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The cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia
- forinti 8y agoCassettes 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 8y agoThink of it like buying a plastic Nicki Minaj figurine that happens to be playable.
- WalterBright 8y agoI have no nostalgia for SSSSSSSSSSS... But with vinyl, I do shamefully admit a bit of nostalgia for thunk, rumble, snap, crackle and pop.
- ggm 8y agoThe intro and outro were part of the recording. It's like the three thumps on the floor with a stick, from a guy on stage before a moliere play. I very much enjoyed an album experience and I try to relive it with a CD, but CD encoding de-humanises the inter-track moments. Even the fade-out is sometimes gone. "re mixed for your listening pleasure" as if the beatles didn't record in Mono deliberately. What works for me, is Keith Jarret and Glenn Gould, because they mutter and fidgit while playing. But I miss that initial thunk,rumble, snap crackle too. Another "porky" prime cut...
- eecc 8y agoNot 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 8y agoVinyl 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 8y agoI 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.)
- nkozyra 8y agoSounds like you're conflating the playback format with the production then. Nothing's stopping you from putting brick wall compressed mastered music on record just as nothing's stopping you from putting a track with more dynamic range on cd.
- isolli 8y agoYou're right, except that in practice some wonderful historic recordings are only available on vinyl, so a blanket statement like: "I have come to hate the vinyl format" should be qualified.
- mikestew 8y agosome wonderful historic recordings are only available on vinyl Now you're conflating the media with the content.
- timrichard 8y agoHave to disagree. With the mechanical wear interaction between the stylus and groove, it's often estimated that you start to lose detail after about 10 plays. Plus a whole lot of EQ compromises have to be made to stop the stylus jumping out of the groove, which don't exist on digital formats. So if you add up the HF and LF rolloffs, rumble, wow, and general snap crackle and pop from vinyl that probably isn't completely dust-free, you have a grab-bag of imperfections that won't exist in a FLAC file ripped from a CD when it was mint and free of read errors.
- glormph 8y agoI have nostalgia for my early adopter friend's setup. He had his mp3 player (a jazpiper?) connected to a fake cassette for playing in his car.
- mrguyorama 8y agoI drive a 2004 vehicle. This is still my daily life
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoI 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.
- forinti 8y agoThe first CD players let you stick the disk in with case and all. You would never get a scratch. It was a shame it didn't stay that way.
- dagw 8y agoNot the cases the CD came in though. You had to buy special cases that where compatible with your CD player. Handy, but it started to get expensive once you had more than 20 or so CDs.
- chib 8y agoWow, I never knew this. Can you give an example of such a system? My initial search has returned nothing.
- rjsw 8y agoSome pictures here [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)
- gideonparanoid 8y agoHa, not too dissimilar to a floppy disc really.
- misnome 8y ago
- sxates 8y agoAs 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 8y agoPortability (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.
- johnchristopher 8y agoOP said all that: > Portability (also walkmen and boomboxes, not just car stereos), recording (copies, mixtapes, radio recordings), durability & price. And the question remains: > what's the point in bringing them back?
- dalbasal 8y agoAh.. well the point is obviously not that they're objectively better. They're a collectible souvenir.
- Symbiote 8y ago
- acomjean 8y agoI 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.
- timrichard 8y agoNot 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.
- jamesrcole 8y agoI wonder if Guardians of the Galaxy has anything to do with it.
- ipunchghosts 8y agoThis 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- WhompingWindows 8y agoThis 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 8y agoThis 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.
- Latteland 8y agoDon't forget about the late great Tom Petty and his famous "Hello, CD listeners, in fairness to cassette owners, we'll take a quick pause while they flip their cassettes over.
- bastawhiz 8y agoI 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 8y agoThe 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.
- kgwxd 8y agoI 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.
- duxup 8y agoJust physical buttons often would be nice, some phones have an extra customization one... buttons please.
- einr 8y agoSanDisk 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 8y agoVery 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-mp3-player-with-recording-and-fm-radio-black https://www.agptek.com/?product=agptek-u3-16gb-portable-usb-... Take out the built in USB and internal storage, add ogg/flac support, it'd be excellent.
- CharlesW 8y agoIt'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.
- gatesphere 8y agoAs 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.