A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling (wsj.com)

A reader shares a report: Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era. The world is running out of cassette tape (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, an-eighth of an inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music. The company says it has less than a year's supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. "The best tape ever made," boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. "People will hear a whole new product."

Comments

I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a new car in 2001 that had a cassette player in it. I still use cassettes for mix tapes. Over 300K miles of road trips have been driven to the sounds of the 80s and 90s in all of their Maxell XLII-S glory.

Now take your newfanlged CDs and MP3 players and get off my lawn.

Re:I still use them

[MightyYar]

I don't have it anymore, but I used to have a car with a tape deck. It had a single tape in it all the time, because I patched in a line-level audio jack for my mp3 player that only worked when the deck was "playing".

I have a love-hate memory of tapes. Subjectively, I have fond memories of them. Objectively, they were horrendous and only used because LPs were not portable and portable CD players were bulky, prone to skip, and were too expensive until late in the game. The hoops that had to be jumped through to get decent sound...

Re:I still use them

[FatCashewsSlapMe]

When my late father handed down his 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix to me, a Dolly Parton cassette tape was stuck inside the player and wouldn't come out. The radio had an input jack so I was able to play audiobooks from my iPhone on long road trips.

Re:I still use them

[DontBeAMoran]

I buy music from iTunes, burn it to CD, rip it to MP3, press a vinyl, scan the vinyl at 1200dpi, fax the scan to myself, save it in JPEG at 20% quality, use software to reconstruct the audio and record the end result to cassette tape.

Sometimes I don't even notice if it's the cassette tape playing or if I'm just listening to an empty AM/FM channel.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

I buy music from iTunes, burn it to CD, rip it to MP3, press a vinyl, scan the vinyl at 1200dpi, fax the scan to myself, save it in JPEG at 20% quality, use software to reconstruct the audio and record the end result to cassette tape.

Bullshit, maybe you are pressing acetate, but there is no way you are pressing vinyl.

Don't talk shit all you life.

Re: I still use them

[DontBeAMoran]

Shit, you're right. It should have been:

I buy music from iTunes, burn it to CD, rip it to MP3, 3D-print a record with nylon filament, scan the 3D print at 1200dpi, fax the scan to myself, save it in JPEG at 20% quality, use software to reconstruct the audio and record the end result to cassette tape.

Re:I still use them

[chuckugly]

I still own an 8 track RECORDER. Sigh.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to transfer it to write recordings.

Re: I still use them

[MightyYar]

Did you feel like a real man?

Only when I stuck my dick in it.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Autocorrect!! My joke was supposed to be wire recordings.

Re:I still use them

[SpaghettiPattern]

I had expected split rate of 1200 and 75 Baud somewhere in your excellent argument.

Re:I still use them

[serviscope_minor]

I have a love-hate memory of tapes. Subjectively, I have fond memories of them. Objectively, they were horrendous and only used because LPs were not portable and portable CD players were bulky, prone to skip, and were too expensive until late in the game.

I have fond memories of tapes. I used to use D120s, since then you could cram 2 hours of music on to one tape. Of course the tapes were a bit thinner and prone to snapping.

Fond memories of picking broken, stretched D120 out of the capstsans!

Re:I still use them

[93 Escort Wagon]

Woo hoo! I knew if I held onto the Escort long enough, its accessories would become useful again!

I’m obviously an audiophile!

Re:I still use them

[serviscope_minor]

I buy music from iTunes, burn it to CD, rip it to MP3, press a vinyl, scan the vinyl at 1200dpi, fax the scan to myself, save it in JPEG at 20% quality, use software to reconstruct the audio and record the end result to cassette tape.

That's all fine, but unless you connected your laptop to the internet with one of these ethernet cables you'll lose all the richness the mid tones from the JPEGing process, not to mention the warmth and depth from the faxing.

I assume you're using a true vintage *analog* fax machine there. Hard to find, but there's really no substitute.

Oh also, don't forget the cable is directional so if you plug it in the wrong way round none of this will work properly.

Re:I still use them

[DontBeAMoran]

Ah! Directional cables. I can see it now... Presenting the new Monster Cable unidirectional audio cables, with "built-in 0.7V softener".

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen a tape player for years. Not including my parents tape player in the living room, which sits right beside the VHS player, that we had to use to watch the instructional video for an appliance.

There is no good reason to use cassette tape, at all. You can buy hundreds of 1-8GB USB drives for cheaper.

Re:I still use them

[hawk]

Hey,,, you can recored some Conway Twitty for my '72 Caddie convertible :)

I pick up rednecky 8-tracks for it when I stumble across them in thrift shops (which I hit to buy the vinyl I couldn't afford when it was new . . .)

Then again, I still keep a wire recorder, and even have a spare but broken cassette (weight eased in pounds) for it. I have delusions of getting it running someday,

hawk

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, I listen to my music over SSB on shortwave. Kids, these days...

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Passing malware by tape is a worthy challenge. USB drives are probably already malicious from the mfgr

Re:I still use them

[MightyYar]

The sound is so warm, though.

Re:I still use them

[UnknownSoldier]

> with one of these ethernet cables

Those the are the same morons (AudioQuest) who sell a Diamond Braided $999 HDMI cable

When did audiophile become an euphemism for More money then brains ???

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they could use technology to get rid of the capstan and pinch roller assembly, and make better (lower friction) surfacing on the playback head. With better tape media, the result could be quite pleasing (yes my memory is a little rusty on the details).

Re:I still use them

[avandesande]

Without Audioquest where would we get inspiration for these great reviews?

Re: I still use them

[thereitis]

Don't forget to bounce the CD laser through a hall of mirrors first, for optimum quality.

Re:I still use them

[samwichse]

I did something similar to my 2000 Honda's tape deck.

Except I soldered the contacts shut n the micro switch closed when a tape was inserted so it thinks there's a tape in there all the time.

Works like a champ. The amp in the OEM deck isn't very powerful, but it's actually a pretty nice quality unit.

Re:I still use them

[MightyYar]

Yeah, I didn't think my mod through. I thought I had it set up to "trick" the tape deck into being the input whenever I plugged in an external jack, but this only worked when the external player was on the same ground and unless I plugged it in, it was on battery and floating. Plugging it in caused a ground loop. So rather than fix my shitty work, I just inserted a tape and moved on :)

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

That euphemism has been true since at least 1987. And based on the state of the industry back then (Stereophile magazine, anyone?) I'm sure that euphemism had been true since long before 1987.

Re: I still use them

[pnutjam]

Still doesn't mean shit if you don't have gold connectors on you premium audio cables and a diamond shard needle for your record player.

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a footlocker full of reel to reel tapes I made off of the radio during the sixties.

You took a clock radio, took the back off of it, took a patch cord and put alligator clips on the speaker wires and ran the other end into the input of the tape recorder or tape deck.

Today I just put a stereo plug into the PC speaker headphone jack and run the other ends of the patch cord into the right and left line in on my Akai tape deck.

I go to estate sales and buy reel to reel tape recorders.

I am slowly converting the tapes into CDs.

Most of the music on the tapes are on YouTube but taping off of the radio I got DJs introducing the music and other stuff that reminds me of better days when the music was fun to listen to.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, you're right. It should have been:

I buy music from iTunes, burn it to CD, rip it to MP3, 3D-print a record with nylon filament, scan the 3D print at 1200dpi, fax the scan to myself, save it in JPEG at 20% quality,

use software

        ^^^^^^^^^^ AI machine learning

  to reconstruct the audio and record the end result to cassette tape.

FTFY

Re: I still use them

[DewDude]

You don't press acetates either; you cut them.

Re:I still use them

[lgw]

Somewhere I actually have a pair of directional Monster cables, as evidenced by the arrows printed on them. Not sure where they came from.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

You broke your promise Creimer. We are about to break ours. Tread very carefully chris.

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Pshhhh, cheap bastard, I paid $10,000 for my
platnium hdmi cable

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold conductors okay, but any audiophile worth his salt knows that you can only get authentic sonic reproduction with vacuum-encased, vibration-isolated copper cables.

Re:I still use them

[leadfoot]

Maxell XLII-S, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time, a long time

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should worry less about him and a bit more about me. :) The satellite views of your shitty home are rather amusing.

Re: I still use them

[negRo_slim]

Check out Techmoan on YT sounds up you're alley.

Re: I still use them

[Khyber]

"but there is no way you are pressing vinyl."

Desktop Record Cutters have been around for pressing or etching your own vinyls for like three years, now. Do try and keep up with the times.

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the 'loudness' button more powerful, Master Yoda?

Re: I still use them

[negRo_slim]

Not using gold plated optical lines, pffft. Why even bother?

Re: I still use them

[negRo_slim]

They're all over the thrift shops for some reason.

Re: I still use them

[negRo_slim]

I'm glad people are out there preserving bits of the past like that. I think it's more important than most realize.

Re:I still use them

[operagost]

Maxell XLII-S were the best. Excellent tape and the shells were tanks you could get away with stepping on.

Re: I still use them

[dfsmith]

I bought gold-plated optical cables at Fry's last week. It was the cheapest option. And, yes, there really was a tiny gold-colored ferule around the fiber. I'm sure the photons are much happier and crisper now.

(Crutchfield link since Fry's doesn't have a description.)

Re: I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot QR code. I hear it's better at recovering data.

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

CREIMIER SAID:

All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Shitposting, Amazon affiliate spam, being fat, and being a general nuisance.

CREIMER SAID:
Only on Slashdot.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

So why hasn't managed to ban this intentionally disruptive user? According to him his "trolls" can't help themselves.. he is the one in control willingly and maliciously creating disruptions. Reasons that slashdot has stated they will ban accounts at their discretion.

Why isn't creimer banned? He degrades the slashdot experience for everyone and attempts to monetize these efforts. This is effectively stealing from Dice.

Just the other day creimer attempted to dox a user by posting her name and ip address. How many chances should he be given?

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.

The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.

For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.

Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!

Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."

For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...

Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:

Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.

To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.

The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!

Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.

I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65

Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
https://school.discoveryeducat...

But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.

Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education

Re:I still use them

[Anonymous Coward]

yes... and your computer phones aswell...
damn kids and their microchips...

tomorrow I will install a god damn record player in my god damn truck!

Re:I still use them

[rpstrong]

I actually had the Customer Service Clown from my cable company ask me to reverse the Ethernet cable connecting my cable box to my router. I twiddled my thumbs for several seconds, then reported that I still had no signal.

I can only assume that they may get better results that way, instead of asking: "Are the connections tight?"

