
The cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia - longdefeat
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/23/cassette-tape-music-revival-retro-chic-rewind
======
sxates
As far as I remember, the only advantages tapes had were the fact that you
could record to them yourself (making copies, or recording radio sources), and
you could play them in a car. The sound quality wasn't better than vinyl, it
was just more flexible and portable. But if you're not making your own
recordings or playing them in your car, what's the point in bringing them
back?

The vinyl revival make a lot more sense. Of course, the biggest pop star in
the world selling a few hundred cassettes may not constitute a 'come back'
either.

~~~
dalbasal
Portability (also walkmen and boomboxes, not just car stereos), recording
(copies, mixtapes, radio recordings), durability & price.

You could loan someone a tape without worrying about scratches. You could make
your own mixtape, which became a romantic trope and let people take creative
part.

Cassettes were usually cheaper than vinyl or CDs. Also, you could record your
own tapes. I have tapes of me talking as a toddler. You could record a lecture
or interview. There's a reason people still say "album" and "demo tape." Tapes
could be produced in 1s and 10s. Vinyl presses had big minimum runs. So..
underground music happened on cassette tapes.

I would flip it. Vinyl's only advantage was sound quality (assuming the needle
was sharp and the record unscratched). Cassetes had every other advantage.

There's a reason they were so popular well into the cd age.

~~~
Symbiote
Cassette tapes also lost that advantage around 2000, when CD-Rs became cheap —
cheaper than tapes ever were.

Some friends in unknown bands produced ~100 CD-Rs of their music and left them
lying around bars and nightclubs. That cost £20 and a lot of time spent
swapping CDs at the computer.

~~~
Udik
True. But I've always found cds awful from a UX point of view. Delicate,
needed to be kept in their box and handled with care to avoid fingerprints.
And it was sometimes tricky to get them out of their boxes, maybe with one
hand while driving. While I used to have tapes scattered around the car, just
push a button, eject it and throw it anywhere, pick another, push it in.
Perfect format.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I don't care for cassettes, but I hope the Compact Disc never dies. It is a
nearly perfect physical music format.

Edit: I really appreciate the simplicity of it, it's DRM free (the only DRM-
free digital prerecorded physical format still pressed?) and contains lossless
uncompressed stereo PCM at the frequency and bitdepth that is still the
standard for digital music, good enough no human ear can distinguish it from
theoretically superior successors.

~~~
anc84
Rotating plastic that relies on sensitive optics? No thanks, that seems far
from perfect for lossless, digital data. I will take a solid-state medium any
day over spinning discs.

~~~
tempodox
“lossless, digital data” is a contradiction in terms if the source is analog.
When converting analog to digital, resolution is finite.

~~~
sjwright
All practical analog audio signals are band limited and have a nominal noise
floor. Given those characteristics, the conversion from analog to digital can
be considered mathematically lossless.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_the...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem)

Then you consider the fact that our own ears are band limited and dynamic
range limited and you realise pretty quickly that CD audio at 16 bits 44100 Hz
is, for all practical purposes, an objectively lossless audio format.

------
acomjean
I used cassettes a lot a while back. I took my cds and made tapes of them for
my car and Walkman. Had a pretty good tape deck for my home stereo (Yamaha 3
head..)

Cassettes are terrible. You have to clean the pinch rollers a lot or you can
get a weird “wah” sound as the speed changes slightly as the tape is being
pulled through.

And the hiss, even with Dolby b noise removal it was kinda not great. Dolby c
and Dbx where so much better but without having it on walkmen/car players the
point was lost.

OccTionally you’d get a jam and the tape would pull out of the shell. you’d
have to try and get the tape back inside without a twist..see the first photo
in the article

It was an interesting format (write protect tabs on the top, that would
prevent you from recording over accidentally. There were also differ holes in
the top of the tape which indicated which “type” of tape it was (cro2, metal
or normal)

I don’t miss them though.

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bastawhiz
I think the nostalgia that a lot of folks feel is that a tape is a physical
unit of audio. With digital audio, your device can fit a ludicrous number of
songs (or stream magically from the cloud). With a tape, that physical object
_is_ the sound that's played. It makes it more precious. It requires a
substantive amount of effort to create or duplicate.

CDs were like this too, for a while. When everyone had a burner and you could
fit 650MB of MP3s on them, the magic faded. The CD was just a vehicle, not the
song itself. The songs could be downloaded and shared trivially. If you wanted
a song on tape, you had to buy it or find someone that had it and make a copy
in a slow manual process.

The closest we've ever come to reclaiming this magic, IMO, is HitClips.

~~~
rchaud
The thing with a cassette, aside from its physical tangibility, is that it's
time-boxed, with no track skipping. Vinyl has the same appeal. The point of it
is that you have a physical document of a recording with a clear beginning and
end, with the expectation that you listen to it from start to finish. OK,
cassettes will pick up where you left off, but you get the idea.

It may sound obvious, but in a world with infinitely scrolling feeds and
bottomless Spotify/YT playlists, it's practically novel.

------
timrichard
Not sure if it's completely nostalgia, or also an element of corksniffing-
meets-Chinese-whispers.

I saw a recording forum where someone had read up on the wonders of tape,
looking for the elusive 'magic' talked about. Then was surprised and
disappointed at some lo-fi hissy results. Somewhere along the line, it's not
communicated that the nostalgia is for 1/4" to 2" studio tape, and not a box
of TDK C90's from a garage sale.

------
WalterBright
I have no nostalgia for SSSSSSSSSSS...

But with vinyl, I do shamefully admit a bit of nostalgia for thunk, rumble,
snap, crackle and pop.

