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The Cassette Returns On a Wave of Nostalgia (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Pause. Stop. Rewind! The cassette, long consigned to the bargain bin of musical history, is staging a humble comeback. Sales have soared in the last year -- up 125% in 2018 on the year before -- amounting to more than 50,000 cassette albums bought in the UK, the highest volume in 15 years. It's quite a fall from the format's peak in 1989 when 83 million cassettes were bought by British music fans, but when everyone from pop superstar Ariana Grande to punk duo Sleaford Mods are taking to tape, a mini revival seems afoot. But why?
"It's the tangibility of having this collectible format and a way to play music that isn't just a stream or download," says techno DJ Phin, who has just released her first EP on cassette as label boss of Theory of Yesterday. "I find them much more attractive than CDs. Tapes have a lifespan, and unlike digital music, there is decay and death. It's like a living thing and that appeals to me." Phin left the bulk of her own 100-strong cassette collection in Turkey, carefully stored at her parents' home, but bought "20 or 25 really special ones" when she moved to London. "I'm from that generation," she says. "It's a nostalgia thing -- I like the hiss." "Vinyl has got so expensive to manufacture these days, especially if it's only a seven-inch you're putting out. You'll only lose money on a seven-inch release," says Tallulah Webb, who runs cassette-only label Sad Club Records. "Cassettes are an exciting way to put music out, in the same way that seven-inch singles were exciting for punk. They have always been a crucial part of the DIY scene."
On the flip side, Peter Robinson, founder and editor of Popjustice, believes the trend for tapes is a gimmick gone too far. "Cassettes are the worst-ever music format, and I say that as someone who owns a Keane single on a USB stick," he says. "I can understand the romance and the tactile appeal of the vinyl revival, but I'm actually quite amused by the audacity of anyone attempting to drum up some sense of nostalgia for a format that was barely tolerated in its supposed heyday. It's like someone looked at the vinyl revival and said: what this needs is lower sound quality and even less convenience."
"I think labels know full well that almost every cassette they sell is going straight on a shelf as some sort of dreadful plastic ornament," he says. "I don't think it's much different to the recent trend for pop stars adding pairs of socks to their merchandise lines, the crucial difference being that, for better or worse, socks don't count towards the album chart."
"It's the tangibility of having this collectible format and a way to play music that isn't just a stream or download," says techno DJ Phin, who has just released her first EP on cassette as label boss of Theory of Yesterday. "I find them much more attractive than CDs. Tapes have a lifespan, and unlike digital music, there is decay and death. It's like a living thing and that appeals to me." Phin left the bulk of her own 100-strong cassette collection in Turkey, carefully stored at her parents' home, but bought "20 or 25 really special ones" when she moved to London. "I'm from that generation," she says. "It's a nostalgia thing -- I like the hiss." "Vinyl has got so expensive to manufacture these days, especially if it's only a seven-inch you're putting out. You'll only lose money on a seven-inch release," says Tallulah Webb, who runs cassette-only label Sad Club Records. "Cassettes are an exciting way to put music out, in the same way that seven-inch singles were exciting for punk. They have always been a crucial part of the DIY scene."
On the flip side, Peter Robinson, founder and editor of Popjustice, believes the trend for tapes is a gimmick gone too far. "Cassettes are the worst-ever music format, and I say that as someone who owns a Keane single on a USB stick," he says. "I can understand the romance and the tactile appeal of the vinyl revival, but I'm actually quite amused by the audacity of anyone attempting to drum up some sense of nostalgia for a format that was barely tolerated in its supposed heyday. It's like someone looked at the vinyl revival and said: what this needs is lower sound quality and even less convenience."
"I think labels know full well that almost every cassette they sell is going straight on a shelf as some sort of dreadful plastic ornament," he says. "I don't think it's much different to the recent trend for pop stars adding pairs of socks to their merchandise lines, the crucial difference being that, for better or worse, socks don't count towards the album chart."
Nostalgia and romanticism are good reasons, nothing to say about that.
But there are already kid in Youtube arguing that the thing sounds _good_ only to gain attention.
Couldn't have a better name for it. This one is utterly ridiculous. I mean, you had tapes originally so that you could record off your friend's record player, or maybe later to put in your car. That was an end to it, and they were never really loved as such.
