
Cassettes Are Back, and It’s Not About the Music - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-02/cassette-tapes-are-back-but-it-s-not-about-the-music
======
niftich
Cassettes were also the first and last audio storage medium where mainstream
consumers could purchase an affordable, ready-made appliance for home
listening that could also act as an audio editing system, recording the result
onto another cassette. This is what enabled mixtapes.

With formats that came later, CD-recording remained expensive until personal
computers were becoming widespread, and while CDs could be ripped or mp3s
could be remixed on computers, you needed software that was often commercial
and rarely included.

Digital audio then de-emphasized removable storage, re-introducing friction
between exchanging music and listening to it on a portable player. Nowadays,
most music exchange happens online, but the appeal of exchanging music in
person endures even for generations that grew up with the Internet.

Cassettes had excellent usability for sharing: ease of duplication, ease of
remixing, more rugged than vinyl, easier to hold than CDs, and maintaining its
playback position at rest [1]. Couple that with authentic nostalgia, or
yearning for an aesthetic and mood of times past. While the vinyl revival is
centered around the deliberate experience of browsing, playback, and large-
size album art, like enjoying an artisanal product made by skilled craftsmen,
cassette revival celebrates the versatility of the format, its lack of
restrictions, the opportunities for creativity, and its physicality on a very
human scale.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20332150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20332150)

~~~
Godel_unicode
How many cassettes do you own? When was the last time you gave someone a
cassette? I bet it's been over a decade, because cassettes suck. The backups
are made in linear time, you can only share them with someone who is
physically next to you, it's a giant pain to edit cassettes at a specific
point in time, mashups are impossible because you have to have very expensive
analog equipment to beat match, and pitch shift is then a problem. If you want
to listen to a custom playlist you have to have thought of that well in
advance, and you can only have as many as you have room for bulky cassettes.

There's a reason nobody has a cassette deck anymore. It's not some conspiracy,
and it's not because the kids don't understand. It's because they aren't very
good.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> When was the last time you gave someone a cassette?

When was the last time you gave someone non-technical a song that's only on a
streaming service?

Yeah, you can send a link, and it can disappear any time, forever. Might be
blocked in their country, and so on. Meanwile, I still have cassettes of me
and friends just derping around, ages ago. If I give you music that way, at
least you _actually_ have it. It decays, sure, but no worse than it does for
people who don't know what a file is, who are at the whim of platforms.

~~~
Godel_unicode
YouTube.

------
ThJ
Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a
while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes
and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that
and a digital recording. Cassettes only sounded low-fi because most people
listened to cheap tapes on cheap players with cheap speakers. Even some of the
better portable players from the 1990s sounded very transparent if you
attached them to a good pair of headphones or a good stereo system.

I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in
the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee
Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy
at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone
was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed.
Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Cassettes have terrible fidelity. Dolby attenuates some of the hiss but
doesn't remove it, so it's always there in the background.

The original Type I tapes have the same frequency response as an old person
with hearing issues. Type II Chrome is a bit better, but the low end has a
hump and rolls far short of 20Hz, and the top end is nowhere close to the
ruler-flat response of a 44.1k WAV or FLAC.

You needed $$$$$$$equipment$$$$$$$ to get real hifi out of cassettes. The only
brand that really solved the hifi problem was Nakamichi. The engineering on
their high-end decks was legendary, but so was the price - the Dragon would be
around $6500 in 2019 dollars.

But... the terrible fidelity makes the sound more interactive. I started
listening on cassettes, and when I moved up to a more revealing mid-fi vinyl
system I was surprised to find that sometimes I liked the music less.

With cassettes, I could interpolate and imagine details I wanted to be there.
When I moved up to hearing the details that really were there, I didn't always
enjoy them as much.

~~~
ThJ
You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be
detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible
fidelity is an exaggeration.

Some 16-bit consumer sound cards had outputs with way more hiss than the
better tape decks.

As for the high end, the differences aren't exactly easy to pick out. I don't
know where these peaks and troughs are in the spectrum, but I'd have to listen
for them explicitly to pick them out, because I have no idea what you're
talking about.

I mean, I've heard _bad_ cassette audio with warbling and pronounced hiss and
high end loss, but if you take a brand new high quality tape and record to it
from a CD and play it back from the tape, it's damn close to sounding
identical.

I have a fair bit of experience with audio. I have a home studio. I can pick
out subtle quality differences between sound sources. I stand by what I have
said.

------
neuralRiot
Personally i enjoy listening to vinyls becaule of the whole "ceremony" browse
the albums, pull one, take it out of the sleeve, clean it, put it on the
turntable, lower the tonearm and listen to the small imperfections until the
music starts. Its like cooking vs ordering food.

