miracle!

The best

[rockout]

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

Very few mediums die completely

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Very few mediums die completely

[MightyYar]

CDs killed vinyl just as surely as digital has killed CDs. That a few holdouts still use them does not make them any less dead as a mainstream medium. You can still ride a horse if you like, and once a year a significant number of people even watch a horse race. That does not mean that the automobile did not kill the horse.

Re:Very few mediums die completely

[Dogtanian]

I think he knows what you mean, he's just making a point about the irritating habit of using "digital" as a synonym for downloads and streaming and- even more irritatingly- implying that CDs and DVDs somehow aren't "digital". (Compact Discs were originally marketed using the fact they were digital- it was arguably the biggest selling point, and is even included in the bloody logo!).

I've commented before that I'd expect this kind of annoying use of language in the mainstream press but that you'd expect better from Slashdot which is- or was- a site for genuine geeks interested in the underlying science and technology and not just the superficial "boys toys" aspects (#), but apparently not.

(#) It's my belief that despite the fact people are apparently *much* more tech-savvy than they were even 15 years ago, people's understanding of (and interest in) the underlying fundamentals- such as what "digital" actually means- isn't actually that much better when it comes down to it. Yeah, every man and his dog is obsessed with his smartphone in a way that only marginalised geeks were with technology back in the day- but while they know how to use the Android interface, do they actually understand even at a basic level how the underlying technology (e.g. the Internet and computers) work? They know how many gigabytes is a decent amount for what they want to use, but do they understand what a gigabyte- or rather a byte- actually is? I suspect most people don't. Anyway, as I said, I expect that from the mainstream media, I expect better from Slashdot contributors... except I don't any more. :-(

Re:Very few mediums die completely

[TWX]

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.

On the other hand, the drop in volume can be measured, and eventually the drop in volume reaches a point where the only customers left are niche customers, and sometimes there aren't enough niche customers to justify production anymore.

I have a fairly large LaserDisc collection. There were machines to record LaserDisc, but they were very limited in number. No one produces blanks for them anymore just as no one produces titles on LaserDisc anymore. There had been "Selectavision", an RCA system for movies that played on a vinyl disc. No more of those either. 8-track also appears to be completely out of production even though it had achieved fairly significant market penetration, to the point it was common in automobiles and home stereos in the seventies and touching the eighties.

This particular factory, if they play their cards right, can be the niche manufacturer for a whole bunch of media as the big players get out. They have to be careful and pick-and-choose what's worth trying to keep up with, but if they choose wisely they can continue to be the source for blanks and possibly even factory-mastered media for some time after the big players stop. If they choose poorly though, that could just knock them out.

Re:Very few mediums die completely

[Lumpy]

They company still makes DAT tape. I still record digital audio to tape as my old sony pocket DAT recorder still kicks the crap out of any other portable recording system out there. and the DAT drive I have hanging off of a SCSI->USB reads in the digital audio to the PC just beautifully.

"still buys a few hundred blanks each year."

[Nutria]

That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?

Re:"still buys a few hundred blanks each year."

[Nutria]

Because in the new reality they're trying to create, you are liable for what your customers do with your product.

The RIAA/MPAA should sue the electric companies that supply the power to pirates. After all, those computers don't run on hamsters!!

Blind folks still use cassette tape quite a lot.

[Myself]

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.

Dice: /. reciclyng arstechnica articles ... badly

[williamyf]

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.

Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s

[lgw]

Well, at least vinyl still does something that even CDs can't

Make hipsters happy? It has no audio advantage, to be sure.

Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD,

Make audiophiles happy? Make your cables danceable?

The only limitation of CDs (if you include CD-Rs etc) is that they only contain enough information to match perfect human hearing, so you might want more bits for the mastering process, where some information loss is inevitable. But for consumer use, just playing the music, CDs are right.

The only example that makes sense is a tube amp, which distorts sound in a way many people find pleasing.

Re:What's the point?

[lgw]

But you also hear things on vinyl that gets left out on digital media because the sampling rate isn't high enough.

This is not only wrong, but provably wrong. That's the nice thing about math: actual proofs. After you've listened to a record a few times, you've degraded the audio quality through wear. Perhaps you like that sound better? Many people like the distortion of tube amps better.

Also, most prominently used digital audio formats are lossy, which means some of the data gets lost as part of the compression process

True enough. Low bitrate MP3s annoy me to no end, but they're still better than cassette tape.

But there is no better listening experience than vinyl with a good turntable and high-end speakers.

You forgot directional cables. Don't hook em up backwards: you need your cables to be danceable.

Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s

[Lumpy]

Except Hipsters have a buttload more money than the rednecks... and they pay very well for someone to restore that 1965 motorcycle for them and add a beard holder.

I love hipsters, they actually pay their bills.