On the other hand, get past the 80sness and listen to C30, C60, C90, Go! as a perfect description of when the writing was on the wall for physical record shops.
100000 song music library onto something the size of a cassette now.
especially if it's only a seven-inch you're putting out.
When I read that, I full expected Archer to poke his head through my window and shout, "Phrasing!"
"Cassettes are the worst-ever music format, and I say that as someone who owns a Keane single on a USB stick"
Says someone who has never had to use 8-track.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My heart is all fluttering for the glory of the cassette tape. It's great to... hold on... I have to fast forward cause I hate this track. Overshot, rewind. Ah close enough. Anyway as I was saying, we all know the cassette is the most superior format and, hold on I have to flip the tape over. Anyways as I was saying, the floppy disk is clearly superior in every way to cloud storage.
I lived through the cassette era, and I really don’t get it. Setting aside the bad sound quality... it was not uncommon for the tapes to get “eaten” by players and recorders. It also was not uncommon for the tapes to get folded inside the cassette, and for the tapes to just break. I spent numerous hours, back then, attempting various repairs on cassettes which were messed up, one way or another... and even if you were “successful”, so to speak, your reward was a tape with fade outs or fuzzy sound or gaps...
The only medium which was worse was 8-track tapes, where it was a common experience to have at least one song on an album which overlapped a track change by design.
#DeleteChrome
because of stretched tape, or they would start dragging because the little plastic wheel the tape was on did not turn freely which more than likely was the cause of tape getting stretched
and when i switched to CDrom for music in my car i gladly tossed a shoebox full of cassette tapes in the trash, i wont ever buy another cassette tape again
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Anyone who had to get their music from cassette tapes remembers what they sounded like. Cassette tapes may have become somewhat cool in some circles these days - but they still sound horrible.
We need to return to the good times of the 70's and bring back Disco!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
tl;dr - Yeah having to fast forward and rewind was annoying, but they sounded pretty good if you didn't buy the absolute cheapest cassettes you could find, and paid attention to what you were doing when recording.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I had cassettes so that I could carry a little single speaker cassette recorder down the sidewalk blasting the Suicide Commandos and the the Sex Pistols at full volume. Punk sounds GOOD on cassette. Did you know that the original Sex Pistols Bollocks album was released only in mono?
And in general, cassettes were portable sound . The Walkman was a cassette player. It wasn't a technology only for yuppies to make copies of their friends' albums on their metal deck.
Cassetes seem the tool of devil allowing DRM circumvention. Think of the pirates!
Outlaw the possession of cassetes with capital dead of the owner and his dog.
Compact Cassette was not the worst format. 8-Track will probably forever hold that crown. Cassette could even be pretty good if you had high quality heads and transport that had modes for running the high quality Cr tape nobody used and you did.
That said cassette was reasonably durable for home and office use. The biggest threat to them were high-temps which made them kinda suck for car audio, unless you never parked out doors or took your cassettes with you.
So on to the nostalgia angle? I can put a USB stick in compact cassette shaped container for you if it will make feel better. I am sure we could use some digital audio filters to create the effect of poor frequency response and slight stretches at random positions for random intervals; so you can enjoy that 'warm' sound. Maybe some folks are really dead set on waiting while it rewinds and not having a easy way to seek to the content they want? Not sure how to simulate that misery using technology; maybe some of our DRM implementing buddies can make suggestions there.
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Agreed. Walkman was definitely yuppy though - only they could afford them. A few years later I got a cheap Seisho knock-off in my early teens, which I coincidentally found again last week. Worked fine, well, as 'fine' as it ever was.
Does no one remember;
- Removing it from the sleeve, obsessively cleaning and cleaning the surface, each side as played, and transcribing that precious vinyl album to reel to reel tape, on your Revox, at 15ips? Then, after careful storage of the vinyl, transcribing from the tape to metal oxide cassette tape, high bias, Dolby C, and all, treading upon the maximum level but never exceeding, to have a replica you could play over and over and over, secure in the knowledge that this could be replaced by a new transcription - for years...
- Waiting until 10pm on a specific night on Sundays, patiently, so that your almost in range FM station, for instance WABE, to play the most recent release of whatever top band was in the market, complete with start announcements, lead-in silence, and lead-out silence, one side at a time, your finger poised over the PAUSE button on that Revox reel to reel recorder, capturing what you could not quite yet actually purchase, to be transcribed onto cassette...
