Cassette Tape Making A Comeback?

[lxskllr]

So, apparently cassettes are getting popular again. I guess vinyl wasn't shitty enough for the hipsters, so they had to find something that sounded even worse. Crappy materials, and incessant tape hiss. "But what about Dolby!?" you exclaim. Ah, yes, that fabulous innovation that kills all the high end, and makes it sound like it's playing through a pillow. The world's shitty enough without bringing back cassettes. I'd rather have a 64kbs mp3. At least that won't get shittier every time you play it, or flat out break.

“If you’re a person that does care about sound,” says Zeke Baker, co-owner of Crazy Rhythms, another record store in San Antonio, “I think getting a decent cassette deck is where it’s at. And for people who want some kind of aesthetic, maybe the Walkman is the way to go, or the boombox. It’s just really in the ear of the beholder.”

If you're a person that cares about sound, the player is irrelevant. Cassettes are bad right off factory line, and it doesn't matter what you play them in. Unbelievable that anyone would entertain a serious discussion of music quality as it pertains to cassettes. I guess wax cylinders will be the next hot new audiophile format :^S

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-start-cassette-collection/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

[Captante]

Can 8-tracks be far behind?

 

[lxskllr]

I had some fun with 8tracks yeeears after their heyday. I had a work truck with a digital am only radio. How about that for some wtf? We're high tech and digital, but only am for you... Anyway, I found an 8track car stereo and installed it for fm, but I could also get 8tracks almost free from flea markets. That's about what they were worth, but it was amusing playing 8tracks. Unfortunate that some of the songs got whacked in half when it was time to change tracks :^D

 

[repoman0]

Cassettes don’t make a lot of sense to me aside from the nostalgia factor — I was a little kid right during the transition to CD so had a bunch of silly cassettes and a portable little kid cassette player etc. I do proudly use my cassette player in my car to play a small rotation of 80s metal tapes that I keep in it, mostly for the joke. Can’t see myself starting a cassette collection however.

I think a lot of the movement behind vinyl is people longing for the experience of just listening to music and looking through the large form artwork and lyrics without modern distractions. I’m a EE and have studied signals and systems, audio, sampling etc in depth so I know very well that uncompressed digital audio indisputably is more accurate and all else equal, sounds better. But I’ll still put on a record as my format of choice even if it sounds “worse”. It’s the ritual and the knowledge that I’m using one of a finite number of plays right now to experience this — so pay attention. That has value to a lot of people with musical backgrounds in the world of throwaway Spotify background music.

 

[zinfamous]

DAT was great though!

 

[lxskllr]

I've always been big into music, but I don't really miss vinyl. Slide the record out, hold it on the edges, and place on the turntable. Start it up, and brush the dust off the record. Clean the stylus. Now we're ready to hear 6 songs! After that ~30 minutes is done, get up and do it again, but perhaps we don't have to clean the stylus this time. CDs and the six disc changer was pretty cool, but the carts cost as as much as a cd, and if you wanted some other order, you had to reload them.

My big idea of the time was something that looked like a motherboard, and you bought a chip with music, and installed it on the board. You could then remote which address you wanted, and play noise free music without hassle. That was small thinking though. Digital music is amazing. A couple clicks and I can play one or all of the ~40k tracks on my computer in any order I want, and they'll never degrade.

One thing I will give vinyl is defects are far less annoying than digital defects. I'd rather hear pops, scratches, and the occasional skip than the jarring noise a bad cd or corrupted digital file gives.

edit:
I always thought it would be cool to have "vintagizer" filters for digital music, where you could decrease fidelity and add noise for "character". Pretty niche, but it would probably be popular enough to develop. I used to like listening to vintage jazz/swing on my laptop. The tinny speakers made it sound like a crappy vintage radio. Clearly inferior for fidelity, but it added character when I was in the right mood.

 

[repoman0]

It does seem to be mostly younger people who never had to be annoyed by vinyl who are into it now. Seems like most just don’t mind the annoyances .. like I said, the ritual. I’m sitting down and dealing with the quirks of 100 year old technology to listen to this music right now at good enough quality, and I have big artwork to look at. No distractions like some shitty social media site or ATOT

I’ve been buying CDs throughout the 2000s and 2010s as well though so I’m weird as it is

Anyway back in topic, I was doing some reading about cassette tapes a few months back and apparently most of their sound quality issues has to do with cheap ass production. They write to the tape at a super high speed and it screws up the frequency content and makes it noisy. Real time recordings with a good deck can be less noisy and more accurate than vinyl at its best. Obviously CD is in a different league still, 20+dB better noise performance than either and perfectly flat frequency response.

 

[IronWing]

I kind of miss the ritual of:
Unwrapping a new LP
Unwrapping a new XLII-S cassette tape or making the gut-wrenching decision to record on the back side of a tape holding album by a completely different band
Hand forwarding the tape past the header strip before placing it in the deck
Setting the tape deck into record/pause mode
Putting the LP on the turntable and lowering the needle
Taking the tape deck off pause before the first note
Watching the recording level for a bit to make sure the recording wasn't clipping
Pulling the card out of the cassette case and flipping it inside out
Filling out the cassette index card with the album title and song list while the recording was made
Filling out the labels for the cassette
Putting the tape deck on pause as the last song ended
Flipping the LP and lower the needle
Taking the tape deck back off pause
Finishing recording
Placing the record in the super duper hyper premium record sleeve*
Putting the original liner in the box with all the other original liners
Folding up the card and place back in the cassette case
Putting the label stickers on the cassette
Putting the cassette back in the case
Rearranging the cassettes in the rack to put the cassette in the proper alphabetical order (by group)
Putting the LP in the record rack in the proper place to never be played again until the tape died

* They still sell the exact same model of record sleeves today as they did back in the mid-80s.

