11 ms·

Why Cassettes?

63 points by ZacnyLos 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
Unrelated aside: I saw the URL and thought it was going to be something to do with the 90s web classic "hamster dance". https://www.webhamster.com/ https://www.webhamster.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance
bwestergard 4y ago
I found it very difficult to buy a high quality portable tape player for less than $200 last year.
- armitron 4y ago
  Exactly, nobody is making new players with the quality of the old stalwarts (Sony, Aiwa, Sanyo), everything new on the market is Chinese garbage that's not fit to reproduce simple voice recordings, nevermind music. So one has to hunt down used equipment which comes with its own set of issues (besides exorbitant prices) as there is wear and tear to account for and components that need to be replaced.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    > exhuberant You misspelled “exuberant”, but you probably meant to write “exorbitant”.
- dbeley 4y ago
  Yeah it mostly has to do with the fact all the historical tape player manufacturers are either closed or moved out to newer technology. I researched a similar device some time ago and I only found "We Are Rewind" selling a "modern" tape player but from what I understood the sound quality is not on-par with the best portable tape players from the 90's and such.
  - cmdrriker 4y ago
    You're correct, just about all "new" cassette decks contain Tanashin-originated components. Even reputable brands like Panasonic (National), TEAC, Son, Aldi & AllyExpress all use the same crappy mech. Techmoan has been shown that nearly every "new" tape-playing device these days all contain the same lousy mech, some not even capable of stereo playback! VWestlife covered the "world's first Bluetooth capable portable cassette player" which is a few years old now but also uses a lousy mech (mono!). Cassette audio today seems to be more about the experience and social aspects of making, trading, and playing tapes ( Ala Guardians of the Galaxy style )rather than getting the best quality audio. https://youtu.be/nezGOVOpHtc https://youtu.be/nezGOVOpHtc https://youtu.be/WVylfRhIA7o https://youtu.be/WVylfRhIA7o
- tgv 4y ago
  I think it used to be impossible to buy a (new) high quality tape player for less than $500, let alone a portable one, while they were still being mass-produced.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Depends on your definition of “high quality” — every Walkman ever produced (and still in good working order) probably still sounds better than any newly manufactured deck you can buy in 2023.
- hank808 4y ago
  I've had good luck using ebay and importing to the US from the UK and EU. Search for the Aiwa brand as opposed to Sony, because they're slightly less collectible/expensive, but are every bit as high quality and sound great. YMMV. I've bought two over the last six months.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Hmm.. I have two tape decks in my house, maybe I need to check their worth.
- pwenzel 4y ago
  Even more so, 4-track cassette recorders exploded in price after Alessandro Cortini posted his Tascam process video a couple of years ago. The Portastudio I sold on a garage sale for $5 in 2010 goes for over $300 now!
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Ha ha, they were about $300 when new (or maybe closer to $400 as I recall).
lucidguppy 4y ago
The ck's in the typeface of this article made me stop for a fraction of a second when I hit each one. It was jarring.
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  I second that. Jarring indeed. Maybe there's some ligature history I'm unaware of but ligating c and k seems about as useful as gluing the letters 'wq' together.
  - Tomte 4y ago
    At least in German it's a standard ligature, but nowadays rarely used (mostly in very designery and ornamental stuff).
isoprophlex 4y ago
So, not entirely on topic, but I've been searching for a cheap portable cassette player that has a 3.5mm input to record audio from other sources. Maybe anyone can recommend something? Goal is to give the kids something unconnected to the Internet to play music, and I want them to be able to make mixtapes by recording audio playback from another device. Hence the line-in requirement... preferably I'd buy something mass produced, not spend 400 bucks on ebay on something that might break within weeks ;)
- scrumper 4y ago
  Cheap walkmen are available readily, most of which can record off 3.5mm. Better experience would come with a used full-size deck off eBay to make the recordings themselves, then you play back on the walkman. I'm in the same boat. I'd ruled out cassette as unavailable and cumbersome, but my 10 year old took to it instantly when her friend bought her a Jensen walkman. I wrote another comment above on that.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    Have you actually seen a cheap knockoff Walkman that records off 3.5mm?! I must have searched all the wrong places, endless scrolling of amazon, aliexpress etc and all i saw was things with a microphone for voice, no 3.5mm -- like your kid does in the other comment Guess I'll do some more searching tonight!
    - scrumper 4y ago