- And happily making another cassette copy for a friend, who made a copy for a friend, and so on until the result sounded better if you merely LOOKED at the cassette, in preference to playing back the 7th generation copy, reduced to an analog of a rainstorm on oil drums. Or AM radio from Chicago. Or SW from Berlin.
Those days. Makes me want to get my MiniDisc player/recorder and copy my favorites. Again. Through the Koss Pro4A cans. Isolation. Yes, we probably paid more for the equipment than we should have, but that golden age of HiFi still rings in my ears. L100 speakers, Sansui receivers, Linn turntables (the SL1200 not yet produced), Grado cartridges, Ampex tape (I know...), Nakamichi cassette decks, all this before directional oxygen-free copper interconnects. Just to hear shoddy recordings, with the exception of The Who, they cared.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This seems like it is entirely due to the success of the movie(s). Nostalgia is interesting in that most of the things that we "miss" about yesteryear are gone because they were awful. Cassette tapes are definitely in the awful category.
Speaking of tapes, I miss gigantic boom boxes with analog meters, square LEDs, 50 buttons and 10 D-sized batteries. But I don't think having one is a good idea, and I think that the sudden fond remembrance of cassette tapes will disappear pretty quickly.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I've lost all my Walkmen. On a business trip to NYC i walked by 47th St Photo just to look in the window. There it was. The TPS-L2. Mine in 15 minutes.
Before that I had an underdash cassette deck with a pack of NiCd batteries taped to it, omg. The Koss headphones were full isolation, and it is a minor miracle I wasn't run over skating around in traffic. A little like having a boat anchor on your hip, but it was music.
I was in NYC for training on Sony dictating machines, fortuitous because that Walkman, the first, was mechanically virtually identical to the new and svelte hand held cassette dictating recorder. So I could actually keep putting it back together. A couple of those NiCds were really really helpful.
Yes, my Sharp MiniDisc recorder has lasted much longer.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There was nothing particularly awesome about cassettes other than the fact that you could record over them yourself and that they were portable. They sound bad, they deteriorate and disintegrate - I think it's largely a millennial thing. Nobody of that era would argue in favor of them. We have come a long way since then. How long before reel to reels or 8 tracks make a comeback?
If you're into wow and flutter and S/N of 50db, very little dynamic range and
high frequency cut-off starting at 10-12kHz, yeah, great sonic listening times.
Also, the tape wears because of a poorly designed transport that rubs off
the oxide on the tape as it plays. Don't forget that once a player starts to
"act up," your collection of tapes will be eaten over time. Don't forget the
#2 pencil to rewind the tape back on to the spool or to take up the tape slack
before inserting it into the player.
I was so happy when CD's finally replaced tapes (which kinda replaced vinyl).
CAP === 'investor'
LOL. Walkman was yuppy? OK sure, whatever. My family was pretty damn poor, but when I was 7 or 8 (a few years after the walkman was first released) I bought a Sony Walkman for myself with my paper route money.
I think digital has become sort of cold, highly compressed and is a convenience format but hardly inspires people's experience. The end result in music is most instruments are analog in nature, and output is still analog from a speaker. Human's are drawn to this sort of sound, maybe because our hearing isn't perfect and the imperfections of analog media just fits in better with that fact.
I recall that back in the 80 (and slightly less so in the 90s) it seemed like almost every intersection in the country had broken strands of tape fluttering about from people who had given up on a broken cassette. Yards after yards of that crap, tangled up on everything. Let's hope production on this revival doesn't reach high enough levels to see that again. At least a broken CD or vinyl record stays in (mostly) one place.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
a top-tier metal tape with noise reduction on a high-end system could sound very close to CD-quality
though, afaik, all of the new-retro cassettes being produced are on low-tier tapes and none have noise reduction support
There are few - if any - companies still making cassette tape players now. I haven't seen them sold in any obvious places in retail stores for years. If people have to mostly resort to buying used hardware to listen to these new releases, that sounds a bit short-sighted. At least I can still pick up a CD player at Best Buy or WalMart (or play a CD in a Blu-Ray player if I want), and most cars on the road today still have CD players as well. I can't say the same for cassette.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I agree cassette was not great, but I had a Nakamichi with dual capstans and a very nice transport system with Dolby B/C and had record head alignment with a cal tone to set it. It was not CD quality but in some ways rivalled Vinyl. I would use tape for most listening and save the albums for serious. It was a beautiful machine. I fondly recall the 80's were a period where audio equipment looked good and was machined aluminum cases. My Sony CD players were battleships. Still have a CDP-101 that weighs a ton. Dunno if it still works but it might. Still use my 650ES. 30 years old I think.
