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.
And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
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.
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
since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.
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!
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 parent article, by the way, smells of AI writing, particularly the overall flow and the lack of any specific first-person detail.
But for $30, you can't beat this:
https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-...
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
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 :)
Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
- 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).
What's next? VHS?
I could see dumber things happening.
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?
(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.
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.
You had to get a very old or seriously cheap portable player to get skipping.
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.
(I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
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.
Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.
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.
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.
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.
_wire_•5d ago