A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
171–180 of 273 posts
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want the cassette experience without the massive downsides of cassettes, pick up an old Minidisc recorder. Physical media that are nearly infinitely re-recordable (unused ones are expensive but used ones from Japan are not) and nearly indestructible. The NetMD ones have been bid up in price because of transfer speed but older ones that only do real-time transfers are not hideously expensive.
Minidiscs were so cool! I was surprised to see they still make them. Unfortunately they’re not all that cheap but not terrible.
They don’t still make them. It’s all NOS or used.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#173As 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 la…
Man I love tape saturation and the sound of high quality cassettes played with a nice tape deck. Sure, there are many bad ones.. Luckily, we have more possibilities then ever (given you have enough hipster money to spend). Tape is a little bit like slow food and very enjoyable to me. To each his own.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#174A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had…
Yeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”.
That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#175I 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…
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious: The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape. Dolby B/…
> The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal")
That statement feels a litle misleading. The only type of cassettes produced today is Type I.
Everything else is new old stock, where you might end up with a decades-old, chemically degraded cassette.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#176I 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…
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious: The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape. Dolby B/…
> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium
So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want the cassette experience without the massive downsides of cassettes, pick up an old Minidisc recorder. Physical media that are nearly infinitely re-recordable (unused ones are expensive but used ones from Japan are not) and nearly indestructible. The NetMD ones have been bid up in price because of transfer speed but older ones that only do real-time transfers are not hideously expensive.
But why would I want the cassette experience in the first place?
Mix tapes were a very cool experience that a Spotify playlist can’t replicate. Beyond that, ask someone who wants it. I don’t, but they are a really cool piece of tech.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#178My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break an…
Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff. (I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it.
They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too.
I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#179Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-)
https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/
BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#180The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.
That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.
At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.
Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.