I had a really nice Pioneer tape deck that had Dolby S noise reduction. It was very nice. I made several live recordings that sounded great.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I married my high school sweetheart after we were both out of college. We both went to high school during the height of the cassette tape generation, and share fond memories of making each other mix tapes.
Last year, we were moving and I found an old shoebox in the closet that I had never known was there. It was full of old things that I had given her in high school - some snap bracelets, notes we had passed in class, a can of spray glitter, other 80's fabulous relics, and a few mix tapes that I had made for her, including Mix Tape Number One - the first one I had ever made her on my old Realistic boom box. It was our first date - get a pizza and make a mix tape together.
I left the box exactly where it was, as undisturbed as possible, but I scribbled down all the songs that were on that mix tape. I managed to find the exact boom box I had on ebay, thanks to the nostalgia that was going around at the time of Radio Shack's closure, and with a little help from Spotify, I re-made that exact cassette tape using as many remixes and new versions as I could.
It was our 20th anniversary, and we were talking about what to do. I suggested we just go out to our favorite Italian restaurant and then I'd take her out for a surprise evening. I called a few days before to talk to the chef to see if he could make us a pizza (the restaurant doesn't have it on the menu), and he said sure, he could.
We got to the restaurant, and I had asked for a private dining area, so our host seated us in a back corner away from everyone else. I told my wife that I'd already ordered something special for us so we just got an appetizer and a bottle of wine to start.
After a while, a small team of people from the kitchen brought us our main course: a large pizza with pepperoni and green pepper on half and sausage and feta on the other half, and a dusty old Realistic boom box playing the remade mix tape we had made together on our first date.
The revival of the cassette tape isn't just to do with hipsters making old technology cool again. It's about cherishing memories of a time when the cassette tape was such an integral part of how we expressed ourselves. Playlists have become so easy that they have lost their meaning. Mix tapes took hours to put together and so had a lot of value in terms of time and effort sacrificed for another human being.
That night we were both reminded of just how much we love each other to this day. Our kids are getting ready to head out to college, and we'll be starting the empty-nester phase of our lives together before we know it. It's nice to have anchors in our relationship, and that first date is certainly one of them.
I'll admit that the cassette tape is undoubtedly sonically inferior, but it's a very accessible way for young artists to release music. As noted above, pressing vinyl has gotten exorbitantly expensive in recent years. It's a good way to lose money. Obviously mp3/FLAC is the logical way to distribute music now, but humans are sentimental creatures and they like to have a physical object to hold on to. It's also a money maker; no one's ever drunkenly purchased a download code. I'll always have a soft spot for cassettes.
At some point in the 90s, it dawned on me why so many "old" people who only learned about computers in their 40s or later had difficulties with these new machines: It was the lack of a direct mapping between interface element and function. Before the computer, every button had at most a few functions, and devices with multiple functions per button were considered complicated. That's why people that age learned sequences of where to click: This had been a viable strategy. Buttons didn't change function or position before computers. And, I figured, at that age they perhaps didn't have the mental flexibility to adapt to a completely new way of interacting with a machine.
Now a generation younger than me prefers technically vastly inferior media like cassettes and vinyl because of their tangibility. Was I wrong? Are the abstractions of the digital world not just a problem for people who grew up without them? Is the non-tangible world of the computer perhaps a lasting problem for a non-negligible part of the population, regardless of age?
Maybe the price dropped off after competition came out, but on first release the walkman cost more than the first car I purchased (also with paper route money).
It's like someone looked at the vinyl revival and said: what this needs is lower sound quality and even less convenience."
Less convenient? They were smaller, the players were much smaller, and they didn't skip. Portability was easy.