      Her is a Jensen CR-100, it has a 3.5mm "mic" input so I guess it's expecting a low-level mono signal. Probably not what you want but for kids' ears it's likely ok. It was for sure cheap. We've only used the built-in mic which is, of course, horrible, but nonetheless exciting for her to hear her voice and music played back. But I think the easiest way to go is cheap walkman for playback, used full-size deck for proper stereo recording off line-level inputs. Edit: I said "most of which" didn't I. Oops. I'm sure there's some cognitive bias at work there; what I meant was, the single one I have seen does, but only for certain values of 'does'. Sorry!
anonymous_sorry 4y ago
My abiding memories of cassettes are: * Tape getting caught in cassette players, potentially ruining the recording * Unspooled tape littering the side of motorways. * Pitch variations, presumably due to the tape stretching, making songs fairly unlistenable. I have positive memories of things I listened to on cassette, but I don't really associate them with the format itself.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  >Pitch variations, presumably due to the tape stretching, making songs fairly unlistenable. The music in the part of Home Alone where he ziplines away from the house is permanently incorrectly imprinted in my mind because our VHS copy was worn out and the music distorted.
dbeley 4y ago
Even today a big chunk of the music indie scene is still selling tapes as they are way cheaper to produce than other medias and they have that "cool" factor you don't have with CDs or vinyls (portability, format easy to share). Unfortunately portable tape players are becoming quite hard to find: Stranger Things and Guardians of the Galaxy have create a huge demand for some Sony walkmans, whose prices are now in the triple-digits.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  I found mine for $2 at Goodwill. It's not a Sony - some mid-90's offbrand, but it works. This was before Stranger Things though.
  - dbeley 4y ago
    Yeah it's depends a lot on the model, I should have precised it's only for some models. Otherwise normal cassette players are still very easy to find.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  >>portable tape players are becoming quite hard to find Quick search shows a dozen on Amazon for $20bucks on average. BUT... I can readily believe they are crap. I don't know how one can find/identify a GOOD player (ideally new).
scrumper 4y ago
My daughter, 10, was really pushing for some way to access her own music back in the summer. At her age I got a walkman and was already making my own mixtapes off the radio using the big system in the living room. We swapped tapes at school, did all the things in the article. I just couldn't see that being a thing now in 2022. So we got her a HomePod Mini for her birthday and, sure, she plays her tunes and is happy-ish but there's no headphones (it's not private) and no way to take it with her, no sharing, no discovery, no peer-swapping at school - it's pretty crappy compared to the experience I had at that age. I'd have bought her an iPod but of course they were discontinued the year before so impossible to justify. At the same time her friend bought her a little Jensen walkman with a copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix on it. She loves it! So I bought her some blank cassettes and now she makes mixtapes by playing off the HomePod into the Jensen's microphone. Quality is shit but she's young and nobody will be more pleased than me (among other things, a semi-pro audio engineer) when she complains and asks for something better. At that point I'll figure out some unholy solution involving a computer and a headphone cable and a tape deck. So much more complicated! So much for progress. It really is an ideal format. Cassette is perfect. Siri most assuredly is not.
- foobarian 4y ago
  I got mine a speaker with a microSD card slot. It works well but getting stuff onto the cards is a bit convoluted: if she likes a particular youtube video she needs to run youtube-dl, then pull out the audio track, and copy that to the SD card. Maybe if there was a walkman-format device with a SD card slot that would be better because it would be more private with headphones, and it would be possible to swap mp3s with friends.
  - scrumper 4y ago
    Yeah I thought briefly that SD cards could become the new cassettes but they just won't. None of them have computers. Phones, iPads, Chromebooks yes. Everything streams. There's no physical download and share option. Actually... as I write this, I realize you're hinting at something I think exists, in a form: a digital voice recorder. (Aka Dictaphone, since we're in the nostalgia thread.) Edit: And right in front of me is a Tascam DR-40, which is a handheld recorder which takes stereo in (or internal mic) onto SD card. Very un kid friendly but simpler devices must surely exist.
SeanLuke 4y ago
> Audiophiles might point out that analog audio sources can theoretically hold details you can't hear in digital. This is true because values in analog media are continuous. Over imperceptibly short periods of time, the numbers that represent different values on a sound wave in a digital recording jump instantaneously from one discrete value to another with no gentle slope between. Analog signals instead form smooth curves, so at some level they can contain tiny variations in slope that are too subtle for the digitization of that signal to represent. > The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Has anyone ever worked out / quantified what kind of depth difference in a vinyl groove you'd need to beat the CD digital signal for "too subtle to capture"?
