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.<p>The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium:<p>> Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily.<p>No they don't. It happens sometimes but really tapes and decks were pretty reliable as long as you didn't have foreign material in the deck. CDs and vinyls are more fraglie. A Sony tape deck my cousin has had a belt wear out, but it was fixable. Unlike your Airpod batteries.<p>> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head<p>Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.<p>> and weakens the tape over time.<p>I recall that anything more than a 45-minute tape ("C90") is too thin and could experience this issue. So I never bought C100s or C120s (if those existed). Wearing tapes out wasn't a thing I ever experienced back in the day.<p>> The audio quality is low<p>I don't know the specs of all the Dolby NR stuff (which was a technology on later decks) but decent quality tapes had full frequency range. Given things like the loudness war and the artifacts of compressed audio, tape is perfectly fine for most typical music listening.<p>> and comes with a background hiss.<p>I've always <i>liked</i> the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. But in most cases were you listen to music in real life, you don't notice it when the songs start playing.<p>The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: you can listen, give, trade, or share the audio without things on the Internet tracking or preventing you from doing it. In a time where digital freedom and creative artistic recognition is becoming less and less, this is one gateway into the offline world, which is going to be where the real interesting stuff starts to happen if current trends continue.
<i>Are</i> 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.<p>(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.
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.
That must be an issue with the player
I 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 clunky buttons ideal for kids hands, and you have something even all the dedicated digital kids media players can't compete with.
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.<p>It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.<p>And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)<p>If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
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!<p>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.<p>The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
><i>compact</i><p>since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette</a>
I noticed that when my kids were little they could use cassette players well before they could read. They would choose music based on the pictures on the cassettes and the covers. We had a (clickwheel) iPod for our own music, but they couldn't work it because they couldn't read the text-only interface.
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.
I still have a few specialty MD's from various brands such as the mona/bitclub; my last recorder was the RH1 and I regretted ever letting that unit go.
I remember minidiscs, but never had my own player. But I don't want any sort of physical media.
But why would I want the cassette experience in the first place?
Yep. Picked up a few MiniDisc players. My daughter is fascinated with them.
Same here. And I've been old-guy grumbling for years now about kids-these-days getting into vinyl and other retro technology that I was happy to be rid of.<p>The parent article, by the way, smells of AI writing, particularly the overall flow and the lack of any specific first-person detail.
I would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss
Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!
It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.
weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?
Of 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.<p>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 serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.
I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape…<p>Actually, I don't miss that at all.
> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great<p>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 don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck.
I've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
I found a French manufacturer called wearerewind.com who uses a heavier brass wheel and better clarity. Quite pricey though, as it is to be expected.
I agree<p>And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.<p>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.<p>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.
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Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.
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.<p>What's next? VHS?
I put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that.<p>I could see dumber things happening.
Terror Vision releases modern movies on VHS.. $30+ a pop
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.<p>Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.
That and piracy.<p>You gotta love the cahones of the guy that, in the 1970's, opened a record rental store in a college town… and sold blank cassettes as well.
But what a quality that was!
I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.<p>(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)
Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.<p>Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.<p>All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.<p>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.
So are 80s phones! Lol
(I hated both)<p><a href="https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKulIDVBvG-VvdfibJYL9ou9rlXn4" rel="nofollow">https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...</a>
If 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?<p>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?
Taylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums.<p>Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.
Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.
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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk</a><p>Anyways, here's the mixes:<p>Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4</a><p>Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U</a><p>DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI</a><p>Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4</a><p>What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed
Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..
Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre.<p>[0] <a href="https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a> For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
Even when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.
I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.<p>The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.<p>Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)
I only buy archival (flac) downloadable files. Some places I've purchased music from..<p>- <a href="https://bandcamp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bandcamp.com/</a>
- <a href="https://us.7digital.com/" rel="nofollow">https://us.7digital.com/</a>
- <a href="https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop" rel="nofollow">https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop</a><p>If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents.
Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).
I regularly buy full albums and individual tracks on the Apple Store. AFAIK Amazon also still offers the same, both stores are DRM free
I buy music either on bandcamp or iTunes, both of which gives me DRM free audio files. I then store them locally.
Bandcamp is huge
As far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.
Apple has neglected the iTunes store for years. Yes, you can still buy tracks, but it's really crappy. 1) The catalog is nowhere near as extensive as Apple Music. 2) It's AAC 256kbps format only. Not lossless.<p>Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.
Quick! Fins a Nakamichi 550 Portable. Amazing sonic and build quality.
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.
How about a Nakamichi Dragon? <a href="https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA" rel="nofollow">https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA</a>
Never really understood buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was better to buy the vinyl and make your own tapes.
Yeah, if the cost of the pre-recorded cassette were comparable to a blank tape, okay, fine. (But they weren't.)
whatever is old is new again. it's a story as old as time.
"In many ways, Bob's Big Boy never left, sir. He's always offered the same high-quality meals at competitive prices..."
Ah yes, the record player of the 80s. Hipsters gonna hipster...