Also, you had lots of control, could duplicate with ease, could make mix tapes, leave out extended codas or intros or whatever if you didn't want them.
Probably the people listening to cassette music are the same people adding Clippy to their business card. People who never suffered them, and who don't really care about their performance, but only they are vintage or funny.
Following the trend, I expect that the next big thing will be poorly encoded 128Mbps MP3. Burned on rotting CD-R for authenticity.
Impressive how nostalgia makes people long for things that have nothing positive about them. There are even groups of people who recreate traffic jams with vintage cars because it reminds them of they childhood holidays. I understand the appeal of vintage cars but traffic jams?! You hated them as a kid, you hate them now, they are a plague but nostalgia turned it into something pleasurable. Our brain is weird.
Buckethead sent me a 2 minute custom solo on a cassette tape. It is so cool!
Yuppy? Maybe when the Walkman first came out. I bought a competitor and had it for years for a bit less in cost. But, the boom box was the rage and everybody had them - including the poor inner city kids.
Cassettes were portable. Dolby got rid of the hiss. And, they were cheap, easy to store, and easy to replace or copy. Many had duel cassette decks for that purpose.
Just the other day I was in Target and saw their vinyl record collection. One album I had as a teen, Pink Floydâ(TM)s Dark Side of the Moon was selling for $24. I bought it for $8, I think, with my paper route money. And, I already had a record player. We all had record players and âoestereosâ.
There is something to be said for analog audio over digital despite the hiss (even with Dolby). But, the dynamic range, portability, and low cost of digital formats (despite some loss of quality) makes them prime for todayâ(TM)s society. Bringing back cassettes seems silly other than to be hipster and say you have it.
Cassette stories on /. are down 50% from last month. I guess the glory days of cassette revival stories are over...
I enjoyed the cassette days because I could easily make mixed tapes (that were crappy quality) and take them with me just about anywhere. I remember listening to the radio for hours waiting for my favorite song to play so I could record it. Of course I'd miss the first 5 seconds but it was worth it to me. I rode around on my bike with my little boom box thinking I was much cooler than I actually was. I had a walkman I used when I delivered newspapers after school.
The CD greatly improved quality but due to skipping it just wasn't as reliable when "on the go".
I have no desire to go back to cassette but I do have good memories of that era.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I totally get the vinyl thing. Records can sound great (with good equipment, which I have) and a big part of collecting them is the big cover art. Cassettes don't do either of these things. Cassettes were a bad format for music when they were popular, and they really make no sense now. They aren't pretty to look at, don't sound good, are less portable than alternatives that are now available, and they aren't less expensive than other options. I got rid of my cassette player years ago and don't regret it one bit. I kept the turntable, reel-to-reel, and CD player, though.
Since all aspects of the cassette tape response function from grain-level magnetic domain saturation, to wow and flutter in the the tape speed, to head alignment all can be numerically modeled. Even degaussing from tape stress over repeated plays and magnetic bleed through from tightly wound thin tapes. If all that gives it some j' Ne Sais Quoi that is sought, Why not just create a time domain filter for digital music and play that? lot cheaper than a cassette. Even a raspberry pi or an amazon dash button has the horsepower to do that kind of filtering. Moreover you don't even need to do it in real time, just preprocess it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
i had great times while gaming in early 90's... i yearn for Red Dead Redemption on casettes
first we're talking numbers so low, even after the spike, that they some obscenely small fraction of the real sales of music
second, it's obvious a few people are buying these as just a knick knack, I wouldn't be surprised if most of these are still shrinkwrapped and that many of the people buying don't even have a functional tape player
the gist, in a world of 7 billion people, you can probably find a few hundred thousand that will buy almost anything sent down the pipeline
And Flutter!
played by a huge megaphone thing. I wouldn't mind one of those, with
a sort of Masterpiece Theater vibe.
My dad had a lot of 78 rpm full size disks, I suspect
they may have been worth something. No idea what happened to them.
Tape sucks. Vinyl sucks. They suck for obvious reasons inherent to their format. The only reason anybody would want to resurrect them is to tap into a rich seam of gullible hipsters who'll buy the same music in an inferior format.
As a once-user of cassettes, I'm astounded anyone would buy a record on tape - I only ever used them to record music from other media (straight from a radio receiver, a CD deck, sometimes another cassette).
