A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling (wsj.com) 276
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."
I still use them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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 :)
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Did you feel like a real man?
Only when I stuck my dick in it.
Re:I still use them (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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The sound is so warm, though.
Re: I still use them (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Ah! Directional cables. I can see it now... Presenting the new Monster Cable unidirectional audio cables, with "built-in 0.7V softener".
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Somewhere I actually have a pair of directional Monster cables, as evidenced by the arrows printed on them. Not sure where they came from.
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> with one of these ethernet cables
Those the are the same morons (AudioQuest) who sell a Diamond Braided $999 HDMI cable [amazon.com]
When did audiophile become an euphemism for More money then brains ???
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Woo hoo! I knew if I held onto the Escort long enough, its accessories would become useful again!
I’m obviously an audiophile!
Time to sell my old music cassettes (Score:2)
Recently moved and carried a full box of tapes to me new house. Wondered what to do with it. Send me your offers now!
Drive belts die (Score:2)
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?
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Just replace the drive belt. Why throw a perfectly good piece of equipment away that can be fixed with a $1 part?
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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 rebui
Re:Drive belts die (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Experience, proper tools, and suitable workspace. Makes all the difference.
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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?
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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.
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But it was the first time I'd torn in to that unit and that seized screw put up a fight.
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Replace a $1 part every 15 years? Are you insane? That's almost seven cents per year! We're not all made of money!
Why cassettes? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sound (Score:5, Interesting)
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?... [youtube.com]
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I knew before I clicked that would be Techmoan, his videos are an amazing history of virtually every media format that has ever existed.
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100% on the money (Score:4, Informative)
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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 cas
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Too much bias, your tape sounds muddy. Too little, it's very bright. I'm not talking about
Re:Why cassettes? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree though: why are people still bothering with them?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Today's chips are big enough to losslessly buffer most people's entire music collection. So yeah, it's beyond solved.
Re:Why cassettes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Interesting analogy with the Mexicoke (Score:2)
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.
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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 w
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I
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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.
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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 turn
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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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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They made PCM adaptors for Betamax.
High quality on tape : DAT (or LTO) (Score:2)
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.
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8 tracks of uncompressed CD audio on a SVHS tape. Ability to dub over tracks without erasing previous tracks. IT was something else.
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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
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
Re:Why cassettes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
Doin' it wrong, son. (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
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I'm waiting for music released as Nintendo Game Boy carts.
NES music cartridges exist (Score:2)
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 [nesdev.com]. Brad Smith has covered the entirety of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon [nesdev.com] as an NES cart. As for Game Boy in particular, however, I don't know if the LSDJ scene has held contests.
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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.
"Reeling" (Score:2)
Nobody else is commenting on the pun in the headline?
I love this sort of story on Slashdot (Score:2)
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 a
Since 1969 (Score:2)
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I still use cassettes... (Score:2)
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,
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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.
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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
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>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
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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 pl
No, not cassette (Score:4, Funny)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
leave it lay (Score:2)
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But don't you miss occasionally seeing an unspooled tape tumbleweed on the side of the highway?
Inferior tech can go rot .... (Score:2)
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 o
Wow, how time flys (Score:2)
It's April 1st already?
Who in their right mind would use tapes anymore, especially cassette tapes?
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oh no, the hipsters (Score:2)
People want cassettes? (Score:2)
Sure, Lois. All the sorority girls are clamoring for the plantain section. Stop with this!
Bring back 78s! (Score:2)
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The last batch I know of was made sometime in the mid 90s. They were reissues of oldies for classic jukeboxes.
not to rain on anyone's parade.... (Score:2)
Recycling... (Score:2)
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...
HiFi VHS (Score:2)
Re:Nice Pun (Score:5, Funny)
I only got the "leaves cassette fans reeling" part.
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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.
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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
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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.