Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..
Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
51–60 of 273 posts
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#52If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?
Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#53I 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…
Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!
You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.
The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#54Never really understood buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was better to buy the vinyl and make your own tapes.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#55I 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.
I remember minidiscs, but never had my own player. But I don't want any sort of physical media.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#56Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.
Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.
All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.
If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.
But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.
Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.
You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#57Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked. Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement. All of this still works, if you have a CD drive. If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses a…
CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#58Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever. However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly…
> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I…
I've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#59Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever. Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.
But what a quality that was!
Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
#60Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.