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    You need roughly an extra 60dB of dynamic range to match CD. The largest groove deviation on vinyl - nominal 0dB - is around 23um. To add 60dB you have to multiply by 1000, which gets you 23mm. And increase the thickness correspondingly. This has has tragic consequences for the size and weight of the disk. Although it wouldn't be playable because the stylus would be pulling hundreds of Gs. For the short period for which it survived it would be hot enough to melt the vinyl. (Actually it would probably catch fire.) You can imagine an optical reader - the've been built for for vinyl, but for some reason they never caught on - but if you're going to do that you may as well have a sub-micron digital data stream in a much smaller disk.
lloeki 4y ago
> The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. Not "you". Not most. None. Nyquist-Shannon means a 44.1kHz-sampled signal can perfectly capture an reconstruct a signal up to 22.5kHz freqs, and it's not like it's a flat cut off after that. > The commonly stated range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz.[5][6][note 1] Under ideal laboratory conditions, humans can hear sound as low as 12 Hz[7] and as high as 28 kHz, though the threshold increases sharply at 15 kHz in adults, corresponding to the last auditory channel of the cochlea. So yeah, some rare specific humans can perceive a single isolated sine at up to 28kHz in a an anechoic chamber. That's completely different from listening to actual music. > Our gradually degrading analog audio media may not sound “better” than digital, but they do sound different, and for some they can sound different in a way that's preferable to digital perfection. That, is totally on point though. Beauty is as much in the ear of the listener as in the eye of the beholder.
- knorker 4y ago
  > Beauty is as much in the ear of the listener as in the eye of the beholder. For all the human ear can hear, though, this can be implemented with a digital "nostalgia filter". For the rest I agree with all you said, except a lingering feeling that there is one exception: In the end audio is analog. Yes, the digital version literally perfectly contains the analog perfection that's hearable. But that assumes a perfect digital to analog conversion. In theory a 192kHz digital signal, with a DAC that understands it, may create distortions that add in a subjective pleasant way within the hearable spectrum, whereas a 44.1kHz signal may, in DAC, cables, or headphones, create a different set of distortions. For high end amp and speaker/headphones this should matter less.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > In theory a 192kHz digital signal, with a DAC that understands it, may create distortions that add in a subjective pleasant way within the hearable spectrum, whereas a 44.1kHz signal may, in DAC, cables, or headphones, create a different set of distortions. Which you then put into a 32kHz 12-bit ear.
forinti 4y ago
I'm from the cassette era but at this point I think they are just plastic pollution. I have a single 16GB thumb drive in my car with an absurd amount of music in it. It would take hundreds of tapes to store the same amount of music. Plus, mp3 files can store metadata for the songs: author, artist, year, etc.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  You mentioned plastic pollution — there was a time when the highways were edged with chromium-oxide garlands.
grugagag 4y ago
Is it possible to DIY wlakman? A modern version with 3d printed parts aside from the head/engine and some other essentials?
- ilyt 4y ago
  Rubber things would be a problem.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
What's with the odd 'ck' ligature?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Good question. I suspect that the font (Lora) plays a role, though it doesn't seem to have that specific ligature by default, though I find it in a Mozilla Developer example: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-variant-ligatures https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...>
bagpuss 4y ago
Tangentially relevant, the Sony 808 walkman is a masterpiece of modern design IMO. I suspect it played some part in the decision to have a polished steel back on the first iPods. https://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/sony-wm-ex808hg/ https://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/sony-wm-ex808hg/
- ilyt 4y ago
  My first thought about that was "fuck that would scratch like hell in normal use when I was a kid" I had Sony WM-FX261 (with radio) and even that got the shiny parts scratched quickly
amiga386 4y ago
I don't like the limitations of cassettes, but in their heyday, they readily handled the important social activity of music swapping: * ubiquity: everyone had a tape player at home. The cool kids had portable players * uniqueness: people did not have _your mixtape_ unless you gave it to them. You wrote/drew on the inlay to personalize it and make it yours * contemplation: you couldn't just seek straight to particular tracks, you'd typically listen to the whole thing, give it your full attention * peer-to-peer: no third parties involved * cost: tapes were cheap enough that you wouldn't be ruined if someone didn't give a tape back * the object itself: they're a nice size and shape so they don't easily get lost. You need to handle them to play the music. They remind you they're there, they remind you of the person who gave them to you This continued in the 1990s/2000s with CD-Rs, but the flatness