And I used what I was told were high-quality tapes - Maxell XL II or later Maxell XL II-S.
Matter of fact, I might still have some empty ones around... certainly, those with records are still there. I guess I'll pick them out for some memories... having recently put the old hi-fi set back into service (needed some work on the amplifier's potentiometers, otherwise still fine - we took pride in those pieces of equipment).
Playing MP3s off the computer just isn't the same.
If I buy a new release in an obsolte format when I could get it in a modern format, it's to buy it as a work of art.
That is, it's either for display or as an investment collectable. Almsot all are only for display: Other than very limited releases - say, low-run anniversary releases with special cover art - these likely won't be investment collectables.
Besides, the only "nostalgia" value of vinyl or analog tape for me is if it wasn't available in CD or other digital form when it first came out.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's like someone looked at the vinyl revival and said: what this needs is lower sound quality and even less convenience."
Lower sound quality maybe, but not less convenient. Smaller, lighter, easy to use on the go in a car or walkman. Vinyl is the one that is far less convenient.
... more dead cassette entrails wafting in the breeze alongside highways as they die a horrible death on hipsters car cassette players.
I'm not looking forward to the coming onslaught of articles instructing the new cassette aficionados whether one should choose dolby, CrO2, metal, or some combination of the various tape player settings that will never make up for the inevitable "wow" sound that tape gives you as the rollers wear/dry out.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Originally, cassettes were somewhat preferable to vinyl because they were more portable. One made a sacrifice in terms of audio quality for that convenience, but for many it was worth it.
However, in today's digital age, you can store thousands of songs within the space that a single cassette would take up, and at *vastly* higher quality. It's still more portable (and apparently now, less expensive) than vinyl, but when there are cheaper and no less portable mechanisms available that do not compromise on quality, honestly, any preference for the obsolete tech is going to come across more like Luddism than genuine nostalgia.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If I want to be nostalgic _and_ have some maker-ish fun I'd go cobble together a basic data backup system using an audio cassette player and homebrew electronics to store code snippets or short text files. Now I gotta wonder if I still have those old Coleco ADAM tapes with Jr. Hi essays on them in a box somewhere in the garage... or maybe some from my old beloved Timex Sinclair 1000, probably holding BASIC files typed in from computer magazines.
I still have my tapes from 1981-1993, and they sound great. Pretty much as good as when they were new. I don't know what you are using to listen to cassette tapes withj, but it does matter. Someone did take my Let's Dance tape sometime in the late 80's. Still pissed about that! Also, making a Mix Tape is awesome. I still have several, and they are wonderful. Have you not seen Red Dwarf? This is the future. Mind you, I hardly listen to them now, but I have been shopping for a new / old cassette deck again. I foolishly gave mine away during my divorce (I was distracted!)
Q. What is Calvin's monster snowman called? A. The Torment Of Existence Weighed Against The Horror of Non Being
Your best bet is to find a way to profit off the endless stupidity that abounds. Kudos to those who make these things. I hope they get rich beyond their wildest dreams.
> that doesn't mean that a particular piece of music might not sound better to SOMEONE on a lossy analog format.
That's not what "lossy" means; it doesn't refer to fidelity of the reproduction. It was coined to refer to digital compression, to contrast with "lossless" methods.
That's why people that age learned sequences of where to click
Right. Muscle memory. I don't have to look down at my car's audio system to figure out which button does what. If it's a software-generated UI, each location on the screen changes function depending on what mode the app is in. Or if some developer with too much time decided to move functions around in the menu. For an ATM, this isn't that big a deal. Witness the millenials staring at some machine with their mouth hanging open as they have to re-read the same menu every time. Just to make sure the function they want is still there.
Have gnu, will travel.
I think most of people's bad memories of cassettes come from using poor quality tapes on poor quality decks. Cassettes: Better than you don't remember
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The digital media when sustaining some physical damage usually has a catastrophic result. The tape may sound worse for a moment but it will keep playing (well unless it gets chewed up that is).
Now granted with non-mechanical storage and backup copies you'd be fine for life with your digital library.
4wdloop
Guy the author never heard of the wax cylinder. Some engineers I know play them regularly to get the data off them and archive them (old indigenous music and speech, mostly).
The sound quality is atrocious.