Time to sell my old music cassettes

[mars-nl]

Recently moved and carried a full box of tapes to me new house. Wondered what to do with it. Send me your offers now!

Re:Time to sell my old music cassettes

[antdude]

1 IRR!

Nice Pun

[Anonymous Coward]

Shortage, get it?

Re:Nice Pun

[DontBeAMoran]

I only got the "leaves cassette fans reeling" part.

Re:Nice Pun

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is about the vienna sausage and two raisins between your legs?

Ummmm, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Illuminate us.

Drive belts die

[MangoCats]

All my tape handling gear included rubber drive belts at some point in the chain (floppy disks, VCR, cassette, etc.) Those belts rarely work for more than 15 years. I suppose there may be some direct drive cassette players, but I'm not aware of any.

Who sells good quality, new, cassette recorder/players?

Re:Drive belts die

[ArchieBunker]

Just replace the drive belt. Why throw a perfectly good piece of equipment away that can be fixed with a $1 part?

Re:Drive belts die

[Anonymous Coward]

Just replace the drive belt. Why throw a perfectly good piece of equipment away that can be fixed with a $1 part?

It isn't a perfectly good piece of equipment, that's why.

Re:Drive belts die

[Sarten-X]

Because it's a $1 part, but it takes 3 hours of my time to prep, execute, and clean up the project. The benefit is that I get an old cassette deck back. However, since the vast majority of media I would use with that deck is already available to me on digital media, that isn't much of a benefit. Even once the machine is repaired, it's only going to work until the next piece fails, all of which already have 20 years of time on them since they were last known to meet quality standards. I could do a full rebuild, cleaning, and inspection, but that's also now a full day of effort, if not more.

Then there's the consideration for what else I could do in that time. I could play some games, read a book, go watch some YouTube videos, or a number of other things that I personally would find much more enjoyable than tearing apart a dusty 90's tape deck. That might be someone else's favorite hobby, but it's not really mine.

The decision is a lot more complex than simply saying it's a $1 part.

Re:Drive belts die

[DontBeAMoran]

Replace a $1 part every 15 years? Are you insane? That's almost seven cents per year! We're not all made of money!

Re: Drive belts die

[Anonymous Coward]

All my tape handling gear included rubber drive belts at some point in the chain (floppy disks, VCR, cassette, etc.)

You left out the.

Re:Drive belts die

[Hodr]

3 hours? What the hell. I used to overhaul broken VHS and Betamax players from the flea market and 90+ percent of the time the procedure was pull the top, replace the belt(s) (usually cheap O-ring drive belts you can buy by the bag in various sizes), hit the inside with compressed air, then swab the head with alcohol. Whole procedure took 5 minutes. Then I would go back and sell my $10 treasure for $100 the next weekend.

Re:Drive belts die

[religionofpeas]

Experience, proper tools, and suitable workspace. Makes all the difference.

Re:Drive belts die

[ArchieBunker]

A few screwdrivers and a tabletop is all you need for replacing a belt. Not like you're doing an engine out Ferrari belt change here. What kind of nerd wouldn't be interested in learning how something works by taking it apart and fixing it?

Re:Drive belts die

[religionofpeas]

Screwdrivers, compressed air, alcohol. Maybe also some torx or hex. And of course, the assorted bag of cheap O-ring drive belts.

What kind of nerd wouldn't be interested in learning how something works by taking it apart and fixing it?

Not every nerd is interested in all things.

Re: Drive belts die

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah. You've never done a six loop Nak belt obviously..

Re:Drive belts die

[DewDude]

It did take me almost 45 minutes to change the belt on my Onkyo Integra TA-207 cassette deck. About 3 minutes to remove the cassette mechanism from the chassis, 40 minutes of dealing with a seized, already stripped out screw while trying not to actually brake anything, a minute to change the belt and another minute to locate a replacement screw.

But it was the first time I'd torn in to that unit and that seized screw put up a fight.

Re:Drive belts die

[Khyber]

Any nerd worth a shit can handle a screwdriver and have something disassembled and reassembled inside of an hour.

Re:Drive belts die

[TWX]

There is nothing scarier than a programmer heading to the server room with a screwdriver in his hand.

Re:Drive belts die

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing scarier than a programmer heading to the server room with a screwdriver in his hand.

Yes there is: a sysadmin with a compiler.

Re:Drive belts die

[emaname]

There are more and more stores repairing old audio equipment. In fact, my nephew does it. I know of at least two other stores in our medium size community that are doing it. And I've replaced a drive belt in my audio component cassette player. It was very easy. Maybe half an hour. I forget the make of the unit, but it's from the late 70's. You might be able to find a Youtube about how to repair your unit, who knows.

Re:Drive belts die

[Khyber]

Any half-competent nerd programmer has most likely already built their own system several times.

It's a sysadmin with a screwdriver that worries me more. IME they've rarely seen the inside of a computer case of any sorts.

Re:Drive belts die

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Because it's a $1 part, but it takes 3 hours of my time to prep, execute, and clean up the project. The benefit is that I get an old cassette deck back. However, since the vast majority of media I would use with that deck is already available to me on digital media, that isn't much of a benefit. Even once the machine is repaired, it's only going to work until the next piece fails, all of which already have 20 years of time on them since they were last known to meet quality standards. I could do a full rebuild, cleaning, and inspection, but that's also now a full day of effort, if not more.

Then there's the consideration for what else I could do in that time. I could play some games, read a book, go watch some YouTube videos, or a number of other things that I personally would find much more enjoyable than tearing apart a dusty 90's tape deck. That might be someone else's favorite hobby, but it's not really mine.

The decision is a lot more complex than simply saying it's a $1 part.

The GP is talking about "Who sells good quality, new, cassette recorder/players". Plenty of crappy new mono cassette recorders/players can be had for a good price, but it's hard to get a good quality one. At that point repairing an old one for $1, plus 4 weeks waiting for a belt on ebay, plus 3 hours tear down / rebuild starts to make sense. Even if you value your personal time at $50 / hour.

Re:Drive belts die

[Agripa]

I suppose there may be some direct drive cassette players, but I'm not aware of any.

The rubber pinch rollers still wear out even with a direct drive design.

Why cassettes?

[Whatsmynickname]

I grew up with them and I thought they sucked. Had to use compression otherwise the hiss would make dynamic range pretty small. Frequency response was weak at the upper end at best. Could not skip songs too well. Hope the tape didn't come out of the cassette or break... I was longing for a reel to reel when portable CDs first came out, and I never looked back. So why cassettes? I don't get it.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Gilgaron]

I think it is for selling a physical object at shows for novelty. Cars don't come with CD players anymore either, so I'm less sure the playability is strictly the foremost issue compared to a physical token that nominally is functional. Then again if this guy is making the best stuff ever as he says then maybe it is undergoing a renaissance like vinyl..?

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Cassettes are over. Join the 21st Century or be destroyed!

Re:Why cassettes?

[TeknoHog]

It's basically the same reason as vinyl records: you make more money by selling things that wear out over time and cannot be copied exactly. Of course, you need to market it properly as the new hipster fad. I guess the next stage in this retro cycle is DCC or Minidisc, with their warm and fuzzy lossy encodings.

Re:Why cassettes?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Back in the day, cassette tapes were pretty useful: portable, affordable, easy to use, and it didn't take a lot of fiddling or expensive equipment to get a decent recording quality (unless you're an audiophile of course). Tape to tape copies did suck unless the master was really, really good (and that did require some fiddling to get a decent sounding copy). Auto-skip to the next song worked pretty reliably for me on an inexpensive Akai deck or more expensive walkman or car stereo, as long as I added a second-long pause between songs. Issues with the tape sticking, breaking or getting stuck in the machine were extremely rare. Back then, I never thought that tape sucked.

I agree though: why are people still bothering with them?

Re:Why cassettes?

[mlw4428]

One word: Hipsters.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the minidisc...I used to own one...What a waste of money was that :)

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same people who are buying vinyl. It really makes no sense, other than the novelty of it. Being stuck with pops, clicks and hiss when there are no alternatives is one thing. But nowadays there are many options, why choose the inferior ones?

Re:Why cassettes?

[drinkypoo]

It's actually not CDs which have killed the tape for all sensible people, it's MP3s. Tape decks were still useful until fairly recently if you were driving on bumpy roads, especially off-road (or on dirt roads.) In that case, even very expensive CD players often skip. Buffers mitigate this problem, but do not solve it outright. MP3s, on the other hand, only skip when your player is crap, or you have a problem with bluetooth audio.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always loved when the tape would stretch, and the music would slow down. That was always fun. Same thing happened when the batteries in my walkman died. Ah, memories of technology best left in the past.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

The most significant advantage that cassettes ever had over vinyl records was increased amount of portability. It is completely obsoleted by portable media players today. There are those who would suggest that vinyl has not been similarly obsoleted because they would suggest that it offers a superior sound quality to digital sound reproduction by virtue of it being analog, and not having to digitally reconstruct what is only a (high frequency) approximation of the original sound, and it is alleged that the differences can still be perceived by some, even if not necessarily on a conscious level.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Schnapple]

The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.

And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.

To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.

And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.

But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.

So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.

But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather feels that you could apply the hipster label to anyone who isn't an automaton. While this certainly has merit for one trying to divide and categorize it doesn't really make the hipster label achieve anything meaningful other than one who is not mainstream. Since we live on a planet full of varied climates, cultures, and dissenting views, the mainstream narrative is in itself divided and categorized to the point where anything could be blamed on the notorious millennial hipster.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mysidia]

Those are low-quality tapes or low-quality players. High-quality recordings to quality tape played by a good player can have very high audio fidelity -- heck; magnetic tape is a medium recording studios have used predominantly, before the advent of hard drives.

Re:Why cassettes?

[AmiMoJo]

Portable CD players are making a comeback as retro items now. Apparently WAV/FLAC isn't good enough, it's got to be a spinning disc.

For hipsters the idea of even owning music must seem old fashioned these days.

Re:Why cassettes?

[swillden]

But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream.

Either that or the hipsters have realized that vinyl sucks in a host of ways and are looking to move to a less fragile and more manageable medium, so they're more or less just following the same path history took, for the same reasons.

At least it appears they've been smart enough to skip 8 track.

Re:Why cassettes?