of them and that you generally dumped the audio off the CD-R onto your hard drive meant that they ended up in piles and you forgot about them. Unless people went to extra effort to burn a single-track mix, you just ripped them and merged them into your own collection and the attribution that your friend gave you it was lost. You didn't have to listen to the whole thing at once, you paid less attention to it. Nowadays, you're screwed. You could put files on a flash drive, but those are easily lost and always expensive. You _will_ miss them when they're lent out, and most I've ever lent out have never come back. They're only ever a conduit for files, good luck writing a tracklisting on the side of them. If you're just hosting the files on the internet, there's no physical object to remind people any more. That said, it is still nice for people to upload things for each other to a shared dropbox, and people still appreciate a "DJ mix" you've made with as a single file with its own artwork, but I'd say that requires a bit more effort than putting mixtapes together did.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  One of the first things we did when a friend brought home a 128K Macintosh and an ImageWriter was create mix-tape labels with MacPaint.
KaiserPro 4y ago
This is a nice piece, and although I deeply despise cassette tape in almost all of it's forms, I understand the author's point of view. As a form factor, they are quite nice, and have a comforting rattle. As a medium, they suck arse. Almost all domestic analogue audio recording media suck. No amount of waffling about "warmth" or authenticity is convincing. People like it because it reminds them of their youth, or a specific timeframe. vinyl? great cover art, finicky, fragile, terrible dynamic range. 8 track? infinite loop, great. I hope you have a stable winding head. Cassette? shite. Its the equivalent of shooting everything with high contrast, pushed ilford black and white film (think super grainy press pictures) or overly green/red saturation of kodachrome. Its great for a specific type of music, but sucks as a general medium
hot_gril 4y ago
About the desirable noise of tapes: I find old Simpsons episodes much more lively than new ones because of the audio alone. Can't tell if it's the higher quality voice recordings or cause there's zero background noise in most scenes, but for some reason the new ones sound very sterile regardless of the content. And it's not a nostalgia thing cause I didn't watch the show at all until recently. Am I the only one?
- b112 4y ago
  It could be that older Simpsons episodes were shot on film, not digital.
valeg 4y ago
I am not surprised by cassette comeback. It is portable and analog format. Metal tapes can reproduce Hi-Fi sound and record lots of audio. If you want to keep your music listening experience entirely in analog, vinyl+a decent tape totally make sense. Also saves your records. Vinyl records are often less compressed and mixed differently than digital releases. I prefer that, when music actually has some dynamic range.
achairapart 4y ago
I remember there were so many vendors and so many types (and god, Type IV / Metal were really expensive!). Now I do really wonder if they really made any substantial difference, at least when played on the average consumer hi-fi stereo system (or even boomboxes!) of the times. Also, consider how valuable it would have been just this kind of testing/data then: https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/index-to-cassette-tape-measurements.html https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/index-to-cassette-t... That's one good example of the "Market for Lemons" theory.
don-code 4y ago
I've "tried" cassette tapes three times now. The first, which at this point is insignificant, is when they were period-accurate, and I didn't have a frame of reference. They were pretty good then. The second time was around 2009, when I bought my first car, and the steering wheel had buttons that could control (pause / seek, not just rewind / fast forward) the cassette deck. So I bought a recorder and started moving some music onto it. When I got it into the car, though, I learned about "wow and flutter": the motors in the cassette deck being ten years old, they no longer rotated at a constant speed. Instead, they'd speed up and slow down, sometimes at unpredictable frequencies, so the pitch of the music would be increasing and decreasing all the time. Sort of like a truck horn, constantly going by you. The third time was just this year, when I had the opportunity to buy an album digitally for $9, or digitally and with a cassette for $10. Naturally, I had to see what I'd get. I put it in a (different) car's cassette deck, and this time was greeted with music that sounded like it was recorded by Alvin and the Chipmunks. This car doesn't get driven much, and when the alternator is charging the battery, 12 volts is more like 15 - and the motors in the cassette deck again care about that. Digital has its own shortcomings (I own too many devices with horrid DACs), but I vastly prefer being able to listen digitally and get a better-sounding result.
nothrowaways 4y ago
A beautiful invention. I wonder if it would ever come back.
Alekhine 4y ago
This comment section is odd. Lot of people talking about how kids today can't swap music at school. They can, its called Spotify. Its not perfect, but thats what the vast majority of kids do, they dont go out and buy expensive equipment just for aesthetics.

