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Music Entertainment

The Cassette Returns On a Wave of Nostalgia (theguardian.com) 224

Posted by BeauHD from the trends-that-shouldn't-exist dept.
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."
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The Cassette Returns On a Wave of Nostalgia

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  • "...who runs cassette-only label Sad Club Records" (Score:5, Informative)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:08AM (#58187886) Homepage
    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! [wikipedia.org] as a perfect description of when the writing was on the wall for physical record shops.

    • Model tape response. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @10:15AM (#58188390)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 4im ( 181450 )

      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 (nee

  • Pulling out (Score:4, Funny)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:11AM (#58187902)

    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!"

  • Cassette is not the worst music format (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:15AM (#58187912)

    "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.

    • i remember 8 track tapes when i was a teen, those things are worse than casette tape,
      • The further back you go the worse they get, that's why they got replaced in the first place but there's probably someone somewhere still listening to their wax cylinders.

        • My dad has a nice big collection of gramophone records that were a major part of my kid years, especially once I discovered our record players we had in the 70s and 80s could play 78s.

          In fact, total dork that I was and am, some of the first things I copied when I got my bedroom component stereo one Christmas were some of his old records; specifically the Runaway Train and the Bum song. And not long after, my best friend produced a 78 from his grandma's collection of The Rocky Road to Dublin. Can't remembe

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          The early cassettes, really only meant for dictation, were much worse then 8 tracks. At that an 8 track could sound quite good, the tape was wider and IIRC, ran at a higher speed then a cassette. I had a copy of Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds that sounded excellent and my neighbour had Dark Side of the Moon in Quad on an 8 track that also sounded very good. Other 8 tracks sounded like crap probably due to cost cutting.
          Problems was the track changing, no reverse and they had a habit of getting eaten by the ma

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "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.

      You don't know suck unless you have ever had a 8 track where the song fades out in the middle and you hear a loud ka-chunk and the song fades back in where it left off. The idiots who mastered it spread the song over two tracks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        That was partly because vinyl was still king, so if they kept the vinyl song order, inevitably the song in the middle of both sides was right over the splice. A smarter recording engineer might try to shuffle them around to avoid the splice, but there was still no guarantee that it was even possible.

        They were mechanically crap too. Not only would the friction tape loop eventually break (I'm sure they also used thinner tape toward the end of its days, making it more likely to break), but basically any old 8

      • Always hated that the Cantina Band and Princess Leia's Themes were two of the unfortunate victims of splitting the song between tracks on my Star Wars soundtrack back in the day.

    • Yep. Cassettes were a huge advancement over 8-tracks.

    • The only format where songs often had to be split into 2 parts.

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:20AM (#58187922)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by doggo ( 34827 )

      Some cassette decks had the tech to fast-forward to the next silence (end of song), but if the music had significant silent parts it could get frustrating.

      I had an 8-track player in my quadrophonic system.

      Frankly, for all their faults, I liked Compact Cassettes. 8-Tracks? Not so much.

      • Thinking back, it would seem like a tech like that must have greatly reduced the life of the media. Would a feature like that be the equivalent of holding FF part way down while pressing play? It would seem so, since it would need to detect the silence. And that seems like it would have put excessive stress on the tape, which would have ultimately stretched it out and cause it to snap.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blue Stone ( 582566 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @12:08PM (#58189160) Homepage Journal

      Automatic song-end technology was came in toward the end of tape's meaningful life (so you could fast-forward without overshooting, although it wasn't perfect). Auto-reverse cassette players were the norm for a good deal longer, and not just in portable cassette players.

      Cassettes were the solution to a small form factor need, which later made the portable, personal music revolution possible.

      The limitations of technology gave it it's less-than ideal mechanics, but for millions of people, being able to take your music with you and listen to it in public was truly transformative.

      Sure, it's an obsolete technology now, but to describe it as "the worst" is to overlook, to the point of blindness, the amazing personal and cultutral musical revolution it enabled: one which it's tech-privilleged modern-day critics seem to be ignorant of.

      Of course, you'd have to be a fucking idiot to use one now. :)

  • Oh, man (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:24AM (#58187934)

    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.

    • Precisely. I can't imagine anyone who actually used cassettes is experiencing 'nostalgia'. It was a short lived format, which was quickly replaced by much better alternatives.

      A more apt description might be 'retro fetishism'.

    • 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...

      I wonder if the tapes come with a free pencil for winding them back in, hardly anyone carries them around these days.

      • I always had a sneaking suspicion that the designers of the cassette cartridge intentionally made the hub the same size as a number two pencil because they knew how often people would need to attempt home repair jobs on the things.

    • 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

      • I bought a portable CD player when I was in university and it rarely skipped. It was like a Sony Discman. To keep the disc from moving the centre "post" that you placed the CD onto had three ball bearings spread out that would hold the disc in place. Whenever you wanted to take a disc off or put on in they would move in because there were springs behind them. It was a very good design and played CDs quite well. I was very happy with that purchase. I think it was a Panasonic but I can't be 100% sure about it

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

          There were a lot of them that used that design. I owned a Philips Magnavox player that used this, and also made use of a 25 second buffer to correct skipping.

    • I totally agree. I grew up firmly entrenched in the cassette world. CDs didn't come on the market until I was around 16 (as in you could actually go to record stores and find some), so all of my childhood using was totally using cassettes for music. I remember when I was around 13-14 asking for pretty much the "pinnacle" of cassette technology for Christmas. That being a walkman-style cassette player / radio, that included the apex of the technology: Auto Reverse and the auto-music-search (each brand cal

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        I guess the hipsters are using CrO2 tapes and Dolby noise reduction...