Why stop with cassettes? 8-Tracks are even less durable, less convenient, and worse sounding!
Bow Wow Wow approves! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Similar to printed books, an analog cassette tape can sustain a fair amount of damage and still be usable.
The tape can wear, stretch, and even break, but can be spliced, put in a new shell, and you can listen to it again.
If it's the only copy you have, you can copy it off to a new tape. You'll lose quality but you'll still be able to hear it.
Unlike digital formats, there's no DRM to worry about. Making a 'mix tape' used to be a Thing, and unlike purely digital formats, just about anyone can make a mix tape, the skill required is small and the learning curve is short and flat.
The worst format ever? Really? Who said that, other than this moron?
Perhaps he's confusing cassette tapes with 8-track, which *was* dreadful.
He *brags* about having a large USB key with *one* song? So, he also has a zero-length attention span. Some of us, with an actual attention span, like to hear all of what an artist(s) have to say, and listent to an entire album (oh, gosh, listening to one artist or band for MORE THAN HALF AN HOUR?! So old school....
And either CDs or cassettes, I just shove into the player, and don't have to screw around with picking songs, which is NOT something you want to be doing while driving.
That being said, I really do need to burn my few hundred cassettes to disk for backup....
Even with TYPE IV cassettes. I will go with CDs all the way over any cassette.
Ya, everybody knows most of these cassettes just end up on a shelf or in a box. According to the music podcasts I listen to, people just want a physical product to buy at concerts, and all these cassettes come with download codes for the digital version. I'm sure some people listen to them and understand there's no lack of cassette players still on the market. Personally, having lived though that era, I'd prefer tapes over vinyl, but I'm also not a DJ.
For having low quality, huge wear & tear, so they hope you'll be buying twenty copies of your favourit artists album , instead of just one digital file (cd or download).
Lack of DRM
Maybe the price dropped off after competition came out, but on first release the walkman cost more than the first car I purchased (also with paper route money).
The original Walkman was $150. I've bought a couple of $100 dollar cars in my day, but they also weren't even close to new, or in great shape. If you bought your first car in 1950, when the average price for a new car was about an order of magnitude more I can believe it. So you probably could get a pretty nice car for that much then.
I'm guessing that a lot of kids these days spend so much time with keyboards and tablets that they'll never realize that a Bic pen is perfectly suited to sticking through the holes in the cassette so you can wind the tape back in.
LOL, I sort of get the vinyl thing but tapes? Oh, it's hissing. Turn on the Dolby. Great. Now there's way too much bass. Fiddle with the equalizer... if you've got one. You probably don't. Oh well, at least you can carry around this cool looking suitcase that holds something like 36 albums, and you only paid $5 for each, what a bargain! What? You left it at the beach house and it's nowhere to be seen? Oh well. Nostalgia!!!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
On the flip side
I see what you did there.
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Many abused child miss their abusers when he or she goes to prison, too. Death to hiss!
Cassette tapes are the Porsche 911 of audio: a bad idea developed far beyond what its inventors ever intended. Decent cassettes sound demonstrably better than 256k mp3s, and the best cassettes sound measurably better than compact disc (dynamic range, for instance). A first gen ipod cannot compete with a first gen walkman for sound quality. Sure, if you use the cheapest tapes and the cheapest players, you will get the cheapest results. That's also true of digital players. The same trash cans that were once full of broken tape decks are now full of broken iphones. Besides, wise man once say: Better to hear one Elvis song on AM radio than sit front row at Maroon 5 concert.
But I bought a cheapo tape recorder with a mic to bootleg the concerts I went to, in the mid to late 90s.
Later on I converted them to digital, and still listen to them sometimes - I dunnow, shit holds up fine. People are making too big a deal about how terrible cassettes sound.
The Walkman was like the iPod of the time. The only thing was Apple learned that if it kept the file format to itself, they wouldn't be popular Copy models a few years down the line.
While the iPod is more or less dead technology, it was replaced by the Smart Phone, and not by any iPod killer that everyone was expecting.
But like most new technology, when it comes out, it is expensive so only some people will get it, over time, they will be cheaper options.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. create medium ..........
2. make everyone use it
3. let it go extinct
4. wait 30 years
5.