63 points by ZacnyLos 4y ago

Unrelated aside: I saw the URL and thought it was going to be something to do with the 90s web classic "hamster dance". https://www.webhamster.com/ https://www.webhamster.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance

bwestergard 4y ago

I found it very difficult to buy a high quality portable tape player for less than $200 last year.

armitron 4y ago
Exactly, nobody is making new players with the quality of the old stalwarts (Sony, Aiwa, Sanyo), everything new on the market is Chinese garbage that's not fit to reproduce simple voice recordings, nevermind music. So one has to hunt down used equipment which comes with its own set of issues (besides exorbitant prices) as there is wear and tear to account for and components that need to be replaced.
- teddyh 4y ago
  > exhuberant You misspelled “exuberant”, but you probably meant to write “exorbitant”.
dbeley 4y ago
Yeah it mostly has to do with the fact all the historical tape player manufacturers are either closed or moved out to newer technology. I researched a similar device some time ago and I only found "We Are Rewind" selling a "modern" tape player but from what I understood the sound quality is not on-par with the best portable tape players from the 90's and such.
- cmdrriker 4y ago
  You're correct, just about all "new" cassette decks contain Tanashin-originated components. Even reputable brands like Panasonic (National), TEAC, Son, Aldi & AllyExpress all use the same crappy mech. Techmoan has been shown that nearly every "new" tape-playing device these days all contain the same lousy mech, some not even capable of stereo playback! VWestlife covered the "world's first Bluetooth capable portable cassette player" which is a few years old now but also uses a lousy mech (mono!). Cassette audio today seems to be more about the experience and social aspects of making, trading, and playing tapes ( Ala Guardians of the Galaxy style )rather than getting the best quality audio. https://youtu.be/nezGOVOpHtc https://youtu.be/nezGOVOpHtc https://youtu.be/WVylfRhIA7o https://youtu.be/WVylfRhIA7o
tgv 4y ago
I think it used to be impossible to buy a (new) high quality tape player for less than $500, let alone a portable one, while they were still being mass-produced.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Depends on your definition of “high quality” — every Walkman ever produced (and still in good working order) probably still sounds better than any newly manufactured deck you can buy in 2023.
hank808 4y ago
I've had good luck using ebay and importing to the US from the UK and EU. Search for the Aiwa brand as opposed to Sony, because they're slightly less collectible/expensive, but are every bit as high quality and sound great. YMMV. I've bought two over the last six months.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Hmm.. I have two tape decks in my house, maybe I need to check their worth.
pwenzel 4y ago
Even more so, 4-track cassette recorders exploded in price after Alessandro Cortini posted his Tascam process video a couple of years ago. The Portastudio I sold on a garage sale for $5 in 2010 goes for over $300 now!
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Ha ha, they were about $300 when new (or maybe closer to $400 as I recall).

lucidguppy 4y ago

The ck's in the typeface of this article made me stop for a fraction of a second when I hit each one. It was jarring.

isoprophlex 4y ago
I second that. Jarring indeed. Maybe there's some ligature history I'm unaware of but ligating c and k seems about as useful as gluing the letters 'wq' together.
- Tomte 4y ago
  At least in German it's a standard ligature, but nowadays rarely used (mostly in very designery and ornamental stuff).

isoprophlex 4y ago

So, not entirely on topic, but I've been searching for a cheap portable cassette player that has a 3.5mm input to record audio from other sources. Maybe anyone can recommend something? Goal is to give the kids something unconnected to the Internet to play music, and I want them to be able to make mixtapes by recording audio playback from another device. Hence the line-in requirement... preferably I'd buy something mass produced, not spend 400 bucks on ebay on something that might break within weeks ;)

scrumper 4y ago
Cheap walkmen are available readily, most of which can record off 3.5mm. Better experience would come with a used full-size deck off eBay to make the recordings themselves, then you play back on the walkman. I'm in the same boat. I'd ruled out cassette as unavailable and cumbersome, but my 10 year old took to it instantly when her friend bought her a Jensen walkman. I wrote another comment above on that.
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  Have you actually seen a cheap knockoff Walkman that records off 3.5mm?! I must have searched all the wrong places, endless scrolling of amazon, aliexpress etc and all i saw was things with a microphone for voice, no 3.5mm -- like your kid does in the other comment Guess I'll do some more searching tonight!
  - scrumper 4y ago
    Her is a Jensen CR-100, it has a 3.5mm "mic" input so I guess it's expecting a low-level mono signal. Probably not what you want but for kids' ears it's likely ok. It was for sure cheap. We've only used the built-in mic which is, of course, horrible, but nonetheless exciting for her to hear her voice and music played back. But I think the easiest way to go is cheap walkman for playback, used full-size deck for proper stereo recording off line-level inputs. Edit: I said "most of which" didn't I. Oops. I'm sure there's some cognitive bias at work there; what I meant was, the single one I have seen does, but only for certain values of 'does'. Sorry!

