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.
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 nostalgia for us old gits :)
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!
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!
>compact
since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.
Maybe it's just an accurate name? CDs were pretty compact, back in the day: think of how many floppies would fit on a CD-ROM.
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
Unlike a CD, a cassette could fit a pocket. Barely, but still. A CD never could.
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.
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 and jam quite easily.
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.
> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head
Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.
> and weakens the tape over time.
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.
> The audio quality is low
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.
> and comes with a background hiss.
I've always liked 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
Nothing prevents you from doing it today, and there is more music to download than ever before.
Depends on what you mean by fragile. CDs are really susceptible to bitrot
Archival discs are made with gold backing, which is much more robust than the aluminum reflector used in mass-pressed discs.
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.
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.
That must be an issue with the player
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 remember minidiscs, but never had my own player. But I don't want any sort of physical media.
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.
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.
Minidiscs were so cool! I was surprised to see they still make them. Unfortunately they’re not all that cheap but not terrible.
I would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss
8-track is lower than cassette in my book, but they share a common factor!
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.
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.
Yea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.
[deleted]
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'
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!
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.
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.
> 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 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 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've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
I agree
And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
I personally would never listen through a music player that serves ADs. Might just be me and my insane hatred of seeing ADs tho.
I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape…
Actually, I don't miss that at all.
Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.
According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)
The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.
true but j cards hold the torch for diy unique and handmade artwork anyway
These kids and their vapes.
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?
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.
I could see dumber things happening.
>What's next? VHS?
Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.
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.
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?
That and piracy.
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.
[deleted]
But what a quality that was!
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.
[dead]
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Why not MiniDisc?
The machines are quite expensive, especially the NetMD models with USB. And for the best choices you need to order from Japan.
Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.
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:
weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?
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.
Well, they kind of never were the height of tech. To be sure, the cassette Walkman was a kind of height of tech (probably in spite of the format though).
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.
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.
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..
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
Amazon are MP3 though. :-(
Bandcamp is huge
I buy music either on bandcamp or iTunes, both of which gives me DRM free audio files. I then store them locally.
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.
Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
[deleted]
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.
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.
Actually the price and quality range of cassette players is wider than probably in any other format. The good ones were really good.
You can definitely beat that for $30. Hit the thrift stores and you can find vintage machines that will greatly outperform this. You may need to replace a belt on some, but many are working just fine.
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.)
[deleted]
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...
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.
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 nostalgia for us old gits :)
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!
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!
>compact
since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.
https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette
Maybe it's just an accurate name? CDs were pretty compact, back in the day: think of how many floppies would fit on a CD-ROM.
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
Unlike a CD, a cassette could fit a pocket. Barely, but still. A CD never could.
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.
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 and jam quite easily.
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.
> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head
Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.
> and weakens the tape over time.
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.
> The audio quality is low
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.
> and comes with a background hiss.
I've always liked 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.
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.
> 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.
> CDs never had any DRM
Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...
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.
> 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
Nothing prevents you from doing it today, and there is more music to download than ever before.
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.
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.
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.
That must be an issue with the player
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 remember minidiscs, but never had my own player. But I don't want any sort of physical media.
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.
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.
Minidiscs were so cool! I was surprised to see they still make them. Unfortunately they’re not all that cheap but not terrible.
I would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss
8-track is lower than cassette in my book, but they share a common factor!
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.
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.
Yea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.
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'
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!
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.
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.
> 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 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 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've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
I agree
And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
I personally would never listen through a music player that serves ADs. Might just be me and my insane hatred of seeing ADs tho.
I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape…
Actually, I don't miss that at all.
Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-s...
According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)
The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
Like DCC (1992)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.
true but j cards hold the torch for diy unique and handmade artwork anyway
These kids and their vapes.
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?
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.
I could see dumber things happening.
>What's next? VHS?
Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.
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.
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?
That and piracy.
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 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.
[dead]
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
So are 80s phones! Lol (I hated both)
https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...
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.
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.
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?
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?
Why not MiniDisc?
The machines are quite expensive, especially the NetMD models with USB. And for the best choices you need to order from Japan.
Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.
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 Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U
DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI
Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4
What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed
@ooedotech https://youtu.be/urGmmkUDi20 etc.
Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.
Great album. I've been listening to almost nothing but synthwave for years.
Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..
Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?
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.
Well, they kind of never were the height of tech. To be sure, the cassette Walkman was a kind of height of tech (probably in spite of the format though).
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.
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.
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..
- https://bandcamp.com/ - https://us.7digital.com/ - https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
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
Amazon are MP3 though. :-(
Bandcamp is huge
I buy music either on bandcamp or iTunes, both of which gives me DRM free audio files. I then store them locally.
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.
Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
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.
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.
Actually the price and quality range of cassette players is wider than probably in any other format. The good ones were really good.
How about a Nakamichi Dragon? https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA
Looks just like mine.
But for $30, you can't beat this:
https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-...
You can definitely beat that for $30. Hit the thrift stores and you can find vintage machines that will greatly outperform this. You may need to replace a belt on some, but many are working just fine.
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...