[havana9]

I still have a couple of tape decks in working order.
One it's use to make cassette tapes to use with a Commodore 64. when i feel that I have to relax playing a small platform game of my youth makes me feel more relaxed than the las Xbox games, and you can find a lot of oldies in the .tap files.
I have also some old original cassettes and airchecks and a prosumer 3-head Teac deck that has a decent audio quality, and I use it als to record my piano practice and listen to me. The user interface is perfect. I know that there are some TASCAM secorders on SD card that are of good quality, but the tape deck simply works.
Unfortunately CD rewitable audio recorders are impossible to find and they had decent DAC and ADC and user interface.
You can use a PC, but i find the interface distracting.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are low-quality tapes or low-quality players. High-quality recordings to quality tape played by a good player can have very high audio fidelity -- heck; magnetic tape is a medium recording studios have used predominantly, before the advent of hard drives.

Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.

Re: Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

CDs would sound good enough, if they weren't mastered by morons for loudness.

Re:Why cassettes?

[pr0fessor]

The summary says that musicians are clamoring for it to distribute their music though for cheap multi-track recorders would make more sense but the digital multi-tracks are as cheap as the tapes now.

Re:Why cassettes?

[thomn8r]

Rather feels that you could apply the hipster label to anyone who isn't an automaton

Sounds exactly like something a hipster would say...

Re: Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars donâ(TM)t come with CD players anymore? My 2018 shipped with one standard. Pretty sure most cars still do.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Rick Schumann]

Among other things, it's totally DRM-free; you can't copy protect a baseband audio cassette. Aside from that, the technology is mature and dirt cheap, and actually durable in many ways similar to a printed paper book. If an audio CD gets damaged, it may become totally unplayable; if an audio cassette gets damaged, it may still be playable, and may be repairable to the point of being 100% again. If the shells they're using are held together with screws then it's easy to change shells if they get damaged. If the tape itself gets a damaged section, that section can be cut out and the tape spliced, leaving >99.9% of the original content intact. Damaged tapes, if they can be made playable at least one more time, can be copied, yielding a lower quality end product, but one that is usable. Note that none of this is music to the ears of so-called 'audiophiles' who expect everything to sound like they're hearing it live. There's also the fact that making a 'mix tape' is relatively simple, needing only a playback deck and a record deck; no computer or software required, just time and patience. You can even record things off broadcast radio relatively simply, and 0.125" audio cassette tape has more than enough bandwidth for FM broadcast. Sure, it's not CD quality, not by a longshot, but if all you care about is hearing the music and being entertained by it, and not continually critiquing the quality of the recording, then it's not bad at all.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, please don't tell the hipsters about bees wax music rolls or player pianos...

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

For driving, it was easier to switch cassettes than to switch CD's, or to make an MP3 player switch to a different playlist. You could more or less do it completely by feel, and so keep your eyes on the road.

Good quality tape players did adequate song skipping. The one in my car was sensitive enough that I could make it skip back just a sentence when I was listening to language learning tapes - very handy.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure I'd fail a blind taste test between Mexicoke and my local bottler, but damn there's something about a glass bottle--maybe it's just nostalgia.

Blind listening to CD vs cassette vs vinyl though, no contest, even with high end tape deck and turntable.

Good riddance, rumble and pop and carefully cleaning and handling so as not to scratch vinyl.

Good riddance, tape hiss and head cleaning and slow access to the tracks I want to hear.

A big F U to those responsible for the "loudness wars" that wasted the dynamic range available on CD.

Wonder where the hipsters will turn when cassette tapes become mainstream--wax cylinders?

Re:Why cassettes?

[Rick Schumann]

On the 'hipster' end of things, it's to record their vinyl records to, so they don't wear out the vinyl. That's the way it used to be done, and I have no reason to believe that it's any different now. Of course if it were I, and I was still buying vinyl records, which I'm not, I'd be digitizing the vinyl at a high sampling rate and greater than 16b per channel, and using that as a master for creating cassette tapes, and storing the vinyl in such a way that they'd be preserved as long as humanly possible.

Re:Why cassettes?

[religionofpeas]

Buffers mitigate this problem, but do not solve it outright

Well, today's RAM chips are big enough to buffer an entire CD, so you could argue it's solved.

Re:Why cassettes?

[religionofpeas]

Among other things, it's totally DRM-free;

If you don't mind using a low quality analog route, the DRM of other media can be circumvented as well.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Rick Schumann]

I understand that, but the subject we're discussing is not methods of bypassing audio DRM.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Bing Tsher E]

Would that be for those weird Fostex 'portable studio' things, that did multitrack on standard cassettes?

I have a Fostex 8-track reel-to-reel deck that uses 1/4" audio tape. It's a thrift store acquisition and some hipster needs to buy it from me for the big bux.

Re: Why cassettes?

[Gilgaron]

Well maybe we only looked at a narrow market segment when we were shopping last. The other car is over a decade old. None of the trim options for a Chrysler Pacifica included it except for the several highest ones that have all the checkboxes filled. I did a quick google search and there was an article from 2013 which stated that Chevy and Chrysler/Jeep have mostly done away with them with Mazda and others following suit. I'd guess Honda still has them.

Re:Why cassettes?

[cardpuncher]

There's arguments to be made about sound quality

There really aren't. I grew up with vinyl and it was better than shellac, but that's as far as it goes. Leaving aside the mechanical noise from the groove walls and dust and scratches, mastering a vinyl record is a delicate balance between dynamic range and playing time which means the engineer doing it has his hand on the compression knob to stop one groove opening up into another. If you look at the type of devices that people are playing vinyl on, they'd have been considered cheap and shoddy when vinyl was all you could get and they're largely comparing the sound with what they get from their mobile phones.

A decent digital source will always be better, given the same amplification chain, and most stuff put onto vinyl will now have come from a digital master anyway at some point. The people who buy vinyl are mostly the same people who would buy massively expensive audio cables or rework their digital pictures to look like Polaroids.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Solandri]

The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.

I think hipsters are about the stupidest trend ever. But they're not completely off base here. Pretty much all music distributed in the digital era has been degraded by the loudness war. Their dynamic range has been crushed down to almost flat. So even though that digital music file supposedly gets you 12-24 bits of dynamic range, if it's only using the upper 20%-30% of that range, you're only getting 3-7 bits of effective dynamic range. Not to mention the distortion from the high peaks (e.g. snare drums) being clipped when you raise the gain to bring quieter sounds closer to the max volume. So in terms of how the music sounds, the 5-6 bit depth of vinyl records and cassette tapes can actually be superior. You just have to deal with additional noise.

As the loudness war started in the 1990s, you have to get early CDs from the 1980s and analog records/tapes to completely avoid it.

Re:Why cassettes?

[drinkypoo]

Well, today's RAM chips are big enough to buffer an entire CD, so you could argue it's solved.

But you have to actually do that, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody actually is. Anyway, there is a preferred method for buffering an entire CD, and that is to rip it to MP3 (or whatever) and then play it back at your leisure. There are actually automotive head units that will do this for you.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Gavagai80]

Personally I have no interest in vinyl, but it makes sense to me as a more physical experience. You have a large object to hold, you place it, you set a needle, and you can watch it working. That's a different experience from simply listening even if the sound is worse, and I can see how it'd make some people feel more connected to the music and thus increase enjoyment.

Audio tapes have a little of that, but don't do it as well as vinyl because they're smaller and more machine-mediated (you can see them turning, but you can't see what's reading them). I think what's driving the audio tape market is more pure nostalgia -- kids who grew up in the 80s and 90s for whom the audio tape takes them back to a happier time in their lives.

Re:Why cassettes?

[pr0fessor]

fostex and tascam both had very popular 4 track versions in the 90s that were standard cassette but today a cheap digital 6 track costs less than those did has a much better recording quality. The fostex 8 track reel to reel isn't probably worth more than $100 today.

Re: Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2017 Honda CR-V my wife just got certainly does not have a CD player in it. Maybe you can still get a Civic or Fit with a CD player?

OTOH the 2005 Honda Pilot we have has both a CD player *and* a cassette player, which gave us both a big WTF moment when we bought it.

Re:Why cassettes?

[DarkVader]

Today's chips are big enough to losslessly buffer most people's entire music collection. So yeah, it's beyond solved.

Re:Why cassettes?

[DarkVader]

No, I'm afraid 8-track has had a bit of a comeback too. There are actually articles online praising its "warmer tape sound" and such silliness. Enthusiasts have sites that show how to change the now-disintegrated foam pads in your "classic" 8-track cartridges and such things. I think somebody even released a new album on 8-track at some point in the last few years.

It's insanity. I mean, I get playing with old tech sometimes just for the fun of it or for historic preservation, but pretending cassette or 8-track aren't crap is just silly.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, somebody really should tell them about player pianos. That one is at least legitimate, it's really a piano being played.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The spinning motor is a power hog. And heavy. Nothing is keeping you from being analog with your music player. You had to rip something to master the tape. Rip it to a DRM free format.

Hint:. Musicians can also use this method.

Some idiots want tape for some nostalgia hipster vibe. Just go away and take your oxygen free cables with you.

Re:Why cassettes?

[DarkVader]

That's not a problem with CDs, that's a problem with idiot producers.

You can make just as much of a compression mess engineering a record as you can with a CD, and you'll get all the downsides of records to go along with it.

Re:Why cassettes?

[DewDude]

Early digital audio was recorded on to video tape or some kind of reel-to-reel system. Sony's DAT used a cassette factor storing digital uncompressed audio. ADAT used SVHS cassettes for 8-track digital recording.

They made PCM adaptors for Betamax.

Re:Why cassettes?

[DarkVader]

You brought it up.

And in a way, an analog cassette is already somewhat copy protected, the copy is always going to sound crappier than the original, and it's going to get worse with every analog copy generation.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

> not having to digitally reconstruct what is only a (high frequency) approximation of the original sound

ALL recordings are approximations of the original sound.

If you want to talk fidelity, i.e. how close the output signal is to the input signal, CD-quality digital is far and away more accurate than any vinyl, and it doesn't degrade over time.

That doesn't mean you can't prefer the sound of vinyl; just don't pretend it's a higher-fidelity recording medium.

Re: Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every car includes a CD player, even at the lowest trim level. The POS Chrysler Pacifica is one of the only cars to not include a CD player, it is trashed as an astonishing surprise and disappointment in all of the car review sites.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really think people who are using audio cassettes understand that and really don't care.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

My TI-99 needs them to save all the basic programs I've been writing lately.

Re:Why cassettes?

[HornWumpus]

The loudness war started in the 1960s. But was constrained by crappy vinyl.

The first CDs were absolute shit. They failed to remaster them, just burned the pre distorted vinyl masters. Which sounded very tinny when played back without vinyl distortion.