anonymous_sorry 4y ago

My abiding memories of cassettes are: * Tape getting caught in cassette players, potentially ruining the recording * Unspooled tape littering the side of motorways. * Pitch variations, presumably due to the tape stretching, making songs fairly unlistenable. I have positive memories of things I listened to on cassette, but I don't really associate them with the format itself.

HideousKojima 4y ago
>Pitch variations, presumably due to the tape stretching, making songs fairly unlistenable. The music in the part of Home Alone where he ziplines away from the house is permanently incorrectly imprinted in my mind because our VHS copy was worn out and the music distorted.

dbeley 4y ago

Even today a big chunk of the music indie scene is still selling tapes as they are way cheaper to produce than other medias and they have that "cool" factor you don't have with CDs or vinyls (portability, format easy to share). Unfortunately portable tape players are becoming quite hard to find: Stranger Things and Guardians of the Galaxy have create a huge demand for some Sony walkmans, whose prices are now in the triple-digits.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
I found mine for $2 at Goodwill. It's not a Sony - some mid-90's offbrand, but it works. This was before Stranger Things though.
- dbeley 4y ago
  Yeah it's depends a lot on the model, I should have precised it's only for some models. Otherwise normal cassette players are still very easy to find.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
>>portable tape players are becoming quite hard to find Quick search shows a dozen on Amazon for $20bucks on average. BUT... I can readily believe they are crap. I don't know how one can find/identify a GOOD player (ideally new).

scrumper 4y ago

My daughter, 10, was really pushing for some way to access her own music back in the summer. At her age I got a walkman and was already making my own mixtapes off the radio using the big system in the living room. We swapped tapes at school, did all the things in the article. I just couldn't see that being a thing now in 2022. So we got her a HomePod Mini for her birthday and, sure, she plays her tunes and is happy-ish but there's no headphones (it's not private) and no way to take it with her, no sharing, no discovery, no peer-swapping at school - it's pretty crappy compared to the experience I had at that age. I'd have bought her an iPod but of course they were discontinued the year before so impossible to justify. At the same time her friend bought her a little Jensen walkman with a copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix on it. She loves it! So I bought her some blank cassettes and now she makes mixtapes by playing off the HomePod into the Jensen's microphone. Quality is shit but she's young and nobody will be more pleased than me (among other things, a semi-pro audio engineer) when she complains and asks for something better. At that point I'll figure out some unholy solution involving a computer and a headphone cable and a tape deck. So much more complicated! So much for progress. It really is an ideal format. Cassette is perfect. Siri most assuredly is not.

foobarian 4y ago
I got mine a speaker with a microSD card slot. It works well but getting stuff onto the cards is a bit convoluted: if she likes a particular youtube video she needs to run youtube-dl, then pull out the audio track, and copy that to the SD card. Maybe if there was a walkman-format device with a SD card slot that would be better because it would be more private with headphones, and it would be possible to swap mp3s with friends.
- scrumper 4y ago
  Yeah I thought briefly that SD cards could become the new cassettes but they just won't. None of them have computers. Phones, iPads, Chromebooks yes. Everything streams. There's no physical download and share option. Actually... as I write this, I realize you're hinting at something I think exists, in a form: a digital voice recorder. (Aka Dictaphone, since we're in the nostalgia thread.) Edit: And right in front of me is a Tascam DR-40, which is a handheld recorder which takes stereo in (or internal mic) onto SD card. Very un kid friendly but simpler devices must surely exist.

