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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#251

Post by j45 »

prmoustache wrote: post #240
j45 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some decade, bluetooth will get there. While it's improved a great deal, there remains a gap. Noise cancellation is getting pretty good.

It is not necessarily a protocol/technology issue, more a cultural one. Most people are just not looking at quality first and will buy whatever is cheap, loud and has the form factor they want. Music is so compressed nowadays that they don't even hear a difference between crappy and better quality speakers.

Very plausible. Until they hear the same song much clearer and wonder what the difference was, as long as they enjoy music :)

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#252

Post by themadturk »

I don't miss cassettes, but they were an important thing to me in the 1980s. When my wife and I got married we were as poor as could be. Our first stereo was a little radio/cassette deck with four inch speakers. We played a lot of cassettes on that thing.

I moved to digital players as soon as I could afford them. The most memorable (before the iPod) was the Creative Nomad with its 5GB hard drive. It was too big to fit easily in my jacket pocket, but I shoved it in there anyway. I didn't have to choose the tapes I had on my long bus commute anymore. And when the second-gen iPod came along, it was like heaven.

I'd never go back to cassette...but it was great when there was little else available.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#253

Post by FieryMechanic »

anigbrowl wrote: post #106
nvader wrote: post #12

Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre. [0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.

Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this: 1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great…

I could skip around on tapes relatively well on a walkman, you just had to remember the counters or roughly how long it was to rewind/fast forward. It wasn't that inconvenient. It just wasn't as quick as an mp3 player, CD or Winamp.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#254

Post by cellularmitosis »

Aldipower wrote: post #245
cellularmitosis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually try any searches? Or is this just an excuse to broadcast your feelings about AI? The author of the Ogg format claims a bit more pessimistic range of bit depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM Here are some measurements of type I, II and IV: http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.c…

The measurements you are linking to are showing the level of distortion (HD3 v level) not dynamic range! The Y-axis on the graphs is showing the 3rd harmonic in dB in relation to the mV given in on the x-axis. This has absolutely nothing to do with dynamic range and it is also not the signal-to-noise-ratio. The fundamental frequency in those measurements was at 315 Hz. HD3 refers to Harmonic Distortion at 3rd level.

My bad. This Wikipedia article has a table of SNR values for 13 different kinds of tape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette_tape_types_an...

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#255

Post by bondarchuk »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #239
bondarchuk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edit: according to gemini AI: >* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits) >* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits) >So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite. Source? AI content without it is less than worthless.

Did you actually try any searches? Or is this just an excuse to broadcast your feelings about AI? The author of the Ogg format claims a bit more pessimistic range of bit depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM Here are some measurements of type I, II and IV: http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.c…

It's just annoying to post unverifiable numbers without a credible source and expect others to do the hard work of verifying it (or just take you at face value, probably). It has nothing to do with AI except insofar as your own feelings on AI convinced you this is a reasonable method of communication.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#256

Post by Spunkie »

devilbunny wrote: post #47
jghn wrote: post #10

I lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.

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.

If there is one old format that actually should have a revival, it's minidisk. I was really holding out for their production keep on until that revival came but they gave up the ghost this year.

Tiny digital CDs packaged in little neon jewel floppy disks is the neotokyo future we all deserve.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#257

Post by binary132 »

devilbunny wrote: post #172
binary132 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nooooo!!!

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#258

Post by amypetrik8 »

jjgreen wrote: post #148
reel2reel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best over…

My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!

>My dad had an Akamai M8

My own dad had a Akamai T19 cloud computing system and he would give me all the oggs and flacs and mp3s off the cloud from his Akamai system

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#259

Post by bayindirh »

inkyoto wrote: post #201
bayindirh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type IV cassettes were always exorbitantly expensive both due to high cost and low demand (and rarity of the hardware which can record them well). So, if you were able to afford a Nakamichi / Technics / Akai, then you'd be able to afford them back in the day.

Type IV (also known as Metal) cassettes came in stunning industrial designs – BASF, TDK, Maxell etc. They were worth owing even if a Nakamichi was out of reach.

Yeah, I didn't argue otherwise. What I was trying to say is, you tend to be not bothered by the price tag if you can pay for a good deck.

I used to have a couple metal cassettes back in the day.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#260

Post by lloeki »

parineum wrote: post #248
lloeki wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How many people are performing proper maintenance on their record players? The point stands either way. Vinyl isn't durable. It gets worn by proper usage and worse by improper usage. My FLAC files are as perfect as the day I got them and are backed up both at home and remotely. Vinyl is an inferior format but people like rituals and hobbies but then they tell themselves lies about how it's actually better. It's fine…

I never said anything regarding it being "technically superior".

I merely commented on the "vinyl gets destroyed on every play" trope which at a leisurely listening human scale largely does not matter: it does wear but the scale of it is largely insignificant in practice.

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