 

[lxskllr]

I got tired just reading that. I need a nap now :^D

 

[IBMJunkman]

Don’t forget, cassettes allowed you to make a mix tape for the lust of your life.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have an odd soft spot for old tech, I still have a few CRT monitors/TVs in storage, tapes, CDs and even floppies and even have my SNES still. So it's kinda cool to see this sort of thing get popular again, but other than nostalgia factor it does not really have much advantage.

There is something to be said about pulling physical media out and knowing you own the album, or game, or computer program, or whatever it may be. Whether it's a audio tape or CD, DVD, game cartridge etc. It's self contained and will just work. So much stuff now is reliant on cloud, or an account etc.

 

[NutBucket]

Don’t forget, cassettes allowed you to make a mix tape for the lust of your life.

Could do the same with CDRs?

Anyway, my favorite portable media is the MiniDisc. Too bad it never caught on. I do still own a few and have a player/recorder...though not a portable one.

EDIT: I'm also a curmudgeon like Red so I "refuse" to buy digital copies of things.

 

[zinfamous]

Could do the same with CDRs?

Anyway, my favorite portable media is the MiniDisc. Too bad it never caught on. I do still own a few and have a player/recorder...though not a portable one.

EDIT: I'm also a curmudgeon like Red so I "refuse" to buy digital copies of things.

It got really nerdy though when it came to making CD mixes. Like, who were the people that had CDRs and know how to use them during that relatively brief time that it was viable before being completely replaced by mp3s?

mixtapes were almost more than an entire generation of teenagers swapping body fluids, and no one was labeled a nerd for knowing how that worked.

"You think this fancy mix CD that I made is cool? Well look! I just made a dozen bootleg PS games with it and modified my PS to play them! LOVE ME, LADIES!"

....that never worked.

Oh, you could also disassemble a cassette tape, stash some weed or hash in there, reassemble it and pass it on to your lady, or even yourself, and smuggle it across various borders. You could never do those things with CDs.

 

[waffleironhead]

Im all for it, if it means I can sell my walkman for fat stacks.

next up they need to make it so my portable cd player with tape deck adapter makes some cash.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember downloading music off Napster and making mix CDs for friends in school. Fun times.

I recall when MP3 discs were a thing too so you could fit way more songs on it if you burned in that format, but they only worked in very specific CD players that supported them, so I never did any of those as compatibility was not as good as regular audio CD.

 

[NutBucket]

In the early 2000's my friend went so far as to install a miniPC in his car for the sole purpose of music. I helped him do a custom PCB for the buttons that fit in the ash tray. I forget where he mounted the (character) LCD. I think the PC itself was mounted under a front seat.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Unfortunate that some of the songs got whacked in half when it was time to change tracks :^D

Echoes on Meddle.

 

[pmv]

Agreed.

Not sure which I disliked more - vinyl (that, after you'd spent your precious pocket money on, would always self-destruct and acquire masses of crackles and pops and skips, no matter how carefully you tried to store it) or cassettes (that would also self-destruct, just in different ways, either unspooling and scrunching themselves up in knots while playing, or acquiring a mysterious muffled quality as the mag coating somehow slowly detached itself from the tape).
CDs were a huge step forward - just annoying they were so grotesquely over-priced for so long, as the music industry made you pay a fortune for the same IP you'd already paid for once.

 

[pmv]

The one thing I miss (and it applies as much to CDs as lps or cassettes) is the excitement of discovering a second-hand music store, sometimes in a foreign country, and finally stumbling on those long-deleted albums or singles you thought you'd never find.

It's not the same when everything is just an Ebay/Amazon search away, never mind the digital download stores (and more illicit sources).

Irony is some things seem to be becoming hard-to-find again, because they only get a digital release (especially if they refuse to sell it to you if you aren't in the right country - cant' really buy "import" digital files as you could with physical media) or or, worse, are only available via streaming.

 

[SKORPI0]

I wouldn't mind getting these cassettes for the nostalgia factor.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com

 

[sdifox]

Don’t forget, cassettes allowed you to make a mix tape for the lust of your life.

You can make a playlist today... And you can burn a mix cd if you are so inclined.

 

[sdifox]

Could do the same with CDRs?

Anyway, my favorite portable media is the MiniDisc. Too bad it never caught on. I do still own a few and have a player/recorder...though not a portable one.

EDIT: I'm also a curmudgeon like Red so I "refuse" to buy digital copies of things.

MD was horrible. The codec was just no good and when MP3s hit the scene, out goes it.

<--- has a MD walkman and a cd changer/ MD recorder deck. And hundreds of MD.

 

[snoopy7548]

I still have my 90s alternative rock cassette tapes - Nirvana, Green Day, Bush, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, The Offspring...

Hopefully I can unload them on some hipsters for good money at some point.

 

[Muadib]

DAT was great though!

I always wanted a Dat player / recorder, but couldn't because I was poor. When Sony stopped making them, I shed a tear.

 

[blackangst1]

If so, we need to stock up n these: