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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#111

Post by lloeki »

parineum wrote: post #108
geekamongus wrote: post #34

Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever. Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.

I don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm. It's objectively worse than lossless d…

> your vinyl gets worse with every listen

Worn out vinyl grooves are typically caused by an unbalanced tonearm or damaged stylus.

Realistically if the tonearm is adequately balanced and the stylus is kept clean you're looking at hundreds to thousands of listens before it has any kind of even slightly discernible effect.

There's a much more likely chance of vinyls being damaged by simply handling them.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#112

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

I still have a Nakamichi in storage

Another consumer deck I loved was made by Philips, who I once read "invented the tape deck"

I still have a Sony portable line level deck and powered stealth mics, too, for live taping. Concerts are way too expensive these days, though

Heck I still have a HHB CDR850 for converting from analog to digital

I gave away my Digi001

I still have 100 or so tapes, I gave away the rest

I remember buying 100s of Maxell XLIIs, Tower Records became the goto source

I'm not sure I have the ears anymore to notice the improvements, if any, of modern equipment over "vintage"

But most music produced today sounds like crap to me anyway. Too loud

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#113

Post by AngryData »

Not for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don't have reliable service, but I doubt 99% of people experience even that these days.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#114

Post by karlkloss »

As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.

Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times.

Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it.

Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#115

Post by ValentinPearce »

jackdoe wrote: post #105

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…

I'm looking at cassettes that way as well, a physical limitation to avoid instant gratification and to take my time.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#116

Post by AndrewStephens »

Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.

Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#118

Post by kakacik »

AngryData wrote: post #113

Not for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don'…

Its the same hipstery thingie like LPs are with similar talk about quality, experience and whatnot. People still do it, heck people do a lot of seemingly weird stuff that is far from optimal behavior.

Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos).

There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.

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