SeanLuke 4y ago

> Audiophiles might point out that analog audio sources can theoretically hold details you can't hear in digital. This is true because values in analog media are continuous. Over imperceptibly short periods of time, the numbers that represent different values on a sound wave in a digital recording jump instantaneously from one discrete value to another with no gentle slope between. Analog signals instead form smooth curves, so at some level they can contain tiny variations in slope that are too subtle for the digitization of that signal to represent. > The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

zimpenfish 4y ago
Has anyone ever worked out / quantified what kind of depth difference in a vinyl groove you'd need to beat the CD digital signal for "too subtle to capture"?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  You need roughly an extra 60dB of dynamic range to match CD. The largest groove deviation on vinyl - nominal 0dB - is around 23um. To add 60dB you have to multiply by 1000, which gets you 23mm. And increase the thickness correspondingly. This has has tragic consequences for the size and weight of the disk. Although it wouldn't be playable because the stylus would be pulling hundreds of Gs. For the short period for which it survived it would be hot enough to melt the vinyl. (Actually it would probably catch fire.) You can imagine an optical reader - the've been built for for vinyl, but for some reason they never caught on - but if you're going to do that you may as well have a sub-micron digital data stream in a much smaller disk.

lloeki 4y ago

> The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. Not "you". Not most. None. Nyquist-Shannon means a 44.1kHz-sampled signal can perfectly capture an reconstruct a signal up to 22.5kHz freqs, and it's not like it's a flat cut off after that. > The commonly stated range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz.[5][6][note 1] Under ideal laboratory conditions, humans can hear sound as low as 12 Hz[7] and as high as 28 kHz, though the threshold increases sharply at 15 kHz in adults, corresponding to the last auditory channel of the cochlea. So yeah, some rare specific humans can perceive a single isolated sine at up to 28kHz in a an anechoic chamber. That's completely different from listening to actual music. > Our gradually degrading analog audio media may not sound “better” than digital, but they do sound different, and for some they can sound different in a way that's preferable to digital perfection. That, is totally on point though. Beauty is as much in the ear of the listener as in the eye of the beholder.

knorker 4y ago
> Beauty is as much in the ear of the listener as in the eye of the beholder. For all the human ear can hear, though, this can be implemented with a digital "nostalgia filter". For the rest I agree with all you said, except a lingering feeling that there is one exception: In the end audio is analog. Yes, the digital version literally perfectly contains the analog perfection that's hearable. But that assumes a perfect digital to analog conversion. In theory a 192kHz digital signal, with a DAC that understands it, may create distortions that add in a subjective pleasant way within the hearable spectrum, whereas a 44.1kHz signal may, in DAC, cables, or headphones, create a different set of distortions. For high end amp and speaker/headphones this should matter less.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > In theory a 192kHz digital signal, with a DAC that understands it, may create distortions that add in a subjective pleasant way within the hearable spectrum, whereas a 44.1kHz signal may, in DAC, cables, or headphones, create a different set of distortions. Which you then put into a 32kHz 12-bit ear.

forinti 4y ago

I'm from the cassette era but at this point I think they are just plastic pollution. I have a single 16GB thumb drive in my car with an absurd amount of music in it. It would take hundreds of tapes to store the same amount of music. Plus, mp3 files can store metadata for the songs: author, artist, year, etc.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
You mentioned plastic pollution — there was a time when the highways were edged with chromium-oxide garlands.

grugagag 4y ago

Is it possible to DIY wlakman? A modern version with 3d printed parts aside from the head/engine and some other essentials?

ilyt 4y ago
Rubber things would be a problem.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

What's with the odd 'ck' ligature?

dredmorbius 4y ago
Good question. I suspect that the font (Lora) plays a role, though it doesn't seem to have that specific ligature by default, though I find it in a Mozilla Developer example: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-variant-ligatures https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...>

bagpuss 4y ago

Tangentially relevant, the Sony 808 walkman is a masterpiece of modern design IMO. I suspect it played some part in the decision to have a polished steel back on the first iPods. https://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/sony-wm-ex808hg/ https://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/sony-wm-ex808hg/

ilyt 4y ago
My first thought about that was "fuck that would scratch like hell in normal use when I was a kid" I had Sony WM-FX261 (with radio) and even that got the shiny parts scratched quickly