        But that doesn't get everything.

    • I also lived through the cassette era, and I had a few bad experiences with them, but generally they were a fine way to listen to music.

      Also, the type 2 and metal tapes were actually pretty good sound quality, especially through a decent stereo, whether that was in a car or in a home/apartment.

      I think most people that post on here who complain about how bad the sound quality was were listening to cassettes on low quality decks/speakers.

      An important thing people forget about is that in the 60's-90's

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crgrace ( 220738 )

      Yeah, there are multiple albums that I literally wore out from overplaying them in junior high and high school. And then several of them I repurchased on CD.

      What the hell was wrong with me?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      > it was not uncommon for the tapes to get âoeeatenâ 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.

      See, nostalgic . . .

      . . . sorting through your mother's kitchen drawers to find where she left those turkey stitching wires, the onbly way to hook the cassette and pull it out . . . spinning the reels with a pencil aftwer it was wound to tight and screeching . . . finally giving up and borrowing dad'

      • . . . finally giving up and borrowing dad's tools to extract your radio from the dash and remove the lid to get the mangle tape out when all else fails . . .

        I remember having to do that a few times when the cassette eject mechanism in the car player refused to lift up the cassette and push it out! I'd forgotten about that particular "nostalgic memory" until I read your post.

  • i cant count the cassettes i tossed in the trash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:28AM (#58187946)
    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

  • Nostalgia? Snobbery, more likely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:30AM (#58187948)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      That's mainly because most people listened to their tapes on walkmen, whose pitch would change as you walked around with them. A decent home deck could sound great.

      • That's mainly because most people listened to their tapes on walkmen, whose pitch would change as you walked around with them. A decent home deck could sound great.

        The Walkman's drive mechanism was counterbalanced so it wouldn't do that. That was the whole point of the name - you could listen to it while walking (or jogging) and the pitch wouldn't change, so it would sound as good as your home cassette player. Most people don't know this because the Walkman was priced at about $150 (around $500 today),

  • We need to return to the good times of the 70's and bring back Disco!

  • Obligatory Techmoan (Score:3)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:33AM (#58187960)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    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.

    • Correct.

      Chrome was my minimum quality.
      Then I tried Metal...That's it Metal all the f'n way.

      I still have them all and my 3 head tape deck.

    • And didn't play it much so the sound quality didn't degrade.

    • "Pretty good" - compared to what? It was clearly the worst of the commonly-used audio formats in terms of fideltity, .iIt was at best acceptable, but was also the only practical method for car audio before the CD came along, and, and you could make mix tapes with it.

          Despite what he music industry said about it, the use case was generally to allow you to record off of records you already had just so you could play them in the car.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 )

        "Pretty good" - compared to what? It was clearly the worst of the commonly-used audio formats in terms of fideltity, .iIt was at best acceptable, but was also the only practical method for car audio before the CD came along, and, and you could make mix tapes with it.

        So you didn't watch the Techmoan video. Answers are in there. Hence the tl;dr thing at the beginning of the sentence.

  • 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

    • You could absolutely simulate a USB cassette. We've already got the tech to transfer audio to the player via those CD to cassette adapters. So now you have to make those wheels do something. Turning them powers the internal electronics. The rate and direction they turn, along with which one is turning, tells you whether to fast forward or rewind and which side of the tape is being played. The last thing you need to simulate is a mechanism to lock the wheel when you reach the end (making sure to pad the shor

  • The past comes back... (Score:3)

    by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @08:46AM (#58188004) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • There was also all the different tape chemistry you could use. The pinnacle was the "metal tape". There was also ferric-oxide and chrome-dioxide.

      The higher end cassette tapes could be indistinguishable from a reel to reel running ferric-oxide. But they degraded far faster due to wear and tear. The bias stuff was also really inadequate on lower end cassette decks.

      The funny thing is that 8 tracks had higher fidelity than cassettes. But the form factor was limited by it's size and need to reverse tape directio

      • Higher tape speeds moved hiss up in frequency, hopefully to inaudible ranges. Bias increased levels, drowning out hiss, we just hoped.

        Of course Dr. Bose pretty much destroyed most theories of high fidelity playback.

  • 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.

    • That still sounds awesome but power it with modern electronics and batteries so it weighs half as much, runs 4 times longer and has bluetooth.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Cassettes are Romantic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @09:24AM (#58188156)

    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.

    • Very nice.
    • Part of the nostalgia is that cassette tapes were the first mass-consumer media format which consumers could record on by themselves. So it wasn't just mix tapes or new songs copied from radio broadcasts. You could record audio messages and mail them (the early version of podcasts). My grandmother's last words to her kids was recorded on cassette tape, because she had grown too frail to write.

      However...

      The revival of the cassette tape isn't just to do with hipsters making old technology cool again. It'

  • huh? (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @09:31AM (#58188182) Journal

    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.

    • Going to a specific song and replaying a song are a pain in the ass with tapes. You can duplicate a tape easily but copying a songs off a number of different tapes is more bothersome. It's not difficult work but just tedious trying to find the start of each song.

  • Probably the people listening to cassette music are the same people adding Clippy [slashdot.org] 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.

  • Vinyl to cassette to... (Score:3)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @09:50AM (#58188248)

    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.

  • 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 du
  • 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.

  • ... 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.

  • .... a technology that is inferior in *EVERY* way to other things that are commonly and cheaply available is incomprehensible to me.

    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 a

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!
  • 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 ta

  • 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 pla

  • 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.

  • 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

  • On the flip side

    I see what you did there.

  • I've said it before, I'll say it again (Score:3)

    by Drunkulus ( 920976 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @01:58PM (#58189794)
    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.

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