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 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.
> Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent.
Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.
Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.
Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.
And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.
The only real down sides of cassettes other then the
obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!
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.
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.
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.
Owning bit-perfect rips of your favourite music is a sweet spot. I have no interest in tape - of any kind - or vinyl.
The one frustration is that continuous FLAC playback appears to be an arcane programming challenge that only a select few developers have mastered. Especially on mobile.
And unless you set up a server the business of getting files onto and off devices is insanely perverse.
But in terms of sound quality and convenience, lossless rips win over anything else.
Going back to physical seems almost pointlessly decadent.
Cassettes were always a pain, but LPs are an awesome medium even today.
While it's convenient to just listen to anything with a click, the joy of the experience is gone. Purposefully pulling out an LP and setting it on the turntable, sitting on the couch to meaningfully listen while reading the album cover is a much more engaging musical experience.
Yes, I don't have time to do that much anymore either. But when possible, it is much more enjoyable.
Not trying to correct you, just looking for the right word.
Digital isn't the right term here, because CDs are also digital. I'm trying to come up with the word for the opposite of physical media, but strangely I can't. Maybe streaming, but how would MP3s on a USB drive fit in?
Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.
2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.
3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.
4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.
5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.
Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
I could skip around on tapes relatively well on a walkman, you just had to remember the counters or roughly how long it was to rewind/fast forward. It wasn't that inconvenient. It just wasn't as quick as an mp3 player, CD or Winamp.
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:
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 :)
syncthing is a very useful utility for this. just install it on 2 devices, add a folder, then the files will sync over the network whenever both devices are on.
if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.
every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone.
its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh
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!
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.
VHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
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.
Yeah, I used to have a habit of buying a blank cassette with two vinyl albums each weekend after I got paid so I could listen to said albums in my car. I'd still rock the records at home though.
I don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm.
It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster.
I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.
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 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)
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?
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.
89 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 87.3 ms ] threadHowever, 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.
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.
Actually, I don't miss that at all.
Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.
Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.
Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.
And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.
The only real down sides of cassettes other then the obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!
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.
The one frustration is that continuous FLAC playback appears to be an arcane programming challenge that only a select few developers have mastered. Especially on mobile.
And unless you set up a server the business of getting files onto and off devices is insanely perverse.
But in terms of sound quality and convenience, lossless rips win over anything else.
Going back to physical seems almost pointlessly decadent.
While it's convenient to just listen to anything with a click, the joy of the experience is gone. Purposefully pulling out an LP and setting it on the turntable, sitting on the couch to meaningfully listen while reading the album cover is a much more engaging musical experience.
Yes, I don't have time to do that much anymore either. But when possible, it is much more enjoyable.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.
2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.
3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.
4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.
5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.
Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...
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
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 :)
if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.
every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone. its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh
What's next? VHS?
Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.
Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.
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.
their ONLY redeeming quality? mix or not mix, did you ever try to record a vinyl?
It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster.
I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.
(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)
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?
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.