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

[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

[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

[MightyYar]

Did you feel like a real man?

Only when I stuck my dick in it.

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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

[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:Nice Pun

[DontBeAMoran]

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

No, not cassette

[boudie2]

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

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: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.

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).