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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#221

Post by Spivak »

abanana wrote: post #197
coldtea wrote: post #180

The 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 rele…

Indeed, the title is the usual nonsense. Sales within a niche like this will always fluctuate. When someone spots a slight increase, they jump at the chance to wheel out this kind of headline. The article itself doesn't give hard numbers, just says UK sales "reached their highest level since 2003" - meaningless since cassette sales had died long before then. It links to an article that says there were "195,000 units…

The title is less nonsense than it first appears. Cassettes are riding the coattails of vinyl getting popular again as collectibles. Lots of medium sized bands added vinyl to their merch stands to great success with their fans but the total manufacturing capacity of vinyl is small and everyone was suddenly competing for it. Not to mention when Taylor Swift drops an album and buys it all. Enter cassettes, another piece of physical media that's easier for artists to get their hands on and has similar collectible properties.

Neither vinyl nor cassettes are going to make a dent in terms of music distribution, but that's because they compete in the same market as band t shirts.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#222

Post by prmoustache »

jdalgetty wrote: post #28
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #27

It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.

Yea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.

You couldn't instantly record the radio on CD and until computers with CD recorder were common it was harder to share/copy/mix stuff between friends. Tapes were useful before MP3/broadband/p2p file sharing were a thing even long after CD had become common. As a teenager I couldn't afford every CD and vinyl release I liked and even if I had the means the records weren't necessarily available in store locally. Many of us had to rely on that tape being ready in the deck and ninja reflexes to hit the record button fast enough.

Minidiscs would have been better but harder to finance/justify as a kid.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#223

Post by forinti »

Aldipower wrote: post #212
forinti wrote: post #210

I 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.

I don't understand the analogy. Picassos are not mass produced artifacts.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#224

Post by Aldipower »

forinti wrote: post #223
Aldipower wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand the analogy. Picassos are not mass produced artifacts.

You assume that cassettes are all mass-produced artifacts. But that's not true. Many of them have a limited edition of perhaps 50 copies. But what I wanted to say was something completely different. People like to own art in a physical way. But to implicitly tell someone whether or not they should own something made of plastic is, in my opinion, crossing a line.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#225

Post by nephihaha »

Cassettes were fairly good for car radios and little else. They aren't large enough to lead in cover art like LPs or even CDs. They are terrible for snapping and getting chewed up.

I still have some cassettes from years ago but definitely not the best format by a long shot.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#226

Post by nephihaha »

nine_k wrote: post #79
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just an accurate name? CDs were pretty compact, back in the day: think of how many floppies would fit on a CD-ROM.

Unlike a CD, a cassette could fit a pocket. Barely, but still. A CD never could.

That is one advantage. Also great in cars if they're not chewed up. Very hard to change CDs in a car.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#227

Post by miek »

Aldipower wrote: post #179

Shameless 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…

Excellent work! Reminds me (though maybe inaccurately) of soundtracks from old CGI laser discs that were basically long demos.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#228

Post by K0balt »

stinos wrote: post #165
K0balt wrote: post #158

Based on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations? I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/st…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape

I think this used a spinning head, similar to video? The trick would be to use a static head and still record 4 or More digital tracks on a 4mm tape, with enough headroom for robust ECC. I’m pretty sure it could be done at ~kbps with contemporary recording head litho at 8 tracks per mm. That makes 16 tracks per side, 32 for the full 4mm (both sides). It would even be possible to convert existing tapes to digital in one play/pass using a 2 head system, or a read-store-record setup.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#229

Post by Aldipower »

miek wrote: post #227
Aldipower wrote: post #179

Shameless 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…

Excellent work! Reminds me (though maybe inaccurately) of soundtracks from old CGI laser discs that were basically long demos.

Thank you! Ah cool CGI laser discs!! This is a great reminder.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#230

Post by huxley »

ceuk wrote: post #7
finaard wrote: post #5

I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clu…

Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like. It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish. And of course there's the heady dose of nos…

John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)
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