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Some of this article is just complete nonsense: > Originally developed for studio and live applications, [metal] tapes will produce a low noise recording No o

Some of this article is just complete nonsense: > Originally developed for studio and live applications, [metal] tapes will produce a low noise recording No one ever used 2- or 4-track cassette recorders in a recording studio. They were used in basements and garages to make home recordings of amateur bands. And those 4-track recorders pre-dated metal tapes anyway. This guy is just making shit up as he goes along. > metal tapes sound closest to a digital recording. No, they don’t. They don’t sound anything like digital recordings and never did. When music started being published on CD in the 80s, no one lamented cassettes going the way of the dinosaur. No one (records, yes). Now there’s a revival, fine. But admit that it’s nostalgia and different than digital, not better.

ubermonkey 4y ago
I regret I have only one upvote to give you. I'm 52. I had lots of musician pals in the late 80s, 90s, and early 21st century (still do!). In that era no piece of kit was more coveted by those folks than the 4-track recorders from Tascam or Teac or whatever that worked with regular cassettes. They were game-changers for amateur and aspiring musicians! But then digital audio happened, and real quick anybody with a decent laptop suddenly had access to recording capabilities that only a few years before were only available in professional studios. Shit, Apple even started shipping, for free, a home recording tool that opened the door for a lot of people. Nobody who lived the cassette era, though, misses using them for playback or mixing down to them for demos. Everything about music recording and playback is astoundingly better now than it ever was back then. The level of sonic fidelity you can have in your living room for a couple hundred bucks today is staggering. Hell, the audio quality you get out of a basic iPhone and the earbuds it ships with is stunning vs. what we had access to in 1985 or 1995.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I regret I have only one upvote to give you. I'm 52. I had lots of musician pals in the late 80s, 90s, and early 21st century (still do!). In that era no piece of kit was more coveted by those folks than the 4-track recorders from Tascam or Teac or whatever that worked with regular cassettes. They were game-changers for amateur and aspiring musicians! But then digital audio happened, and real quick anybody with a decent laptop suddenly had access to recording capabilities that only a few years before were only available in professional studios. Shit, Apple even started shipping, for free, a home recording tool that opened the door for a lot of people. Nobody who lived the cassette era, though, misses using them for playback or mixing down to them for demos. Everything about music recording and playback is astoundingly better now than it ever was back then. The level of sonic fidelity you can have in your living room for a couple hundred bucks today is staggering. Hell, the audio quality you get out of a basic iPhone and the earbuds it ships with is stunning vs. what we had access to in 1985 or 1995.