Re:Why cassettes?

[brantondaveperson]

No, it's a very inexpensive medium that's often used by underground bands to release their recordings on. People are buying these recordings because they want to support their local music scene, and like owning the physical artifacts thereof. I expect that the mixtape might be making a comeback too, since as far as high school gifts go, they're pretty much unbeatable. With a mixtape, being unable to skip tracks is positively an asset. You *want* the recipient to have to listen to every single carefully-chosen track that you recorded for them. Hand it over along with a thrift-store walkman too. Nostalgia for an unlived-through age.

People that buy vinyl, play vinyl. I certainly used to record my records onto cassette, but this was only in order to listen to them on my walkman, not to preserve the vinyl itself. It doesn't degrade very much at all through being played, only through being mishandled, or stored in unpleasant conditions, such as on a rack in direct sunlight...

Re:Why cassettes?

[Schnapple]

Not a player piano but Beck did release an entire album once in the form of piano sheet music. At the time it was deemed pretty pretty damned hipster

Re:Why cassettes?

[hankwang]

Back in the days, it was common to see tangles of cassette tape on the roadside. Apparently, car cassette players would sometimes eat the tape. I'd like to see you make such a tangle near-100% playable again.

Re: Why cassettes?

[TWX]

As far as I'm aware, none of the Chrysler products come with CD players anymore standard. Some models allow them to be added, but not all.

Re:Why cassettes?

[TWX]

It would've been great if more prerecorded music was available for the same price, as the cartridges were smaller diameter and protected their contents better.

Again price and availability won-out.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly possible to burn a "mix CD" with no track divisions.

Re:Why cassettes?

[iksrazal_br]

Digital audio for musicians cannot emulate anywhere close to the classic Roland Space echo machines imho, which is why for $1000 you can get a fully balanced +4db professional signal in and out of a refurbished Marantz cassette deck like this.

IOW as an effect its like one of the classic tape machines they stopped making in the early 80's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Another example is the Binson tape delay machines as seen in Pink Floyd's echoes in the film "Live at Pompei" .

As for fidelity ... well, digital audio for better or worse is the delivery method these days. I'm not making demos on cassettes :-) .

Re:Why cassettes?

[TWX]

Having lived through that age it kind of sucked.

A very quick, cursory search reveals optical media duplicators with multidisc simultaneous capacity for less than $300 brand new as purpose-built machines. These are the kinds of machines that someone with no technical acumen can operate, just plug it in, put the source disc into the top drive, put blanks into the other drives, hit the button to copy, and take our four copies a few minutes later. Repeat as many times as one wants.

For nerds, hit-up the Goodwill and get an old tower case with six 5.25" drive bays and build your own. Can probably even find the drives for next to nothing. Or go find those external USB drives or enclosures.

And while CD is not as popular as it once was, a lot more cars and homes can play CDs than can play cassettes, as DVD and Blu-Ray players will play CDs.

If you want to stop someone from skipping ahead to the next song easily, don't master the original recording into separate tracks.

Anyone specifically seeking-out compact cassette is being willfully obtuse at this point.

Re:Why cassettes?

[iksrazal_br]

Digital audio for musicians cannot emulate anywhere close to the classic Roland Space Echo (RE-201 etc) machines imho, which is why for $1000 you can get a fully balanced +4db professional signal in and out of a refurbished Marantz cassette deck like this.

IOW as an effect its like one of the classic tape machines they stopped making in the early 80's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Another example is the Binson tape delay machines as seen in Pink Floyd's echoes in the film "Live at Pompei" .

As for fidelity ... well, digital audio for better or worse is the delivery method these days. I'm not making demos on cassettes :-) . However, its common for popular bands with a big budget to record to 2" 24 track tape still ... which arguably has better fidelity ymmv.

Re:Why cassettes?

[TWX]

The medium with the music on it is not the advantage of vinyl. The album artwork and the jacket liner with information is.

I collect Laserdiscs. Haven't bought any in quite a long time now but I'm up over 500 titles. At the time I started buying them, on an NTSC 4:3 TV they looked basically the same as DVD, but since Laserdisc was launched as a premium format originally, most releases on the format continued to be released with all of the extras like nice artwork and the jacket liner, and boxed sets often came with small books or other accessories.

Now, my rate of purchase slowed greatly when the TV physical aspect ratio changed, because between that and the use of LCD, the picture quality became noticeably worse when compared to DVDs that were encoded properly. Basically a Laserdisc had the black bars at the top and bottom of a letterbox version as part of the image. A properly encoded DVD only encoded the content, it was up to the player to locate that content on the screen properly, adding the black bars to map the 16:9 aspect movie on a 4:3 screen. Some early DVDs got it wrong, they took the matted image with black bars and recorded it onto the DVD, but those are fairly uncommon. Once it became obvious that new formats were going to look better I generally stopped buying LD except where I wanted the artwork.

As much as I like Laserdisc, I don't think it should make a comeback unless they're going to throw a blu-ray of the movie in as an extra.

Re:Why cassettes?

[TWX]

When I was a kid our turntable broke. Not sure what went wrong exactly, but while the platter still spun it didn't make any sound. Having seen old movies with purely mechanical turntables I was able to take newspaper, wrap it into a cone, and tuck the end where it made physical contact with the needle. While the sound lacked bass, we were able to play records with it for a short time before my parents replaced the broken machine.

So from a close-to-the-process perspective, yes, vinyl does bring the listener closer. Whether or not that's valued is another matter.

Re:Why cassettes?

[iksrazal_br]

Eh link didn't work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Digital audio for musicians cannot emulate anywhere close to the classic Roland Space Echo (RE-201 etc) machines imho, which is why for $1000 you can get a fully balanced +4db professional signal in and out of a refurbished Marantz cassette deck like this.

IOW as an effect its like one of the classic tape machines they stopped making in the early 80's.

Another example is the Binson tape delay machines as seen in Pink Floyd's echoes in the film "Live at Pompei" .

As for fidelity ... well, digital audio for better or worse is the delivery method these days. I'm not making demos on cassettes :-) . However, its common for popular bands with a big budget to record to 2" 24 track tape still ... which arguably has better fidelity ymmv.

Re:Why cassettes?

[operagost]

Had to use compression otherwise the hiss would make dynamic range pretty small.

You mean, like Dolby B/C? Yeah, that went with the territory. You got 60 dB S/N on a good deck with Dolby on, maybe 70 if you used chrome tapes. Use high quality TDK, Maxell, or Memorex in a quality deck, and they rarely broke. Couldn't burn to a CD back then. That S/N ratio rivaled vinyl. I bet your PC sucked back then, too. Total garbage, couldn't even do 4K res video at 60 fps!

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

Vinyl isn't. The ridges and valleys in the grooves have the same physical shape as the vibrations as the vibrations produced in the air when the record is played. The amplifier used might introduce distorition, but theoretically, you can't get any better at recording audio than direct recreation of the vibrations that are perceived as audio in the first place.

To suggest that vinyl only approximates original sound is like saying that sound itself is just an approximation of sound because it involves moving molecules in the air that are not infinitely small, which have to approximate whatever vibrations were produced initially.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the same reason why I still use a Sony MiniDisc unit in my car, instead of a CD player. The MiniDisc shell can only go in one way, and the disc is protected inside the shell, so I can switch discs entirely by feel without having to worry about touching the data surface or sticking it into the player the wrong way around.

(I did triy having an MP3 player hookup on a few road trips, but I actually found it more distracting because there was too much temptation to keep hitting the "next" button. "Nah, I'm not in the mood for that song. [NEXT]... Nah, not that one either. [NEXT]... That shouldn't even be on here; I need to remember to delete that one. [NEXT]... Dammit, there's almost a thousand tracks on here, why does the shuffle play keep hitting this one? [NEXT]..." It was like cable TV; too much temptation to channel-surf instead of actually watching/listening to anything.)

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real reason is hipsters. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but once the CD took over and things like vinyl records and cassette tapes left stores, hipsters who wanted to be different kept buying vinyl whenever and however they could. There's arguments to be made about sound quality and at the very least an album can sound different on vinyl under the right (read: expensive) circumstances but for the most part the novelty was in the fact that they had their music in some non-mainstream format.

And then Record Store Day came along and was actually successful in the long run. Sure, the Independent Record Store is still an endangered species but the long term effect was that people started wanting to buy records again in mainstream numbers. Now you can buy vinyl records everywhere from Best Buy to Target. We had a story just like this one a while back about how the last vinyl record presses were made back in the 80's and how we were just now seeing enough demand to create new technology to replicate something for old technology.

To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it (a new CD costs like $11.99, the same album on vinyl can go for over $35 or more) so they keep getting made.

And to some extent if you buy an album on CD you're buying something you can make yourself or you have to turn into the version you want (digital) yourself. If you're going to spend money might as well buy something you can't make yourself, plus as a bonus they tend to come with download codes for the format you really want. Today if you buy physical music to some extent you're buying a souvenir.

But if you're a hipster, the vinyl record becoming mainstream is a problem for you since the whole point is to not be mainstream. So, the next frontier in differentness is cassettes. The pioneer of this for the most part was Urban Outfitters, they've wound up being the exclusive retailer of a number of albums on cassette, like the Run The Jewels album or the Hamilton Mixtape.

So naturally we're now seeing the same problem the vinyl industry faced.

But the sort version to your question is: it's the latest way to be hip and different.

I agree on everything, except the "mexicoke". That stuff is way better than the corn-syrup crap they feed us here in the States.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony also kind of botched the marketing for them (here in the US, anyway) by trying to position them as the successor to CDs (at a time when many people were still in the middle of switching from LP to CD to begin with!), instead of pushing them as the successor to cassettes due to their portability and the fact that you could record on them on-the-go.

Re:Why cassettes?

[sheph]

I'd have to disagree. On a fairly good system (mine) I can distinguish between vinyl, cassette, CD, and MP3. MP3 is a terrible format. The problem is there really isn't a decent digital source available that's gained acceptance. FLAC is pretty good, but it's not widely available. CD is clean but it's also sacrificing depth and clarity in the conversion to digital in part because 44.1k/16 isn't sufficient resolution and the algorithm for conversion is flawed. DVD-A is better at 96k/24, and BlueRay audio at 192k/24 gets close to vinyl. However, all of the optical media suffers from digital rot over time. Not only that, how many recordings are available in BlueRay audio? You also can't easily transfer it to your phone or play in your car either. Cassette degrades and becomes nasty over time. Tape hiss, drop outs, the deck eats it, etc. Not sure why we'd bring that back. But I definitely find vinyl to be superior in sound quality.

