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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#91

Post by __del__ »

Cpoll wrote: post #85
bagels wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i had ONE cassette unwind. my less careful friend was always winding them with a pencil. the culprit? button mashing between fast-forward and play.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#92

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

glimshe wrote: post #26

I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back. What's next? VHS?

>What's next? VHS?

Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#93

Post by usefulcat »

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 grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.

Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#95

Post by Acrobatic_Road »

Can confirm. I've bought around 20 cassette tapes over the last 2 years - mostly new releases or re-releases of old stuff from the CD-era. I get way more enjoyment out of tapes than CDs. I think its because they're more hand's on, and I find the sound of my cassette deck soothing.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#96

Post by tombert »

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…

> CDs... are more fraglie.

CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.

About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.

Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.

> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.

Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.

> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:

Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#97

Post by MengerSponge »

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!)

Depends on what you mean by fragile. CDs are really susceptible to bitrot

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

Archival discs are made with gold backing, which is much more robust than the aluminum reflector used in mass-pressed discs.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#98

Post by fsckboy »

geekamongus wrote: post #34

Vinyl 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.

>Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes...their only redeeming quality was the mix tape

their ONLY redeeming quality? mix or not mix, did you ever try to record a vinyl?

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#100

Post by aidenn0 »

The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:

It used to break my heart when I went in your shop

And you said my records were out of stock

So I don't buy records in your shop

Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'

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