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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#81

Post by whycome »

bagels wrote: post #80
RiverCrochet wrote: post #61

My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break an…

My experience with tapes does not match yours. I've seen both audio and VCR tapes unspool by playing or trying to remove them from the player.

That must be an issue with the player

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#82

Post by 95014_refugee »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #18

Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk Anyways, here's the mixes: Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4 Cassette-Only Drum & Bass S…

@ooedotech https://youtu.be/urGmmkUDi20 etc.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#83

Post by vel0city »

Touche wrote: post #57
dfe wrote: post #56

Did 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.

I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.

I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.

I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#85

Post by Cpoll »

bagels wrote: post #80
RiverCrochet wrote: post #61

My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break an…

My experience with tapes does not match yours. I've seen both audio and VCR tapes unspool by playing or trying to remove them from the player.

I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#86

Post by analog31 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #64

I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into. My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.

I sold my Studer-ReVox B77 in mint condition to a collector for the price of a new high-quality digital recorder.

The thing was sitting in its original carton, barely used. Between the hassle of hauling it around, and the cost of tapes, I never actually took it anywhere to record anything.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#87

Post by jaredhallen »

tom_ wrote: post #71
RiverCrochet wrote: post #61

My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break an…

Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff. (I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)

I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#88

Post by seized »

Touche wrote: post #57
dfe wrote: post #56

Did 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.

There were many portable CD players with enough buffering that they'd never skip. Panasonic Shockwave (IIRC) for example. And car heatunits.

You had to get a very old or seriously cheap portable player to get skipping.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#89

Post by ffuxlpff »

tom_ wrote: post #77
littlekey wrote: post #11

Anyone have recommendations for a cassette player?

The cheapest one you can find. They all suck, and this way you'll spend the least amount of money.

Actually the price and quality range of cassette players is wider than probably in any other format. The good ones were really good.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#90

Post by binary132 »

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.

Minidiscs were so cool! I was surprised to see they still make them. Unfortunately they’re not all that cheap but not terrible.
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