Personally, I prefer something tangible I can put my hands on. Sit down and read the lyrics while holding the album cover in my hands. It's part of the experience for me. Not everyone who is in to vinyl is a hipster. IDGAF about being hip. From a good vinyl source that's been digitized I can create a CD for the car, or FLAC files for my phone. Still when I go home and sit down to enjoy a great album I can hear it the way I prefer. Listening to the digitized copy I preserve the LP so they only get physically played once or twice. There's very little pop and click if you take care of them. And I leave my kids something that will have value decades from now.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. What can one say but, if you think a groove cut into vinyl is a perfect representation of the input signal, without compromise, you have really drunk the Kool-Aid. That's leaving aside the flaws in the input signal itself, like noise and distortion inherent in microphones, wires, and magnets.

Here's a hint: there's a reason a recording is called an "analog" of a sound.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

Obviously the groove that is cut into vinyl cannot be any higher in fidelity than the quality of the original input signal, but any noise and losses in fidelity on the input signal itself, as well as any distortion that might be introduced by the amplifier on output would be no better in a digital reproduction of the audio signal. On a well fabricated record, it could be a faithful representation of the original input signal accurate down to levels where the deviations from true accuracy could only be seen with an electron microscope, and even then, it's still going to be a real analog signal, having a smooth gradient of values anywhere along its input range, while at that same magnification level on a digital medium, all you are going to get is either an on or off state.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing physical detail at some magnification factor between vinyl and digital is just silly.

Data is data; the ones and zeros describe the signal, but the physical representation of the bits is irrelevant as long as they are accurate.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's totally DRM-free;

the degradation of generational copies could be considered a form of DRM. as is the shelf-life of the magnetic media inside the cassette shell. all my original tapes from the 70s and 80s are absolute shit now.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

the degradation of generational copies could be considered a form of DRM. as is the shelf-life of the magnetic media inside the cassette shell.

That's a stretch. It might be a weak form of copy protection, but DRM does much more than just copy protection. It also controls how you use the product. Plus it's, well, digital.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

Analog systems can, for all practical purposes, always reproduce analog information, such as sound, more accurately than digital reproduction, assuming that the analog system has a suitable input and output range with respect to the information being recorded.

To represent analog data from sound *entirely* accurately via digital mechanisms, you actually need digital sampling frequencies on the order of hundreds of millions or possibly even billions of hertz. With analog storage of audio in a vinyl record, you get the storage requirements essentially for free by virtue of the physical shapes of the representation of that information which is accurate down to levels that can only be seen with an electron microscope. You suggest that the physical representation of digital data is irrelevant, but it can be entirely relevant when the amount of data that you are wanting to represent will not fit into a usable volume of space because of the physical limitations imposed. You would need no less than several dozen modern high capacity hard drives to faithfully contain all of the audio analog data of even a single side of a vinyl LP as accurately as the LP itself has represented it.

Digital data is far more immune to noise than analog data in communications, which is why is often preferred for many purposes. At the lowest level, however, even digital data is represented by lower level analog systems going all the way down to the molecular level, but the digital system typically has enough redundancy with respect to the underlying analog systems to be able to detect and correct errors that are in the stream in real time. Seriously, this is stuff you'd learn in an entry-level data communications course.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking in theoretical terms, but in practice vinyl cannot faithfully reproduce the entire signal. The energy at the high end decreases to the point where it gets lost in noise. Not to mention the old saw that you can't hear anything above 20kHz anyway (and unless you pay a lot, your speakers can't reproduce it).

Your statement that you would need many high-capacity hard drives to capture the entire audio signal of a vinyl record is demonstrably false: HD-audio and SACD manage it, as well as the 192k recordings Apple and Neil Young were pushing a few years back.

Vinyl is good. There is room for it in the audiophile world, but is is far from perfect and it only gets worse with each play. Stop pretending it has no limits.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

To lazy to log in, but...

You aren't wrong. I do want to add something about the experience. Playing a record is fun. I shared them with my kids while they were growing up. Two of them enjoy vinyl today, and it's not for quality reasons at all. I don't think they care much.

It's the cover art, liner notes, and the experience of actually doing something to enjoy the music. It becomes a special time, and it's not a long time either. Just long enough to take some one out of whatever place and state they are in, maybe with friends, and make it about the music.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Bing Tsher E]

I have a bunch of archival reel-to-reel tapes. The Fostex 8-track is probably one of the best machines available to transcribe old reel-to-reel material. No matter which track layout an old tape uses, the Fostex is set up to play back and transcribe it by choosing which of the eight track heads to play back through. I haven't dug into it, but I suspect it's one of the best options out there for a playback machine and old tapes.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from that, the technology is mature and dirt cheap

Isn't that also true of CDs, though? A bit less on the maturity side, but much better on the cheap side, at least for media ($18-20 for 100 blank CDs or 15 blank cassettes). And one would think the disparity would get worse as supply gets shorter.

Some of the other reasons make sense, but I don't really see the cost angle. At least compared to CD. Maybe a cost-effective alternative to vinyl?

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Portable CD players are making a comeback as retro items now. Apparently WAV/FLAC isn't good enough, it's got to be a spinning disc.

Jesus keyrist. What is wrong with kids today? They have Google, YouTube and Wikipedia to educate them but they don't understand how digital audio works as well as we did in 1990. :-P

Re:Why cassettes?

[mysidia]

Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.

My understanding is with metallic film tapes; it is possible for cassette to exceed the quality of vinyl in terms of media distortions,
but not reaching the same theoretical level of fidelity, and the finest cassette setups
will exceed many of the CD player setups that people actually use, because of things other than the medium ---- so the theoretical best
you could get from a CD doesn't really matter if your speakers are crap or not perfect, as is often the case.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

I'm not saying it's perfect... I'm only saying that the shape of the groove in vinyl physically corresponds to the actual shape of the input signal sound waves, and is thus a more accurate representation of the sound than digital could ever hope to be without moving into the many millions or possibly even billions of samples per second, as you bring the wavelength of the audio down to the size of individual molecules.

I did not allege that digital quality at a sufficiently high enough frequency would not be adequate for all intents and purposes... only that the information density is much lower.

Re:Why cassettes?

[david_thornley]

To represent analog data from sound *entirely* accurately via digital mechanisms, you actually need digital sampling frequencies on the order of hundreds of millions or possibly even billions of hertz.

C'mon. The standard human ear goes up to maybe 28KHz under ideal conditions. Let's kick that up to 40KHz for giggles. Anything above that is wasted. That means a sample rate of 80KHz will do just fine for human hearing.

The problem with analog precision is keeping it from form to form. In this case, we're taking a sound and we're using it to control some sort of stylus cutting grooves. There's going to be limitations on how precisely the stylus can cut at high frequencies. If you get really, really precise, you're not dealing with the music, but rather artifacts from the system.

Is that really what they teach you in entry-level data communications classes?

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm not saying it's perfect...

Not in so many words, but you are implying that the record groove represents a perfect analog of the signal "down to the size of individual molecules."

The problem with that is it's just not true. In practice, high-performance digital exceeds the fidelity of ANY vinyl recording under the best conditions.

CD audio does not have the frequency response of vinyl, that's true. Digital recording and mastering does, with much lower noise and greater dynamic range than analog tape or vinyl.

So please, go on listening to your records, but you should really familiarize yourself with digital recording technology before you criticize it.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm not saying it's perfect...

Excuse me? Aren't you the one who claimed vinyl isn't an approximation of the original signal?

Face it, you are romanticizing analog.

Re:Why cassettes?

[mark-t]

That's because analog can actually represent all possible values in a range, instead of only discrete approximations. It is not necessarily perfect (subject to imperfections in the physical manufacturing process), but it's going to be orders of magnitude more representative of an originally analog signal than any feasible digital reconstruction.

Re:Why cassettes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What can I say? You are flat-out wrong. I've already shown you that what you claim for vinyl's fidelity is false, regardless of what digital can do.

A digital signal will perfectly represent the entire band-limited signal up to the Nyquist limit.

Watch Monty from Xiph's Digital Show and Tell if you don't believe me. He demonstrates with an analog signal generator and scope.

Now, you're going to argue that band-limiting makes digital inferior because analog will record a greater frequency range. In fact digital is cleaner because it removes that high-frequency noise and related intermodulation distortion.

If you do a double-blind A/B test of vinyl vs. a 44.1kHz/16-bit recording of that same vinyl, I guarantee you will not be able to tell the difference.

Re:Why cassettes?

[painandgreed]

So why cassettes? I don't get it.

It's not just cassettes but also records. I grew up with them also although I still have a box of both because I can't find the heart to thrown them out and in some cases, can't find them in a digital format. Still, from the music podcasts I listen to it seems to be mostly just for collectablity. People are tired of tour t-shirts and buy records or tapes instead which often come with a way to download digital versions of the content. They get framed or put on a shelf as a collection. Perhaps sold on eBay to other collectors. Some probably get listened to and then there are DJs would will want to use real records.

why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vinyl actually has unique characteristics that make it worth using today. Tapes have always sounded horrible and nothing will change that. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to bring back the tape other than the twisted logic that exists only in the minds of hipsters.

Hipsters will revive cassettes, then they can feel their smug hipster superiority for a few months before they have to start telling everyone that they were into tapes before everyone started liking them. A year or so from now we'll see another article talking about how someone is trying to bring back Edison's cylinder phonograph for the same reasons that tape is coming back now.

Fucking hipsters.....

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

IKR?

"Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music."

The stupidity of hipsters will always baffle me.

Re:why?

[DewDude]

Tapes have always sounded horrible and nothing will change that.

Cassettes...you mean cassettes. "tapes" sound fine...studios use them. It's cassette tapes that sound bad.

and that's only because consumers are cheap and did not bother spending the money on good decks. Pre-recorded cassettes are made a LOT differently than they were duing the "bad" era.

They sound pretty good these days, you just have to not be so damn cheap when buying a cassette deck. A $20 boombox will sound like garbage compared to a $350 deck.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting good results from tape is a difficult balancing act. It's almost impossible to get +/-1 dB 20-20kHz. Tape is noisy, a little worse than a vinyl record. A deck's frequency trims had to be readjusted not only for different brands of tape, but for different batches. The frequency response changed as the heads wore down.

If you're in a car or playing dance or background music, almost anything is good enough. If you're doing critical listening, all analog media are inadequate.