6. Profit!!!
They were about making convenient copies/backups in addition to a more convenient/portable playback format.
You all had horrible tapes. You had horrible decks. You had horrible sources. And you didn't know how to make a good recording.
We are old. We have money now, we get the best decks, the best tapes, and good source. And we get really, really, good sounding tapes.
That's the end of it. Don't judge cassettes cause the deck your Mom got you was the cheapest she could find at Montgomery Wards sounded like crap with your Tonemaster cassettes.
You know that great sounding vinyl, was made from a tape master, dumb ass.
Someone who is too young to remember 8-track tapes.
These days when I want some tunes I have to open the interface, wait for it to load, update the software, probably look at an advertisement, then I get to decide what to listen to. Tapes you just push play.
Sure I might not find the exact song you want but usually that isn't important to me. I like the music and so I'll listen to whatever the position is at the moment. It's great for quick background music.
Also the #1 feature everyone in this thread has overlooked is how great they are for audiobooks. You can instantly pause, even lose power and the story will resume exactly where you left off. I can't tell you how many times I've lost my position in a digital story and had to spend 5 minutes trying to get back without spoiling the ending.
As other's have noted they are GREAT for making your own mixes. What is wrong with having another format around?
you don't eat crackers in the bed of your future--or else you'll get all scratchy
I was *just* old enough to remember the tail end of people buying and listening to 8-tracks, so I gotta be honest here? I may not have a real good grasp of how the experience went for regular users.
I did, however. have one of those 2XL toy robot/quiz game machines that used special 8-tracks to run it, and could alternately play regular 8-track music tapes as a tape player. I remember getting my hands of a few good albums on 8-track at that time, like a couple early Police albums. And from my perspective, 8-track was a little better than cassettes where you had to flip them over to listen to the other side. (And probably as a side effect of how the 2XL robot worked, you could press the buttons on the front of it to skip to certain songs on the 8-track, which was kind of a cool, if unintentional feature.)
I think later on, I bought a cheap Radio Shack 8-track player that mounted under the dash of my Chevy Nova and I wired it in tandem with the factory AM radio. I didn't keep it long, but it seemed to work ok while it worked.
I'm calling bullshit on this one.
The heydey of the cassette tape was probably in the early 80s when the Walkman came out. It wasn't long before everyone had a cheap portable cassette player of some sort ... my middle-school years were spent attached to one while skateboarding to and from school or on my paper route.
At that time, the cassette wasn't "barely tolerated", it was considered pretty awesome ... it was more portable than vinyl (there is no Walkman for vinyl I'm aware of), smaller than an 8-track and not hard limited to a specific length, and allowed you to also record your own mix tapes or what have you.
Anybody saying cassette tapes were "barely tolerated" in their heydey, either wasn't there, or was already an out of touch audio snob who owned gear nobody else could afford.
Peter Robinson is either full of shit, has an inflated sense of the value of his own opinion, or wasn't there to have any fucking idea of just how widespread the cassette tape was for just how long ... there was a good 15 years or so where if you wanted to listen to music in your car, or on the bus, you used a cassette tape.
The cassette tape was ubiquitous, not 'barely tolerated'. Hell, my wife still has a box or two of her cassettes she won't part with.
So the question should be: ''Why do I have to repurchase songs now after I already purchased them 40+ years ago on cassette tape?
My favorite was when the batteries were dying, causing the tape to play slower and slower.
If you fell asleep listening to a tape, you could very well wake up with your first thoughts being that you were demonically possessed.
Those were great tapes. Not outrageously expensive, I could afford to use them for everything that I cared about. Not that they were cheap though, a package containing 2 SA90s cost the same as one containing 5 of the cheapest TDK tapes. Worth every penny though.
One trick to good recording quality was to fast-forward then rewind the tape end to end on the recording machine before recording on it. The factory-spooling, transportation and storage could prevent that first un-spooling from being completely smooth, and the FFD/RWD re-spool reduced wow and flutter during the recording process.
I still miss my Panasonic personal cassette player. The mechanical engineering in that was amazing.
In 1981, when I was in my final year of high school, there was a song that I heard many times on the radio about the Walkman cassette tape player. Now, whenever I hear this I am brought back to 1981. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
i'm again using cassette's to store all my programs written in basic on.
who needs the cloud?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.