~~~
avip
Amen. One underinvestigated aspect of streaming is "people" (and I'm talking
about my kids here) don't know what they are listening to, it's super easy for
them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost.

On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.

~~~
tzs
It might be easier to discover new music with streaming, but I'm not sure one
discovers music of as high a quality.

Back in the album days, an artist needed a song or two or three on the album
that would would have wide appeal and be easy to quickly like, so that they
might become hits. These would get played on mainstream radio, and based on
them people would buy the album. They would listen to that album for those
songs, but because it was a pain to skip around on an album they would listen
to the whole album.

Artists could put deeper, more complex songs on the album. Songs that people
might not instantly like. Songs that people only come to appreciate after
hearing many times. Songs that eventually become people's favorite songs on
those albums.

With streaming, a lot of people will just jump to the newest hit from another
artist instead of listening to the less immediately accessible songs from the
previous artist whose hit they just checked out.

~~~
lonelappde
Imagine if records were still the best known music technology today. You'd buy
a record ad half of it would be ads. People would make paper templates to tape
to records to block ads.

------
analog31
My son has gotten into cassettes. From what I've observed, a lot of it is "the
thrill is in the pursuit." He rides his bike across town to the used record
shop, where he meets his friends, browses through bins of cassettes (and vinyl
records), brings them home to play. All of that effort and expectation before
he can hear if it's any good. All for a buck. He's brought home everything
from classical to hip-hop.

~~~
notathing
May I ask what format you listen too? Probably digital audio. Now what kid
would listen to the same format as his dad? How uncool would that be...

~~~
analog31
Well, he's listening to his cassettes and LP's through his dad's old cassette
deck and phonograph. ;-) I came home from work one day, and he was listening
to a digital copy that he had downloaded, of an LP that was recorded from a
radio broadcast, of Schoenberg.

------
chris5745
> an attachment not just to a record, but to a specific record, which hiccups
> in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve

My first rock album was a CD copy of Nevermind, which I found in a roadside
ditch while walking home from school one day. It was so scratched up and many
tracks were damaged or not playable. I listened to that broken CD for years.
Opened my eyes to a whole world beyond the country I was raised with.

------
jccalhoun
The thing is, at least according to Techmoan's videos, no one makes good
cassette decks any more. They are all made at the same factory as cheaply as
possible with bad motors and no noise reduction at all. So unless people are
using old equipment the sound they are getting out of their cassettes is
really terrible.

I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to kickstart a high end cassette deck

~~~
Wistar
As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, the place to start such a
high-end cassette deck effort is with the late 70s Nakamichi 550. It is a true
standout. Kind of like the Porsche 911: a bad idea raised to the level of
perfection.

------
mc32
>” ...a vinyl record will often sound more nuanced than music in a compressed
digital format”

?? Compression doesn’t mean lossy. Nuanced, does that mean introduction of
sound artifacts due to the mechanical nature of the medium?

~~~
nvrspyx
The fact that it’s digital, and not analog, means it’s (more) lossy in
comparison to the original sound source. It’s not so much the compressed part,
but the digital part. If it’s digital, it’s approximating points on the sound
waves with “steps” (looks more like stairs than a smooth wave) and missing the
nuance between those steps, where as analog, in this case vinyl, is a closer
representation of the actual, continuous sound waves.

At least, that’s how I understand it.

~~~
mc32
That’s a misconception. Monty from xiph.org explains it well. see
[https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM](https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM)

~~~
dilippkumar
What a fantastic demo!

This is engineering education of the highest quality.

I was about to take up arms and start explaining Nyquist to the parent
comment, but I’m glad I chose to watch this video instead.

Thank you for posting it.

How are the Xiph guys doing? I followed them closely during the early days of
their new video codec attempt. I’ve fallen out of the loop since then.

~~~
ddingus
I agree. I had no idea just how many errors I had in my understanding of
digital signals.

Excellent, and in my view mandatory viewing for anyone interested in audio and
signal processing.

------
kazinator
> _The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice._

In fact, musicians used these things for recording demo tapes, well into the
1980's, using equipment like the Tascam Portastudio (a four-track recorder
using both directions of the tape at the same time).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio)

Check out some of the notable users, like Bruce Springsteen and Weird Al
Yankovic.