Doin' it wrong, son.

[geekmux]

"Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music."

Don't you idiots know anything? Vinyl is where it's at in 2017. GTFO with this new-old cassette bullshit.

Fuckin' Millennials. Can't even do pointless hipster retro right.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[DontBeAMoran]

I'm waiting for music released as Nintendo Game Boy carts.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[Waffle Iron]

Vinyl is the newfangled phonograph technology; probably just a passing fad.

True enthusiasts play their music from shellac disks. This has the added benefit that hand-cranked gramophone players work off-grid and during power outages.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use reel-to-reel and vinyl in my car. Thinking of getting a laser disc player for the back, but I'd need a trailer to hold all the media.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen tracks that have been converted to 8-bit sound, orchestral and ragtime "Remove Kebab" is the classic example.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't even do pointless hipster retro right.

Furthermore, you're beginning to sound like a broken record!

Explain the meaning of that alternate get off my lawn expression, and if you get it right, you might be able to grasp pointless hipster retro, too.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[thegarbz]

Don't you idiots know anything? Vinyl is where it's at in 2017. GTFO with this new-old cassette bullshit.

Fuckin' Millennials. Can't even do pointless hipster retro right.

Vinyl is mainstream rubbish. The millennials are just ahead of the curve with how to hipster. By the time your generation realises they are hipstering something else, it stop being hipster.

Re:Doin' it wrong, son.

[TeknoHog]

Oh yeah? Well I used to melt my own beeskneeswax for my phonograph cylinders before it was cool.

Exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like they never heard of USB drives or recordable disks.

Re:Exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, they've heard of them--they just reject them as "unauthentic" or pedestrian.

They don't actually care that their music sounds worse on cassette, it's all about appearances.

Sound

[JBMcB]

Regular tapes did suck. If you used Dolby and CrO2 tapes, and set the recording level and tape bias properly, you could get pretty good sound out of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

I have high quality cassette tapes that I recorded in the mid to late 70's. I still have all of the same equipment that I used back then and it all still works perfectly. When I play back the tapes, they sound like they were recorded yesterday, not 40 years ago.

Joan Biaz's album "Diamonds and Rust" is amazing even played back on cassette.

Re:Sound

[leathered]

I knew before I clicked that would be Techmoan, his videos are an amazing history of virtually every media format that has ever existed.

Re:Sound

[Jason1729]

I bought some Metal Bias type IV tapes back in the day. They were about $5 each which was a lot of money back then when cheap tapes were 3 for $1 and normal tapes about 75 cents. They did sound significantly better than regular tapes but not something I'd qualify as even "pretty good".

Re:Sound

[DewDude]

etting the bias is a HUGE part. People have no clue that tape is such a finicky creature that the amount of bais level required for a cassette varied not only brand to brand, but sometimes batch to batch. Add to this that only high-end decks had a bias adustment; most of the low end stuff people used had a very specific fixed bias level. Depending on the brand of tape, it could be too much bias or too little bias.

Too much bias, your tape sounds muddy. Too little, it's very bright. I'm not talking about flipping a Chrome/Normal switch either; but I'm talking about precise control of bias within that generic setting. Like Maxell XLII's used a different bias level than Fuji type 2's, and Maxell UR series used a slightly different bias level than TDK D series. Then you've got old tape stock which used a very low level of bias.

The *real* trick to cassettes was however Dolby HXPro. Not a noise reduction system; HXPro solved the problem of "self-bias" of high frequency content by reducing the amount of bias applied as needed. IF you used a solid bias level...a sudden jump in high frequencies would cause over-biasing.

Dolby had it's own issues. For your own tapes played back on that unit; it was fine. The real issue became trying to play that tape in other decks. Dolby required tight calibration and proper head alignment to work. It got MUCH worse as you went up in the series. Dolby C was useless on just about anything except the deck recorded it. Dolby S eluded me. I still lust after one.

With a lot of tweaking and HXPro, you could make a ferric (type I) tape sound fantastic, far beyond what you'd expect it to hear. If you're judging based on pre-recorded cassettes....then that's unfair.

Re:Sound

[DewDude]

The thing about Metal is if you weren't using a super high-end tape deck; then you didn't really get the advantage. You did to a point with a low-end deck...but higher end decks with good bias calibration were a must to really take advantage of it. I still have some Type IV's in my collection that I paid close to $10 each for.

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to listen to Biaz over 'tin can/string'. Sounds 'even better'.

Simple step for 100% improvement: Knitting needles in the ear.

Re:Sound

[denis-The-menace]

I was recording on these METAL tapes with a 3 head deck.

It was awesome in the car.

Still have it all and dunno want to do with them but haven't touched in years.
Only a few tunes/mixes away from having it all in digital format.

If I had time, I'd post the whole thing on Ebay.

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up

Re:Sound

[operagost]

Getting metal tapes to perform was a challenge. They weren't worth the money unless you had a high end deck. I had JVC and TEAC, and although they claimed to support metal tapes they sounded way better with chrome.

Re:Sound

[Jason1729]

I know. It was a higher end tape deck that automatically sense the extra holes in the tape and recorded differently (higher levels?). The stereo system was pretty high end, and it also pre-scanned the whole playlist in the CD changer that I wanted to record to pick up the loudest passage and set the record level of the tape deck accordingly. It was a big improvement compared to cheap tapes, but the Metal tapes were still disappointing compared to the CDs directly.

I got a 10 pack of them at Costco for $50 if I remember right. I'm pretty sure a couple of them are still unopened somewhere in the house.

Re: Sound

[DewDude]

No. The holes did not indicate a high end system. They were there as a cheap way of identifying tape types.

Identifying tape type just switched the biasing level and ephasis curve. See....cassettes have equalization applied to them during recording to optimize things...the same way LPs use the RIAA curve. There are two IEC curves used fir cassettes..75 microsecond and 120 microsecond. Typically non ferric tapes were recorded using the 120us standard..so the playera needed to identify what to use. Thats the "Metal compatibility" in decks....its actually just an EQ. Bias is done during recording...its ultrasonic noise that conditions the tape to respond in a linear fashion to sound. Its only required duri g record. This is why metal/chrome tapes sound "off" if played in a non metal deck.

But within the realm of bias you need to know not every tape stock was 100% the same....so you essentially needed to adjust the biasing level further to find the proper setting. This is something you need a three head deck for...you record pink noise to the tape and manually listen while adjusting so the noise on the tape matches; too much bias and the high end drops...too little and it sounds artifically bright. So decks that used a "fixed" bias beyond high/low selection may not have the proper levels for a particular tape...causing problems.

Thats one reason some tapes sounded better than others when recorded. If you happen to get one that matches your deck's levels...great. If not...its degraded sound.

HXPro was another bias tweaking circuit that improved the situation on tape.

Re:Sound

[david_thornley]

Thing is, I don't have the same hearing that I did forty years ago. It takes a lot less precision to sound perfect to me nowadays.

"Reeling"

[Geoffrey.landis]

Nobody else is commenting on the pun in the headline?

Re:"Reeling"

[Anonymous Coward]

Only sperglords who think no one else noticed...

Re:"Reeling"

[wyHunter]

Yanks are pretty clueless about puns - I saw it but figured 'oh well, nobody else'll notice it. ' Good work, sir! Are you, perhaps, from the USA, or another fine nation in this world?

Just wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the puns will come after everyone is wound up. Otherwise everyone's hopes will be erased.

the tape machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a nerd what I was most titillated by "a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption"

That's the real story here, were is the info on this glorious piece of reinvented equipment?

HISSSSS!! Boo!

[Anonymous Coward]

HISSSSS!!

I love this sort of story on Slashdot

[Schnapple]

How to use new technology to reproduce old, obsolete technology. It's interesting in an engineering, logistical, historical and technical sense while at the same time it's the sort of thing that's going to drive a lot of the people on Slashdot fucking insane because it's a ton of effort to solve a problem that the forward thinking engineer believes should not exist.

I guess in a way it's the same way I feel every time there's some new JavaScript framework designed to help further pretend that you're making an app instead of a webpage.

Since 1969

[Neuronwelder]

There was a 1969 photo tape player on Youtube. The owner had a piece of the original photo tape and actually got it to work. Modern time version: By taking black ink and putting varying lines on a plastic reel to reel combo, you can achieve high quality digital or analog music. All is not lost to the innovator!! The sky is the limit :) Look on the sunny side of science.

Re:Since 1969

[avandesande]

The audio track on movies were created precisely the same way long before 1969.

I still use cassettes...

[resfilter]

I would buy high end cassettes.

I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player or whatever.

The tape adapters don't quite cut it, so I keep a collection of tapes on board, just for driving music. Classic rock, jazz, soul sound just fine on an old cassette. Got a perfectly fine tape deck at a garage sale for 10 bucks for recording.

Thing is, the difference between a 'good' 'metal' tape, and a 'bad' tape (usually labelled 'vocal use' or 'everyday recording'), is HUGE... For comparison, think of a cheap stereo with the eq set up badly vs an old clock radio with a towel thrown over it.

Trying to buy new good-quality tapes right now doesn't seem easy, I've tried... so I'd probably end up buying a few of these cassettes.

So, there is my use case.

Thing is, there isn't really any other!

Anyone without a special use case that would use a cassette tape for ordinary music listening where they don't have to!?

Cassettes are only used on purpose by the kind of intolerable hipster douche nozzle that should be put on a boat and relocated to some kind of island where there is no escape. Seriously, die.

Tape is fine, get a reel-to-reel rig if you really like tape, it's a fine medium. Sell your house and get a studer or something.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[coastwalker]

I still use a cassette tape player because I cannot be bothered to digitize the hundreds of tapes I made back in the day. The quality is good enough as the tapes are the best you could buy recorded on good machines. I agree though I am unlikely to record any new ones. It is quite fun to play back things like New Years Eve 1999 - 2000 occasionally or way back in the shrouds of history - the BRMB rock 100, Or the John Peel Christmas countdowns.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[hawk]

>I have a collector plated car with a fairly high end (for its time) cassette deck. Where I live, you get cheap
>insurance with collector plates, but the laws here don't allow you to change the deck out for a cd player
>or whatever.

There are shops that not only refurbish radios for classics, but add bluetooth input. I plan on doing this to the radio/8-track in my classic.

hawk

Re:I still use cassettes...

