The return of cassettes

[ghettosynth]

Finding your favourite track on a tape.

FWD, wait, wait, wait, Stop, Play, are we there yet? No, Stop, FWD, wait, wait, wait, Stop, Play, are we there yet? no, stop, FWD, wait, wait, wait, Stop, Play, too far, RWD, wait, stop, play... oh no did it too fast, tape's been chewed. I don't miss this at all.

This wasn't just inconvenient, this even has led to some serious car accidents because people were too distracted...

Yeah, that's why 8-track was the superior tech.

Yes, there was nothing better than hearing kerchunk right in the middle of your favorite song when the solenoid fired changing your track. With 8-tracks you developed these odd track switching patterns that allowed you to hear some of the stuff that you liked and skip much of what you didn't.

And, if you've ever had one for more than a few years you know that they always die in roughly the same way. The Achilles heel of the 8-track is the capstan which would lose its grip and fail to engage the pinch roller sufficiently to pull the tape cleanly through. When it got too smooth you'd get crazy wow and flutter.


http://www.8trackavenue.com/player-tune ... epair.html


Oh sure, you could clean it, but, since it relied on not being totally smooth, at some point, they just wore out.

[mellotronaut]

[zerocrossing]

Good old analog times. Nobody blamed you to make a copy .

The world is strange . Now we can make (nearly) perfect copys in a wink and spread it in the world, we have laws against something that was always a dream to do.

Spoken like a man who's never worked for something and then had the pay stolen from him.

[zerocrossing]

The comeback for cassettes (if there is one) is about the same as the comeback for mustache wax. Something hipsters do to show how unique and quirky they are... when the truth is they're mostly dull and empty like everyone else.

[vurt]

Good old analog times. Nobody blamed you to make a copy .

The world is strange . Now we can make (nearly) perfect copys in a wink and spread it in the world, we have laws against something that was always a dream to do.

Spoken like a man who's never worked for something and then had the pay stolen from him.

the germans used to have a system whereby some of the money from each sale of a blank tape got sent to the recording comapnys, thus making home taping and sharing legal
hes german btw.

[breakmixer]

This wasn't just inconvenient, this even has led to some serious car accidents because people were too distracted...

I drove into a stationery car(that was waiting to turn off) once changing a cassette, looked up and Wallop!

CD's are just as bad though, prefer to use a usb stick these days in the car, in fact I got 3 or 4 new albums to put on it!

[skipscada]

Good old analog times. Nobody blamed you to make a copy .

The world is strange . Now we can make (nearly) perfect copys in a wink and spread it in the world, we have laws against something that was always a dream to do.

Spoken like a man who's never worked for something and then had the pay stolen from him.

the germans used to have a system whereby some of the money from each sale of a blank tape got sent to the recording comapnys, thus making home taping and sharing legal
hes german btw.

Was/is it actually legal, though? In Spain, every time you buy equipment that's capable of storing data, part of your money end up in the coffers of intellectual property owners (ideally artists, in reality self-serving representatives of songwriters guilds or big corporations), yet you are still not allowed to use the equipment to store unauthorised copies. Catch 22. So you can spend lots of money on a PC, store nothing on it except legally acquired software and copies of music, video, photos etc you've made yourself, and the state hands over your money to Julio Iglesias for the theoretical damage your activities have done to his financial situation.

[GaryG]

Why?

For the record I have a real fondness for cassettes; have a box full of lofi/noise tapes from the 80s/90s (NZs Xpressway FTW!) and even released a few tapes (not sure I can call it a tape label when total sales were ~6 tapes... )

Just calling BS on a lot of that article.

[mellotronaut]

Why?

[farlukar]

I still have a cassette player and a fair lot of tapes with music that was good enough not to bin but not good enough to buy the CD. If you press ffwd when playing it searches for the next bit of silence (i.e. find the next song), so no back/forth/too far/tape om nom nom anymore.

And almost all of those were taped from CDs I rented, so (theoretically) royalties were payed.

[Jesse J]

My brother in law found a Technics RS-TR355 Cassette Deck Player that he gave me and I have on top of my rack. I could never have afforded one as high-end as this one as a teenager, but now I had the opportunity to revisit my old C-tapes. I was blown away by the fact that most tapes sounded really good, those that were recorded with good decks on good tape, that is.

About a third of the tapes sounded like shit, because of cheap thin 90 minute tape and due to the fact that they were recorded with some el-cheapo deck, but those recorded with high-end "friends dad" equipment on 60 min quality tapes with proper levels sounded really nice.

I believe tapes are a lot better than I remembered!

And I listened mostly to whole albums/EP/demos/live concerts, so there wasn't much rewinding and cueing going on, just play and listen, sit back and relax. You don't have to be skipping and jumping all the time when you listen to good music.

[Zombie Queen]

Yes, some things should stay in the grave. (said a zombie)

[Compyfox]

So I purchased a couple of second-hand cassette decks (very good ones, a Denon and a Marantz) in great condition and a bunch of 5 Sony Metal XR tapes.
And now, I enjoy making tracks in Cubase and send them back into the computer.
Fan-tas-tic!
It will not replace high-end reel-to-reel tape but it's a cheap way to get a little instability and a pleasing old-school sound in our too clean-sounding DAWs.

You prefer 1/8" tapes with an IPS of 1 7/8 (4,76cm/sec) and a non-optimized Noise Reduction system compare to 1/4" 4track R2R with at least 7 1/2 ISP (19,05cm/sec)?

Granted, certain multi track recorders (like Forstex) could utilize 3 3/4 IPS and even 7 1/2 IPS with compact cassettes, but... the loss of audio quality, the limited dynamic range with cassette decks compared to R2R's, the Noise Reduction (forget to activate it and your stuff sounds like garbled lofi muffled nonsense, or high hiss content)...

Take a dive with Nomad Factory's Magnetic II (or any other tape that runs slower than 7 1/2 IPS) to hear what I mean. Unless you speed up your stuff prior to printing on tape, and then reducing the speed again in Cubase. And even then, it's not guaranteed to work as expected.


As nostalgic as I sometimes am, and I loved tapes (still do!). But I take a 1/4" R2R over any cassette deck if possible.


Though they still have their right of existence:
Some people have backups of old songs on them, a lot of people are still using cassette tapes for their kids, and others can simply use these tapes for art, or sound design (er yeah... horse feet in grass, anyone?!)

[kritikon]

For sure a good tape system can be very good. Good 8 track reels can be pretty close to CD playback. The problem with tapes is that maybe 95% of tape machines were pretty dire comparatively. That's the thing with digital (and I love my old analogue stuff) - even the bottom shelf cheapo consumer stuff guarantees a certain quality of playback. Tape didn't. I can't stand MP3s, but I'd still generally rather play those than a cassette recording.

Nostalgia's great when it's based on reality. I really can't see any benefit whatsoever for cassettes over almost anything digital though. Price, motion stability, playback accuracy, storage longevity, maintainance, availability, ease of use. THere's just nothing, apart from old fart dodgy memories of youth. And I'm one of those, so I'm not being ageist for the sake of it.

Now get me on analogue synths, analogue mixers etc and I'll argue with the best - there are concrete benefits/disadvantages with many of them. I love old stuff but I can't find anything to support cassette tape. It was rubbish, really it was. And as for piracy - don't make me laugh, piracy was a huge concern for the recording industry with cassettes. And no in many countries it wasn't legal to tape and distribute recordings of stuff on cassette. They just though at the time that there wasn't much they could do about it. And the fact the recording format was so much worse than the original, it probably didn't affect sales as much as today. Just saying...

[Crackbaby]

The recording industry is still alive, isn't it?