~~~
whenchamenia
Springsteens first album was recorded entirely on cassette. Not a big fan, but
good songwriting, and it sounds great.

------
drngdds
I get it, but I still prefer CDs because the sound quality is better, I can
losslessly rip them, and they don't break. It's a little frustrating to me
when the only physical version of an album is a cassette tape.

------
Wistar
The best sounding cassette recorder I ever heard was a Nakamichi 550 portable.
It produced amazing recordings.

~~~
tech2
My father's Walkman DD9 brings back similar memories :)

~~~
Wistar
Had to go look that up. That was a special Walkman.

[http://zokiaudio.com/sony-wm-dd9-sound-to-match-the-
ingeniou...](http://zokiaudio.com/sony-wm-dd9-sound-to-match-the-ingenious-
mechanism/?lang=en)

~~~
tech2
It was lovely, it had a VERY solid feel to it and the sound quality was as
good as, if not better than, many full-size players. Thanks for the link to
the review, it's been a fair few years since I've even seen that thing.

------
rdiddly
I grew up with cassettes, and random access (lack thereof) was always the big
drawback for me. Even vinyl, their predecessor, gave you that. With tapes
you're shuttling the tape for a seeming eternity, then going forward & back by
trial and error, to find the beginning of a specific song. The technology is
better for listening in order. Hence mixtapes.

Footnote: from hearing certain songs in the same order many times, like on my
best & most-played tapes, I eventually grew to expect the next song upon
hearing the previous one end. So even though I quickly and enthusiastically
abandoned the technology of cassettes, I did recreate some of those mixes as
digital playlists.

------
p1esk
My music listening evolution: vinyl - cassettes - CDs - iPod - Spotify - Aiva.

------
johnnycab
_One even reads nice things about the way cassettes sound, like in this Medium
post from Aubrey Norwood: “The sound tape gives is warm. Saturated. It
promotes a degree of imperfection, and creates an underflow of infamous tape
hiss that leaves the format feeling nakedly honest, which is gold dust for the
sincere-inclined musician.”_

I hope this kind of sickly-sweet format necrophilia gains further ascendancy,
making it easier to offload some of the defunct media on the bay to
unsuspecting users; who want to justify this kind of 'authentic' experience.

~~~
golergka
Tape certainly affects sound, in exactly this way. I don't think that I'll
ever start buying cassette recordings, but I routinely use different tape-
emulating plugins in my music production to get this particular type of
distortion, and I don't think that there are better words to describe it.

~~~
johnnycab
You seem to have gone off on a tangent, with regards to emulating the 'sound'
via plugins and distortion filters for music production, without actually
having to invest in the physical medium. Whereas, I was commenting on the
banality of resuscitating a flawed format based upon nostalgia.

~~~
golergka
The point is, the tape effect on the sound itself is very real, and it's
indeed "warm and saturated" \- it's not typical audiophile snake oil.

------
cutler
My cassette recordings of the John Peel show from the late 70s and 80s are
priceless. Most of the tracks are on Youtube these days but that can't capture
the selections and John Peel's legendary commentary between each track. I hope
to pass them on to my grandchild one day.

~~~
whenchamenia
Why not share them for the rest of humanity?

~~~
cutler
Because the sound quality is fading fast and needs transcribing to MP3, which
I'm in the middle of. Unfortunately cassette sound quality deteriorates after
40 years.

~~~
thirdsun
If you actually do this I can only hope that you'd use a lossless audio format
like FLAC. Even if the fidelity of a cassette recording might not reach the
limitations of a lossy codec, you should only consider lossless audio for
creating a future-proof archive and collection of music.

I think you should do it and provide access to others - I'm sure countless
like-minded people would love it.

------
jl6
I recently found a cassette of recordings of bedtime stories that my dad made
with me over 30 years ago. I played it back on a ~15 year old very cheap
“stereo”. The quality was excellent.

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scelerat
Cassettes were extremely popular in their heyday which means there are still
quite a bit of them laying around, along with the hardware to play and record
on them. It’s a very inexpensive medium, which is also why DIY musicians never
completely abandoned the format. Add to that millennials driving around cars
from the ‘90s and you get the mini resurgence you see now, with labels like
Burger Records being defined by the format.

------
eweise
Regarding tape, I first heard The Who's Tommy on a reel to reel back in the
70's. I'll never forget how amazing it sounded.

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zzo38computer
Audio cassette can sometimes be good if you want to make recordings.

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erik_p
A e s t h e t i c