~~~
eecc
Not just that, vinyl does have much higher bandwidth, up into the 50kHz
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eC6L3_k_48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eC6L3_k_48))
Of course we cannot hear above 20-22k but I expect the non linearities in the
equipment to downmix some of that into the audible baseband. "warmth" is not a
myth after all ;)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Vinyl warmth is created by the RIAA curve that removes most of the bass and
tries to recreate it in the preamp. This adds some nice creamy distortion to
the low end.

Vinyl also has a much lower dynamic range than CD.

I've actually come to hate vinyl as a format. I love the artwork, but I hate
the impracticality, the cultishness, and most of all I hate the distorted low-
fi sonics.

Nothing matches a high resolution digital source file played on good
equipment.

~~~
isolli
I have to disagree: a well-mastered recording on vinyl is superior to a high-
resolution, digital recording when the music has been auto-tuned, mastered,
remastered, and compressed to death. (I'm talking about dynamic-range
compression here.)

~~~
stordoff
There's nothing stopping you avoiding all of these things on CD. All things
being equal, the CD will sound superior to the vinyl (at worst equal to it).

~~~
isolli
Some recordings are not available on CD, or only terribly remastered. I
haven't looked into downloads, but I doubt they are better remastered.

~~~
einr
This has nothing to do with the technical characteristics of the format.

~~~
isolli
Of course, but it has everything to do with real-life availability of records.

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ipunchghosts
This will get buried but I am writing in hopes one day google picks this up
and someone finds it as facinating as I do.

The thing with tapes is that they have 2 sides. Artists previously utilized
that fact in interesting ways. It was a logical way to break up songs or
themes.

One of my favorite examples of this is Metallica's black album. The first side
begins with enter sandman which has this mellow but building intro. The second
side hits hard right at the start with Through the Never. Today, most
listeners have no idea how this album is partitioned.

~~~
WhompingWindows
This is extremely common throughout the history of music. The original context
of a work is almost always lost as technology and culture change, presenting
familiar pieces in new ways. How often are Chopin's pieces performed in huge
recital halls, when they were meant for small salons/private parties? How
about Schubert's songs, which were sang in very private settings for friends?
Or the contrasting sides of two records? Or the continuous flow of
record/tape/CD from one track to the next, vs. Spotify playlist's penchant for
combining songs from all over the place. What about sampling tiny pieces of a
work? Theme and variations on a work from an opera for a piano? Adaptations
for new instrumental groups of old pieces?

Since music is inherently playful, and society is great at inventing new
musical toys, I think we're destined to an ever-shifting musical landscape.

~~~
cr1895
This goes the other way, too...where once a recording engineer had to decide
how and where to split up a long work, the entire uninterrupted piece can now
be played digitally.

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kgwxd
I want standalone MP3 players with removable media and simple controls (no
touch display) to make a comeback. You could make your crush a "mix tape" with
those old 32MB SD cards everyone has lying around from the good old days when
everything was a standalone device. Someone could manufacture little stickers
to put on the SD cards so you could customize each one. And little cases to
carry them around in. Bands could release albums on them. And your modern car
will probably be able to play them too.

~~~
einr
SanDisk still makes the Sansa Clip which satisfies your requirements and takes
microSD cards. I have a previous generation of the same, it's a very nice
device that does (mostly) one thing and does it well.

[https://www.sandisk.com/home/mp3-players/clip-
jam](https://www.sandisk.com/home/mp3-players/clip-jam)

And of course, as far as bands releasing albums on SD cards with artwork...
They tried that with something called MQS SD. Needless to say, it didn't go so
well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGDPFVjvVU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGDPFVjvVU)

~~~
kgwxd
Very close to what I'm looking for. I was thinking pretty hard about it a few
months ago, and I did considered that exact one. Ideally, I'd like no screen
(small LCD at most); push buttons (SanDisk looks like touch, but the
description doesn't clarify); SD card; standard replaceable battery (this is
the hardest feature to find); ogg and flac support.

This is the closest I could find:
[https://www.agptek.com/?product=agptek-u3-16gb-portable-
usb-...](https://www.agptek.com/?product=agptek-u3-16gb-portable-usb-
mp3-player-with-recording-and-fm-radio-black)

Take out the built in USB and internal storage, add ogg/flac support, it'd be
excellent.

------
gatesphere
As someone who has had music put out on tape in 2018 and 2019, and as someone
who owns and regularly plays over 300 modern (post-2015) tapes, it's just a
part of the scene for some genres. There's a certain object fetishization
among underground/niche/extreme music fans. We like to cop the physical
releases because they're a direct, tangible way to connect with the artist.
They're easy to DIY (moreso than vinyl, perhaps less easy than CDrs, though),
and they're an interesting medium to package for (I have releases that have
come in everything from ziplok bags to custom-built wooden boxes).

So, yeah. We do play them. At least those of us who are serious about the
format.

------
CharlesW
It's interesting that this comes ~30 years after cassette's peak (late 1980s),
and the "vinyl revival" came ~30 years after that format's peak.

By that measure, we should see a nostalgic CD revival around 2030.

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jamesrcole
I wonder if Guardians of the Galaxy has anything to do with it.

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forinti
Cassettes were nice (they were compact and sturdier than vynils), but they are
just plastic pollution now. You can put thousands of songs into one tiny flash
drive. To satisfy your retro angst, just get a cassette shaped mp3 player or
something like that.

~~~
dalbasal
Think of it like buying a plastic Nicki Minaj figurine that happens to be
playable.