[the_skywise]

That's actually an interesting point. I've got an '02 sports car with a nice after market stereo in it - has a nice graphic equalizer display with animating levels, etc;
Still, I'd like to get a newer (but just as nice) after market stereo with bluetooth and USB but they don't seem to exist anymore. I can get something with a basic LED screen but nothing as fancy as before OR I can get one with a flip out video screen (meh) or something like a double DIN (which requires getting a custom center console plastic to fit).
As it is, I've been hanging with the one I've got but it seems the whole aftermarket car stereo thing is dying.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[iggymanz]

that's nice but tapes stretch, get worn spots, get eaten.....good riddance to that medium, was okay in its day but I still remember what a PITA it was at times too

Re:I still use cassettes...

[HornWumpus]

Where is that?

You want to leave the car as original as possible, but that's not a legality.

They also sell complete stereos that go in the trunk, so you can leave the dash original.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[HornWumpus]

The car companies fucked the form factor, integrated everything. They always loved to _fuck_ the customer on factory audio/navi.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[TWX]

They did that because they made the audio system part of the body control module.

Hell, even back as far as my '95 Impala SS, the radio contains the receiver for the key fob to unlock the doors and trunk. Integration in this fashion has been the trend for more than a couple of decades.

I can see why, from their point of view, they did it. When they decided they wanted a BCM where all switches were wired to the BCM instead of directly to what they ostensibly controlled, and they wanted all control devices wired directly to the BCM so that they could do things like let the pattern of tail and brake lights be programmed for each market rather than be uniquely wired for each market, they would have had two computers, one for the entertainment system, and one for the BCM. By making everything the BCM, they have one computer, and they can then integrate the screen into the BCM and allow onscreen controls.

Now I personally hate onscreen controls in a thing where I'm not supposed to turn my attention away from the main focus (ie, the road), but if they're willing to accept the accidents that result then their logic makes some sense.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[TWX]

Was going to say, where I live the only thing they care about for historic vehicle plates is the VIN. I used to be an officer in a local car club with approximately 300 members, probably 3/4 of the cars in the club were resto-mod, not straight restorations. No one ever had any problems getting historic vehicle plates or collector car insurance so long as the car was old enough.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[HornWumpus]

Germany has some crazy laws regarding autobahn inspections. _Everything_ that was on the car when new has to work. Broken radio...failed. AC delete...failed. Missing back seat...failed. Seat belts replaced by 5 point harness...failed.

Re:I still use cassettes...

[HornWumpus]

They did that because it killed after market audio/navi, using the rational you list as an excuse.

Factory stereos etc have always been overpriced by factors of at least 5. Last I looked a single year of updates for factory navis are about $1 less than an entire new aftermarket one.

Their stupidity regarding touchscreens is another question entirely. As is the practice of putting a 'back of car' control computer in the rear, to save the cost of running individual wires to (tail lights/defrosters/wipers) etc and gain another expensive part with a built in warranty countdown.

No, not cassette

[boudie2]

I'm holding out, waiting for them to bring back elcaset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:No, not cassette

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is my umatic for the ultimate in the A/V experience.

Re:No, not cassette

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck that. I'm waiting for wax cylinders to come back!

Re:No, not cassette

[Anonymous Coward]

Reel to reel or gtfo.

Re:No, not cassette

[Anonymous Coward]

elcaset just recently got its first ever album release.

leave it lay

[AndyKron]

I was happy when cassettes died. Why bring back the pain?

Re:leave it lay

[Hodr]

But don't you miss occasionally seeing an unspooled tape tumbleweed on the side of the highway?

Cassette tapes are dirt cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a 15-pack of cassette tapes for $1.28 each. I remember paying $5 each cassette tape in a two-pack for my Commodore 64 when I was a kid. You wanted to get the best quality cassette tape to store your data back then.

Re:Cassette tapes are dirt cheap...

[DewDude]

Maxell UR90s are a pretty lousy cassette in fidelity terms. They'd be fine if you just needed basic recording stuff.

I missed the tape era for storage because my first computer was a Laser 128, but based on what I've studied...I don't think a higher fidelity tape helps; you mostly need one that doesn't stretch or drop-out.

Re:Cassette tapes are dirt cheap...

[HornWumpus]

Cassettes are lousy in fidelity terms.

Re: Cassette tapes are dirt cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer affiliate spam. Mod down.

You can buy them on amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

$9 for a brick of them.

Hipsters to save American economy

[gurps_npc]

Oh my god, that's trump's secret plan to save the US economy.

Convince a bunch of hipsters to make traditional products that no one makes anymore and sell them to other hipsters.

Re:Hipsters to save American economy

[jcr]

That sounds more like a Bernie plan, actually.

-jcr

Inferior tech can go rot ....

[King_TJ]

I'm kind of a fan of preserving a lot of older tech, and often believe the new stuff is just reinventing wheels that were just fine to begin with. But cassette tape was NOT one of the technologies I'd want to bring back to the forefront.

I mean, sure ... as long as there are vintage tape players out there that people would still like to use, it makes sense that SOMEBODY still manufactures cassette tape media for them. But hipsters wanting to buy their new music on cassette when they already have superior options? That's kind of ridiculous.

If nothing else, the whole ritual of rewinding tapes to the beginning of a side or fast-forwarding to get to a song you wanted to hear out of sequence was a pain. Never-mind the unreliability of tape (stretches over time, or gets unwound in the mechanism when a roller in the player acts up). A whole lot of us willingly paid twice for the same albums just to get the same thing we already paid for on compact disc INSTEAD of cassette. Why go back?

Even if you're some kind of analog purist who just has a problem with digital to analog conversions? I think you'd be better served by vinyl records. At least there's a long standing argument made that vinyl adds a "warm coloration" to the sound which just makes some of the music more pleasing to the ears. Cassette only added hiss and usually a limited frequency range (depending on the type of tape and ability of a given player to handle it properly).

Re:Inferior tech can go rot ....

[Anonymous Coward]

They are getting fed up of their music choices being logged, tracked, collated, archived, analysed, categorized to provided recommendations for "music we think you may like" every time they used a media device to play music. A similar rebellion happened when TiVo tried to provide recommendations based on past movies watched; War Moves = You're a Nazi, 60's movies = You're a hippy, Cowboy movies = you're a gun collector.

Re:Inferior tech can go rot ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix never could figure out the only 'gay themed' movies I wanted to watch involved hot lezbians.

You _know_ someone curated the machine learning algorithm to prevent it. Likely didn't flag 'hot lezbian' movies separately.

Re:Inferior tech can go rot ....

[King_TJ]

That might be very true. I can completely relate. But that's why I still have a music collection on physical CD and keep all of my digital music as a library of MP3s stored on one computer, vs. paying for any of these music streaming or rental services. Tried "Apple Music" for a while and hated it. Too many headaches for me, like tracks pausing/stopping in the middle of listening to them if your cellular data connection disappeared while traveling someplace (even if you were listening to a "rented" song you had already stored offline).

Re:Inferior tech can go rot ....

[TWX]

That's why my movie and music collections are on physical media, because I control the physical media.

Wow, how time flys

[bobbied]

It's April 1st already?

Who in their right mind would use tapes anymore, especially cassette tapes?

Re:Wow, how time flys

[Khyber]

Some of us still have working TI 99/4A systems with cassette tape drives.

In a related story...

[jcr]

Edison wax cylinder recording media is damned near impossible to find these days!

Using tape for audio these days is nothing but a hipster affectation.

-jcr

oh no, the hipsters

[slashmydots]

Maybe they'll have to switch to a format or media that actually has proper, accurate fidelity!

People want cassettes?

[chad.koehler]

Sure, Lois. All the sorority girls are clamoring for the plantain section. Stop with this!

Interesting analogy with the Mexicoke

[bjdevil66]

To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it

This is true in most cases, and Mexican Coke is definitely more expensive (50-100% more). With that said, there IS a difference - and sugarcane-based Coke from south of the border is better. It's a sharper, slightly more bitter flavor - vs. the more dulled yet more sugary sweet NFCS-sweetened stuff coming out of American plants.

Re:Interesting analogy with the Mexicoke

[TWX]

My sugar-drink of choice has been Mountain Dew. When they started offering the Throwback version the biggest difference I detected was the lack of lingering aftertaste on the Throwback. After drinking it exclusively for awhile I found regular Mountain Dew to be unappealing, the way it felt like the sugary syrup clung to the tongue after finishing was off-putting.

I can imagine that Mexican Coca Cola is much the same way, but I don't buy it because it's just too expensive for what one gets.

100% on the money

[bjdevil66]

For those of you under 40: If you dubbed songs over from their original copies (LPs, other cassettes) or from radio broadcasts onto CrO2 tapes, it was always a sharper, brighter sound with more contrast. The CrO2 physical media was also a darker, grayer, and slightly bluer color than the standard wood-colored tape.

Re:100% on the money

[DewDude]

Disclaimer: I am under 40

By far what hindered the pre-recorded cassette industry were three things: Dolby B, head alignment, and bin duplication.

Dolby B was pretty much a joke for the pre-recorded market. The system could work very well; when the playback deck was properly aligned and calibrated against the deck that made the recording. 99% of the consumer crap on the market at the time wasn't...and the real killer was the head alignment.

Bin duplication was solved...but almost way too late in to the cassettes life to matter; I think I started seeing the "digalog" system in the mid/early 90s. See, originally cassette tapes were duped at high speed in mass using a bin duplicator. You had a massive loop of tape as your "master", and another machine with a spool of tape to be duplicated. This thing would run the tapes at high speed, duplicating both sides simultaneously. But tape wears out, so this master loop in the bin had to be periodically swapped out for a new one. As you can imagine, the last few tapes dubbed from that master were of lower quality than the ones made when the master was fresh. The quality of cassette you got depended on the age of the master loop at the time it was recorded. Digital binning solved this, using a digital master instead of a tape one. Now every tape you dub will have the same quality since the master doesn't degrade. This also allowed even high speed dubbing which pushed for much improved heads. High speed dubbing is actually good when you have a system built for it; you run the tape so fast that wow/flutter is virtually zero. From what I've heard of the modern digital binning system; it's actually gotten really good...almost negating the need for the idea of a 1:1 speed, or half-speed transfer.

Switching to a CrO2 tape also helped. This supposedly took a special forumla of chrome tape since you were recording using the "Normal"/Type I IEC emphasis curve...but I've never been able to play with different cassette curves to see if that's the case or not. Regardless, they started using Chrome tape recorded using the playback curve of Type I, which further enhanced the fidelity when combined with things like digital binning.

