>> triggers memories of particular pieces of music.
It triggers my memories of scanning for songs, using toothpicks to extract broken tapes from car dashboards, and spending afternoons rewinding loose tape back into cassettes. Cassettes (8-tracks included) were a horrible bridge technology between vinyl and CDs. I'm glad people can find joy in their external appearance. That is their only redeeming quality.
Same here. Although I have no interest in it myself, I can sort of understand the back-to-vinyl movement. But it’s a mystery to me why anyone today would want to listen to music on cassettes.
But for those who lean that way, there’s a store in Tokyo that is ready to serve you:
Same as vinyl - "the sound", and tactility. Plus tapes are pretty cheap, still. Usually around $8 last I checked. Also, it forces you to sit and listen to a contiguous album - no skipping around.
There were plenty of tape decks in the '80s and '90s that let you auto-seek between gaps of silence on a tape or even program the tape counter values for seeking to specific tracks.
While cassette tapes can be somewhat dodgy, they are repairable to a degree that's difficult to achieve with modern media. The cassette decks are also very repairable.
Personally, I can no longer tell the difference between digital media and a high-quality cassette recording of it. That's probably due to age though...
It triggers my memories of scanning for songs, using toothpicks to extract broken tapes from car dashboards, and spending afternoons rewinding loose tape back into cassettes. Cassettes (8-tracks included) were a horrible bridge technology between vinyl and CDs. I'm glad people can find joy in their external appearance. That is their only redeeming quality.