They aren't. They remain a fringe hipster staple. Like the vinyls.
The vinyls are a billion dollar industry. Small compared to streaming, but definitely non-negligible.
https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RIAA-2024Yea...
Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
211–220 of 273 posts
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#212I understand the allure, but ultimately they just represent more plastic pollution (along with vinyl). Digital media is a great chance to not collect more plastic stuff.
OK, why not high res scan all those Picassos then and burn the original paintings? Should be sufficient to have this _piece of art_ in the digital domain.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#213Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#214Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?
Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)
Are you tired of dad? Dad, no one wants to hear your stupid Vietnam stories. Are you tired of mom? Hi angel, do you want to read a book or go outside? No. Degenatron!The arcade comes to your living room, only without the creepy guys offering to show you puppies.
How do you like to enjoy a Rusty Brown’s Ring Donut?
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#216Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?
Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
A bunch of things are on their way out among native speakers, e.g. singular vs plural (there is / there are), much vs many (how much people / large amount of people), past vs present tense (build / built), ... as a German we have to pass English classes else we get held back a year, what's going on in English schools?
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#217Shameless 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…
> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)
Yeah, mostly DDA, and some songs are live mixed on the console, this is DAA then? Anyway.. :-)
I think the real shift to digital was around 1994-95 when professional digital recording equipment became somewhat affordable even for smaller studios. My Roland DM-80 4-track digital hard disk recorder, you also find on the albums webpage, was more then 20.000$ back in 1991, so most studio easily stood with 16-tracks on analogue tape.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, if you bought an album, that meant getting some tracks you liked, and some you did not. Oddly enough I bought Suzanne Vega's self-titled album with 'Cracked' on it (off a guy in a stall off Brick Lane, only a fiver), and some of them are fantastic some slightly less so. Some albums I own I turn off one or two of the tracks as they are rubbish, but that was slightly more difficult if you had to fast-forward past…
> UNKLE I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online. DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes. https://youtube.com/watch?v=oRwnUM10mf4
>Psyence Fiction
Its kinda crazy, I loved that album in the 2000's, but hadn't really listened to it in about a decade until youtube brought it up again recently.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#219I recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie.
And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.
It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.
Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.
Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.
The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#220A 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…
> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music.
That's a big part of why they're cool.
Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.
I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.
Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.