An essay about how a thirty-year-old mixtape led me to think about technology, memory, and the strange persistence of things we’ve already declared obsolete.
A few years ago I've bought an old cassette deck, ordered a few cassettes on discogs.com (some of them 30+ years old) and even recorded a few mixtapes myself. There is a long forgotten strange feeling to hold a physical media with music. Like it gives it weight...
And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes
I’ve actually started getting 90s-00s era vinyl for some electronic music I used to listen to.
A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.
I just bought a DVD burner/ reader today and a stack of 100 blanks. I'm planning some physical backups of favorite media (songs, books, movies, pictures). My rackmount setup could die to lightning, fire, theft, animals, and I don't want to be terrified whether I have a backup of any particular thing on it. I'm also planning a couple of HDDs for cold storage, but they're less reliable for LTD (long-term drawer) storage than DVDs.
I just produced 150 cassettes of my new album and people like it to have it on cassette, even if they do not have a player. But they can hold something physical in there hands while listening on-line.
And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify.
It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.
I occasionally buy mix tapes from op shops. There is something weirdly intimate about listening to them. Part of it is the unique sequencing or the song choices. Part of it the handwriting on the insert. It’s a unique experience and perhaps a little creepy. Fun though.
I grew up in the 70s and I loved cassettes. I would take my records and copy them to cassettes so I could play them on horrible and not-so-horrible boom boxes at parties. And of course making mix tapes.
But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadTapes and floppies are "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about malicious controllers embedded in flash media or hard drives.
Paper is "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about cost per square inch of displaying static information, or about running without batteries.
And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes
A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.
And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify. It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.
But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.