Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

collectorsweekly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 41 posts

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#31

Post by qzxvwt »

byuu wrote: post #26
to3m wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :) I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo…

> Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P > I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV? CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies…

Are the highest-possible technical specs necessarily the best choice for every aesthetic purpose? I think this is less a trend of "hipster nonsense" and more of a sign of maturity from electronic music evolution as a whole - showing awareness of the symbiotic relationship between hardware and software, the medium and the message, a "back to its roots" part of the cycle that's definitely necessary given the current state of the art of recording sound IMO.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#32

Post by ams6110 »

to3m wrote: post #21
WalterBright wrote: post #6

I am glad to be done with cassette tapes. I never liked the hissiness, and the rewinding. I'm tired of car stereos eating the tapes. I'm sick of the 5 tapes in my car that got listened to over and over. My boxes of tapes went in the garbage 10 years ago. My current car stereo I bought for $75 has only a USB port, and I stuck a 32G thumb drive in it with gawd knows how many tunes are on it. Mucho better. I enjoy infli…

Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :) I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo…

I do have to say that I for one preferred video cassette tapes to DVDs. Yes the video quality is lower but VHS HiFi audio was quite good. In my experience the cassettes were much more resistant to careless handling especially by kids than DVDs were. For me that more than offset the better picture quality of DVDs (which really wasn't that noticable in the days when a 19" CRT was considered a pretty big screen.

Even if a tape did get a dirty spot it could generally play through it and you'd notice a degraded picture for a second or two. A scratch on a DVD often rendered the entire movie unplayable. Cassette audio tapes had this same advantage over CDs.

That said, I prefer streaming to either one by a huge margin. Hard to believe that we used to pay more for a single movie than a Netflix subscription costs for a month.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#33

Post by ams6110 »

byuu wrote: post #26
to3m wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :) I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo…

> Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P > I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV? CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies…

They might be considered awful now, but back in the day they were better than any alternatives. You couldn't play records in your car or while jogging, and cassettes were more convenient than the bulky 8-track which was the other common format.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#34

Post by ams6110 »

jhallenworld wrote: post #25

Reel to reel at 7 ips was quite good. I remember my dad's Akai player from the 50s even supported quadraphonic. Too bad this isn't catching on..

There used to be some specialty cassette decks that would record 4 track audio on a cassette (it used the full width of the tape rendering it one-sided). Used often for demos, or low-budget studio work, etc.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#35

Post by cgriswald »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #20
userbinator wrote: post #2

I thought it'd be about software tapes, but I'm not surprised - vinyl records are even older and more fragile in many ways, and yet there's still plenty of interest in them, so why not cassette tape.

That's a bit different, though. Of the popular mediums from the last 50 years, cassette tapes are by far the worst in terms of sound quality. Particularly, the noise floor of a tape is absolutely horrible for anything but constant-volume loud recordings. Ever tried to listen to a delicate classical passage on tape? "hissssssssss...". Vinyl would fare far better. So I'm actually pretty surprised to see a revival of in…

Cassette tapes are worst in terms of a lot of things. They lack the width and height of vinyl and CD so album art is not as cool. It is difficult and time consuming to skip a track or skip to a favorite track. And they can get "eaten" by the playback device.

I think one of the main reasons cassettes caught on is that people could make mix tapes. Even after I adopted CDs, I always had cassette players and recorders around for mix tapes (until later, when recordable CDs and the computers to record them with became much cheaper).

Any revival (I've literally heard of this from nowhere except the article) is probably due to the nostalgic feel combined with the ability to make mix tapes.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#36

Post by pjc50 »

agumonkey wrote: post #29
stinos wrote: post #17

I would like to see MiniDisc get the same attention. Guess that'll never happen again as it was always a bit niche while tape was as mainstream as it can get. Ok it's digital and somewhat more expensive but apart from that it imo is very similar (easy to record, share, portable) yet has much advantages over tape (noise, portables last way longer, medium does not lose signal under normal circumstances, less mechanical…

I often wonder how things would have been if Sony had released MD as simple storage medium. It got out in 1992! Imagine having rewritable hundreds of megabytes at the time.

They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data

It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#37

Post by pjc50 »

People are clearly choosing tape for the same reason as vinyl: a desire for embodiment of the music. With digital music, no one piece is more present than any other. Everything is equally close, and therefore equally emotionally distant.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#38

Post by agumonkey »

pjc50 wrote: post #36
agumonkey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder how things would have been if Sony had released MD as simple storage medium. It got out in 1992! Imagine having rewritable hundreds of megabytes at the time.

They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.

Ha, I stand corrected, I never cared to investigate, and only remember the late 90s attempts.

This article says a little about the errors of splitting MD between audio and generic data http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm

Amazingly sad. Typical Sony ?

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#39

Post by pjc50 »

agumonkey wrote: post #38
pjc50 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.

Ha, I stand corrected, I never cared to investigate, and only remember the late 90s attempts. This article says a little about the errors of splitting MD between audio and generic data http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm Amazingly sad. Typical Sony ?

Typical Sony. With a little help from the RIAA. They did it again with "memory stick". And UMD.

Re: Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

#40

Post by agumonkey »

pjc50 wrote: post #39
agumonkey wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I stand corrected, I never cared to investigate, and only remember the late 90s attempts. This article says a little about the errors of splitting MD between audio and generic data http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm Amazingly sad. Typical Sony ?

Typical Sony. With a little help from the RIAA. They did it again with "memory stick". And UMD.

Yeah, even though the article gives plenty of additional data to explain how markets are weird beasts, Sony had so many failed attempts at bringing a new format ...
Post reply on HN