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.

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?

[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?

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: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.