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Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

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Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#151

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

guitarbill wrote: post #65
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The dominance of digital and streaming services has stolen this experience from us, and we are fighting to get it back. I used to collect books. It was a big part of my life. Now I pretty much only buy books on Kindle. I almost sort-of miss buying books. But only in theory. In practice I much prefer having my current library in my pocket at all times. Same with music. I have my entire library on my hard drive, and I…

> In practice I much prefer having my current library in my pocket at all times. This. Once I got a Kindle, I actually read more . Because you know it's convenient and has a build in light. Spotify let's you publish/share playlists, so that's also sorted. The only issue I have is that you don't really own anything. I just de-DRM Kindle books and assume that the availability of songs I like to listen to will increase…

I've been on Pandora forever, but not Spotify. Maybe I should defect.

Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#152

Post by Nav_Panel »

pjc50 wrote: post #92
Nav_Panel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason to use them is some form of conspicuous consumption, signaling how cool and wacky u are Disagree. 1. Sometimes the sonic characteristics of tapes DO complement the music. Typically for genres other than popular music or symphonic/classical/orchestral music (where absolute fidelity is king). 2. Physical media as opposed to digital media is, for some/many, inherently gratifying. It is a more multiface…

> Sometimes the sonic characteristics of tapes DO complement the music Indeed - this is especially true of synthwave/vaporwave and other genres that are themselves nostalgic for the days of synth-heavy music sold on cassette. A bit of compression and hiss is just right. Just as some games put fake film grain on screen, some synthwave videos add a "badly tracked VHS" effect.

Honestly, some of the stuff actually from the 80s is more vapor than anything contemporary I've seen. Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thUODyrEhK4

Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#153

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

fsiefken wrote: post #17

Tapes can do 110 minutes and sound just as good to non-audiophiles as cd's. You could put around 50 MB data on it, which translates in around an hour of high fidelity music (Opus codec or HE-AAC). You can't put a CD in your pocket, you can do so with a cassette. They have a much higher nostalgia value... With the fast-forward/backward, pause and record buttons you can more easy copy or record stuff to create a mix-ta…

>My car only has a tape deck and a radio... it didn't have anything else..

When I was a kid, my parents' station wagon had an 8-track deck in the dash. We had a converter that plugged into it that would let us play our cassettes.

Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#154

Post by meredydd »

lb1lf wrote: post #73
everyone wrote: post #13

This word gets thrown around a lot but, hipsters! As others have attested there is nothing good about tapes. There are very good reasons why vinyl has survived (You can manipulate it with your hand when djing, and see the music on it, also its technically possible to get better sound quality than digital via high quality, high speed, vinyl and an all analog recording to stamping process) But tapes, no, they are shit.…

>(...)also its technically possible to get better sound quality than digital via high quality, high speed, vinyl and an all analog recording to stamping process -This, with all due respect, is a myth. Much as I love my LPs, by any objective criteria the CD (or any digital media) beats them handsomely. Dynamic range, frequency response, noise floor, channel separation - even on the best mastered, half-speed cut, heavy…

There is one criterion on which the LP still wins - time resolution.

The human ear can perceive differences in the 5-to-10-microsecond range (you can prove this by testing our ability to work out where a sound came from, based on differences in arrival time at our ears). Successive samples on a CD are 22 microseconds apart - so a CD cannot encode two impulses 5us apart[0].

An analogue medium like vinyl, however, can do just that. Some audio engineers speculate that this is what underlies the supposed "digital sound" - people are in fact identifying a loss of timing information.

[0] It gets complicated fast, here - the Nyquist theorem says a CD can easily encode a 5us phase difference between two tones - and if the human ear were a linear device with a strict low-pass filter in front of it, that would be the same thing as a 5us time difference between impulses. But the ear is wickedly nonlinear and seems to "care" about impulses for reasons that make obvious evolutionary sense. Long story short, for all their faults LPs do seem to have distinct advantages over CDs when it comes to time resolution.

Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#155

Post by XorNot »

AgentME wrote: post #89
woofyman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with vinyl is it degrades every time you play it and you have to be very careful handling it so you don't get fingerprints on it.

Someone should make a media player that adds some noise to your MP3 files every time you play them. Or maybe it just lossily re-encodes it at the same bit rate.

It's the hiss and scratch as you put vinyl onto play that does it. There's an anticipation associated with that sound, particularly the way the noise stabilizes as the needle moves into the recorded part of the track and quietens.

To me it's always been very similar to the experience of when a live orchestra is about to play and the audience quietens.

Re: Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

#156

Post by joshontheweb »

SixSigma wrote: post #103
joshontheweb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really much of a counter point but you can actually scratch cassette tapes. This guy shows how cool it can be. Never seen anyone else do it though. I want to build my own at some point. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7nImXd0nxU4

For years, Laurie Anderson has been using a violin bow with tape as the "strings" and a tape head as pickups on the violin body. Here's a recording from 1977 of her playing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZyXwcsboGs

Very cool. Thanks.
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