amiga386 4y ago

I don't like the limitations of cassettes, but in their heyday, they readily handled the important social activity of music swapping: * ubiquity: everyone had a tape player at home. The cool kids had portable players * uniqueness: people did not have _your mixtape_ unless you gave it to them. You wrote/drew on the inlay to personalize it and make it yours * contemplation: you couldn't just seek straight to particular tracks, you'd typically listen to the whole thing, give it your full attention * peer-to-peer: no third parties involved * cost: tapes were cheap enough that you wouldn't be ruined if someone didn't give a tape back * the object itself: they're a nice size and shape so they don't easily get lost. You need to handle them to play the music. They remind you they're there, they remind you of the person who gave them to you This continued in the 1990s/2000s with CD-Rs, but the flatness of them and that you generally dumped the audio off the CD-R onto your hard drive meant that they ended up in piles and you forgot about them. Unless people went to extra effort to burn a single-track mix, you just ripped them and merged them into your own collection and the attribution that your friend gave you it was lost. You didn't have to listen to the whole thing at once, you paid less attention to it. Nowadays, you're screwed. You could put files on a flash drive, but those are easily lost and always expensive. You _will_ miss them when they're lent out, and most I've ever lent out have never come back. They're only ever a conduit for files, good luck writing a tracklisting on the side of them. If you're just hosting the files on the internet, there's no physical object to remind people any more. That said, it is still nice for people to upload things for each other to a shared dropbox, and people still appreciate a "DJ mix" you've made with as a single file with its own artwork, but I'd say that requires a bit more effort than putting mixtapes together did.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
One of the first things we did when a friend brought home a 128K Macintosh and an ImageWriter was create mix-tape labels with MacPaint.

KaiserPro 4y ago

This is a nice piece, and although I deeply despise cassette tape in almost all of it's forms, I understand the author's point of view. As a form factor, they are quite nice, and have a comforting rattle. As a medium, they suck arse. Almost all domestic analogue audio recording media suck. No amount of waffling about "warmth" or authenticity is convincing. People like it because it reminds them of their youth, or a specific timeframe. vinyl? great cover art, finicky, fragile, terrible dynamic range. 8 track? infinite loop, great. I hope you have a stable winding head. Cassette? shite. Its the equivalent of shooting everything with high contrast, pushed ilford black and white film (think super grainy press pictures) or overly green/red saturation of kodachrome. Its great for a specific type of music, but sucks as a general medium

hot_gril 4y ago

About the desirable noise of tapes: I find old Simpsons episodes much more lively than new ones because of the audio alone. Can't tell if it's the higher quality voice recordings or cause there's zero background noise in most scenes, but for some reason the new ones sound very sterile regardless of the content. And it's not a nostalgia thing cause I didn't watch the show at all until recently. Am I the only one?

b112 4y ago
It could be that older Simpsons episodes were shot on film, not digital.

valeg 4y ago

I am not surprised by cassette comeback. It is portable and analog format. Metal tapes can reproduce Hi-Fi sound and record lots of audio. If you want to keep your music listening experience entirely in analog, vinyl+a decent tape totally make sense. Also saves your records. Vinyl records are often less compressed and mixed differently than digital releases. I prefer that, when music actually has some dynamic range.

achairapart 4y ago

I remember there were so many vendors and so many types (and god, Type IV / Metal were really expensive!). Now I do really wonder if they really made any substantial difference, at least when played on the average consumer hi-fi stereo system (or even boomboxes!) of the times. Also, consider how valuable it would have been just this kind of testing/data then: https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/index-to-cassette-tape-measurements.html https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/index-to-cassette-t... That's one good example of the "Market for Lemons" theory.

don-code 4y ago

I've "tried" cassette tapes three times now. The first, which at this point is insignificant, is when they were period-accurate, and I didn't have a frame of reference. They were pretty good then. The second time was around 2009, when I bought my first car, and the steering wheel had buttons that could control (pause / seek, not just rewind / fast forward) the cassette deck. So I bought a recorder and started moving some music onto it. When I got it into the car, though, I learned about "wow and flutter": the motors in the cassette deck being ten years old, they no longer rotated at a constant speed. Instead, they'd speed up and slow down, sometimes at unpredictable frequencies, so the pitch of the music would be increasing and decreasing all the time. Sort of like a truck horn, constantly going by you. The third time was just this year, when I had the opportunity to buy an album digitally for $9, or digitally and with a cassette for $10. Naturally, I had to see what I'd get. I put it in a (different) car's cassette deck, and this time was greeted with music that sounded like it was recorded by Alvin and the Chipmunks. This car doesn't get driven much, and when the alternator is charging the battery, 12 volts is more like 15 - and the motors in the cassette deck again care about that. Digital has its own shortcomings (I own too many devices with horrid DACs), but I vastly prefer being able to listen digitally and get a better-sounding result.

nothrowaways 4y ago

A beautiful invention. I wonder if it would ever come back.

Alekhine 4y ago

This comment section is odd. Lot of people talking about how kids today can't swap music at school. They can, its called Spotify. Its not perfect, but thats what the vast majority of kids do, they dont go out and buy expensive equipment just for aesthetics.