Chrome tape was usually jet black and pretty shiny. I do recall seeing some Type I/Normal tapes that had an almost dark ferric compound. The blue tinge was probably from cobalt. I seem to recall reading something talking about cassette tapes with cobalt in them.

That being said, I did actually re-record an album from CD on to it's original 1977 pre-recorded cassette and with HXPro and proper bias tweaking...it sounded years better than the original recording did.

Re:100% on the money

[operagost]

Head alignment had nothing to do with Dolby B performance. If your playback head was out of alignment, output was going to be poor regardless.

Re:100% on the money

[Anonymous Coward]

...duplicating both sides simultaneously.

Cassette tape (and 8 tracks) were all one sided. Even on open reel tapes, 2 sided tape was an extreme rarity. The quality for 2 sided tape was poor due to print-through. Perhaps you meant cassettes were duplicated in both directions at once, which is quite feasible,

They grew up and got jobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

It may happen to you too.

Bring back 78s!

[the_skywise]

I mean, for my money, Michael Bolton on a 78 is the epitome of music.

Re:Bring back 78s!

[DewDude]

You make a joke of it, but the process of making a 78 isn't that different than making a modern LP. You'd need to change your head to a mono lateral-cut with a larger groove; but once you have the master disc made....you can press them out of modern materials on modern equipment.

The last batch I know of was made sometime in the mid 90s. They were reissues of oldies for classic jukeboxes.

Drive belts die: HaD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Over on Hackaday someone solved that problem with a 3D printer. There are also kits that allow one to take rubber stock and glue-up the needed length, and sometimes the profile.

Why art?

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out one quality only the LD (Laser-disk) could duplicate. Enough space front and back one could do extensive art.

High quality on tape : DAT (or LTO)

[DrYak]

Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.

And it's called DAT, and it's (very approximately) a CD (-like) bit-stream recorded on a digital tape.

Yes, you can achieve CD quality on tape if you store CD streams on tape.

--

Small details: Yes, I know. CD are exactly 16bits @ 44.1 kHz, whereas DAT are 16 bits too, but with various sample rates available.
But you can use a digital sound on DAT that is an exact clone of a CD, that's my point.

Or just store your perfect CD rip files on Ultirum LTO backup tapes and stop bothering me about minute format details.

Re:High quality on tape : DAT (or LTO)

[DewDude]

A-DAT man. (Alesis DAT).

8 tracks of uncompressed CD audio on a SVHS tape. Ability to dub over tracks without erasing previous tracks. IT was something else.

Re:High quality on tape : DAT (or LTO)

[mysidia]

Yes, you can achieve CD quality on tape if you store CD streams on tape.

It sounds like you're making a veiled Analog vs Digital argument again.

Some forms of tape (not cassette, or anything the individual consumer will buy) can be used as the master and far exceed CDs just storing the audio;
not that it matters for most purposes.

not to rain on anyone's parade....

[roc97007]

...but what about thumb drives as a distribution media? They're dirt cheap and widely supported.

Vinyl is better than mag tape

[WillAffleckUW]

There's never ever going to be a shortage of dead dinosaurs!

And if you play your backup tape backwards it restores your backup to 1994!

Re:Vinyl is better than mag tape

[DewDude]

No. Your assumption is entirely too generic and just that...an assumption.

Magnetic tape itself is fine. Cassette tapes had a lot of drawbacks that made getting the same kind of fidelity out of them difficult, if not impossible.

Cassettes can also sound surprisingly good when they're made properly. Most people associate tapes with lousy pre-recorded stuff from before the digital bin duplication era; or the lousy recordings they made at home on a cheap deck or a lack of knowledge to properly use a good one.

Vinyl can sound like absolute shit if you have a cheap turntable or an improperly set-up one.

I hate warm sound

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me cold, clinical analog HiFi. The less distortion of the original master, the better. Anything you hear that makes a recording seem warmer is just an easily classified form of distortion.

Especially not in Trump Era

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the 1% - the lower 1%!

Recycling...

[XSportSeeker]

Isn't the material recyclable? Sounds like a good justification to just go dig all the tapes that went directly to the trash and reuse it's component parts...

Re:Recycling...

[hguorbray]

What often isn't recyclable is the tape medium itself:

In some cases, over time, the oxide coating that contains the magnetic information loses adhesion to the Mylar backing. How long the oxide remains bound to the tape is a function of manufacturing materials and process, and storage conditions. Tape manufactured in the 70s and 80s had specific problems in this area:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome -some cassette tapes had this problem and sadly, most 'Pro' Reel to Reel tapes of that time had this problem.

In the '90s, as many people became concerned with transferring old stereo master tapes, or even remixing 2-inch master tapes to digital masters there were nightmare stories of irreplaceable tape recordings being destroyed because the oxide layer was rubbed off on the capstans and playback heads of the tapedecks when transfer was attempted (also messing up really expensive playback equipment). Many of these tapes are now stabilized for digital transfer by baking:

http://www.sonicraft.com/Tape_Baking.html

http://old.airmedia.org/PageInfo.php?PageID=197

Hopefully the new tapes they are making will not suffer from SSS or we will lose an entire generation of Mixtapes -the Tragedy!

-I'm just sayin'

NES music cartridges exist

[tepples]

I'm waiting for music released as Nintendo Game Boy carts.

The Famicompo Pico contest, organized by the FamiTracker.org community, has released NES cartridges of the winning original compositions, such as this. Brad Smith has covered the entirety of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as an NES cart. As for Game Boy in particular, however, I don't know if the LSDJ scene has held contests.

No thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have fond memories of my road-trip from Ottawa go to see a concert in Toronto in...96? Halfway through the trip back, the music coming off of the tape deck was starting to warp - playing at normal speed, then slowing down, then back to normal, and slow down again...until I tried to eject the cassette, which it did, except that the tape itself got stuck inside. The cassette felt like it was about ready to melt.

That was the last time I ever used a tape deck - not just this one in particular, but *ever*.

HiFi VHS

[vtTom]

When I was in college back in the early 90's, my floor would host an annual party for the dorm. Someone had a HiFi Stereo VHS deck, so we would pre-record the playlist to that (reel-to-reel and cassette would've been the only other options at the time; the former was prohibitively expensive and the latter had inferior audio qualify).

"Reeling"

[NicknameUnavailable]

I hate the editor with a passion which these words do not adequately portray.

Cassette tapes suuuuck!

[Anonymous Coward]

8 track tape on the other hand was the shit. Why anyone would want to use cassette tapes for anything let alone good sound quality is beyond me. Old technologies are supplanted because something better came along. Cassettes supplanted 8 tracks which were better sound quality but Cassettes had the form factor advantage. These days Cassettes have no advantage. Let them die already.

I want my MTV!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Until they bring back 9-track cassette and Elvis ... I'll still say "you are dumb"

only Zune

[profssrfink]

Why would you ever need a cassette when you can download to your Zune. people these days.

Re: only Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

Cassettes? Less space than a nomad, lame.

I thought this was about Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I figured this was a shortage of tape for backups, then saw it was about audio which is a solved problem.

Move on.

We like terrible things.

[McShoggoth]

So tapes and vinyl can make a come back but DVD Audio and / or the SuperCD can't find a viable audience? Yeah, why would you want that song you like to be in 5.1 surround sound? Keep wondering why it sounded so good in the movie theater and so crappy back at home.

Uh, I don't want to "hear a whole new product"

[theendlessnow]

The historical problem with tape has always been tape "hiss" or noise. Frankly, I have no desire to "hear a whole new product". Instead, give us a product you can't hear, or rather, one where you can only hear what's recorded on the product instead of the product itself.

Lame moderators

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't a troll. It's funny as hell you humorless dumbasses!

Vinyl is foolish, cassette is stupid

[Megane]

Sure, vinyl has problems, but nothing like cassette tape. The only thing worse is 8-track. First of all there's the normal noise floor. "B-b-b-but noise reduction!" You have to use good quality tape with better formulation to start with, and I think you still have to have some support for it in the player.

The biggest problem is the playback. Rubber belts, rubber drive wheels, all will go bad. Compact players with auto-stop will eventually reach a point where the stop detect will never turn off. I used a tape adapter for an MP3 player, just leaving it in play mode all the time, no reverse or rewind, and it went bad in a few years. And even if you had a player that was mechanically perfect, you would still be dealing with the crap that is the tape.

And then there's the duplication process. I bought my first and only pre-recorded tape back in the early '80s. It had a glitch in it, I took it back to the mall (remember malls? This mall eventually became Rackspace HQ otherwise it would have been bulldozed already) and got a replacement. The replacement had the same glitch in the same place, so it was obviously a problem with the master tape. Fuck that shit, CD was new then, and I just had to wait a few years for it to become affordable.

The only thing cassette tape had going for it was size, resistance to vibration, and being recordable. It did NOT have quality as an attribute, except under special circumstances that cost money and weren't portable. MP3 players (now mostly obsoleted by smart phones) have all three, plus you can get higher quality if you are willing to use more storage space.

So what the hell are hipsters smoking now?

analog

[Anonymous Coward]

Why analog? Nyquist-shannon seems pretty clear. Agreed on the warm tube sound. I like it sometimes but I can add it at the end if I want, can't take it out as easily.

No argument

[DrYak]

It sounds like you're making a veiled Analog vs Digital argument again.

No, I'm just answering to the post above :

Heck, with really good tape and really good equipment, you can get audio that's almost CD quality.

Yes, you can achieve almost CD quality on tape, and the simplest most straight forward method is to store the actual CD audio stream on tape. (Either as a backup file, and that what the modern day LTO Ultrium tape format is all about, or as an actual PCM audio stream one of the various Digital Audio Tape formats that exist since at least a couple of decades).

Regarding the veiled Analog vs Digital argument :
I'm not into listening to recordings of bats or dolphins (nor am I into X-Ray and Gamma ray photography*).
Thus CD's digital is pretty good enough for me as it already covers the whole range physiologically perceivable by human ears.

----
*: As in image that actually keeps the X-rays component of the spectrum, not as black-and-white human visible rendering of X-Ray detectors as used in medical imaging).

Some forms of tape (not cassette, or anything the individual consumer will buy) can be used as the master and far exceed CDs just storing the audio;
not that it matters for most purposes.

Good for them. I'm sure you these forms are useful in some fields. (As in biologists actually studying bats' and dolphins' calls)
In my case, as you suggest, it doesn't matter.

Going to be an interesting machine ...

[RockDoctor]

the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January

That'll be about 6.4km/minute ... Oh, per minute. Thought it was per second but 100m/s isn't a ridiculous speed for a plastic film line to run at.