6 ms·
Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead
- seductivebarry 1y agoAn essay about how a thirty-year-old mixtape led me to think about technology, memory, and the strange persistence of things we’ve already declared obsolete.
- wrs 1y agoThanks. Digging out my shoebox of college mix tapes right now.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoPeople are real quick to declare things obsolete without thinking about Pareto frontiers. Tapes and floppies are "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about malicious controllers embedded in flash media or hard drives. Paper is "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about cost per square inch of displaying static information, or about running without batteries.
- Razengan 1y agoYou mean undead? Zombie technologies?
- seductivebarry 1y agoPretty much..the combination to listening to a song about vampires on a cassette seemed like the perfect metaphor!
- SoftTalker 1y agoSurprised a 30 year old cassette is still playable without falling apart. Maybe I should try some of mine.
- lttlrck 1y agoThey are surprisingly durable. I have a tape I made in 1990, it's followed me across continents and been in cardboard boxes, basements and attics. It still plays flawlessly. Not wanting to push my luck, I archived it. On Minidisc. I have quite a large CD collection. Two albums from the same era are unplayable due to oxidization, same band Banco De Gaia, pressed at the same plant in the UK too.
- ares623 1y agoThere is a reason they are often used as archival medium.
- Aldipower 1y agoYep, but the tape often "overspeaks" with the next winding, so you can already hear what comes in the next 2 seconds. :-) Quite interesting effect.
- id00 1y agoA few years ago I've bought an old cassette deck, ordered a few cassettes on discogs.com (some of them 30+ years old) and even recorded a few mixtapes myself. There is a long forgotten strange feeling to hold a physical media with music. Like it gives it weight... And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes
- chestervonwinch 1y ago> Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes Yea, I use Type II cassettes to record on my Tascam 246. I did an experiment where I recorded a track I made digitally to tape and then back into the DAW. I A/B'd them and struggled to differentiate. That being said, I have used some really poor quality Type II tapes, where the difference was obvious.
- enobrev 1y agoI grabbed a cheap one for my 5 year old with some blank tapes. I remember how much I loved recording my voice, or the TV, and eventually LOTS of radio. Tangible media has more weight than just the physical object. Especially in something as durable as a cassette. It comes in bursts but when he's into it, he has a ton of fun, The manual nature of it is confusing for him (he's used to instant gratification), like waiting a few seconds at the beginning of the tape so he can record, but something about a cassette makes the whole process easier to explain and, I hope, to understand and visualize.
- steveBK123 1y agoI’ve actually started getting 90s-00s era vinyl for some electronic music I used to listen to. A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.
- ang_cire 1y agoI just bought a DVD burner/ reader today and a stack of 100 blanks. I'm planning some physical backups of favorite media (songs, books, movies, pictures). My rackmount setup could die to lightning, fire, theft, animals, and I don't want to be terrified whether I have a backup of any particular thing on it. I'm also planning a couple of HDDs for cold storage, but they're less reliable for LTD (long-term drawer) storage than DVDs.
- nickdothutton 1y agoI hope you bought archive grade media. Also I hope the people who make such media did their work well!
- ang_cire 1y agoYup, M-disc DVDs. Obviously I can't prove that they won't fail, but I don't exactly need them to last that long anyways. :P
- Aldipower 1y agoSorry, but cold storage HDD archiving is much more reliable in the long term then DVD. Also easier to execute. Simply copy on two different HDDs from different manufactures and you are more or less safe to go.
- ang_cire 1y agoHDD lasting up to 1000 years? I don't think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- Aldipower 1y agoWhy so provocative? But thanks for the hint. I did not knew about M-DISC. But back to my argument. * M-DISC isn't a regular DVD. * It is expensive and has low capacity in comparison to HDD. * To read it, you need a reader/drive, where HDDs are already the drive in itself.
- Aldipower 1y agoI just produced 150 cassettes of my new album and people like it to have it on cassette, even if they do not have a player. But they can hold something physical in there hands while listening on-line. And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify. It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.
- Bjartr 1y agoIf the track played though a cassette is that much of an improvement, couldn't you have a mastering step that runs the track through a cassette player? Or is there a je ne sais quoi that even that would fail to capture?
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoI suppose whatever you send to Spotify will then compress more the tape compression making it sound worse? Also reminded of that recent thing about AI improving YouTube videos. I wonder if Spotify would do that about certain things - small creators, concerts, other live performances. At any rate I don't think Master - Tape - Spotify would be likely to sound better than just Master - Spotify.
- Aldipower 1y agoSpotify itself does not compress luckily. They just do loudness normalization, which does not affect the audio quality in itself. But the codec used for streaming does some quality degradation that is for sure. So yeah, it is always better to listen to CD, Tape or what not then to some streaming codec music.
- jdalgetty 1y agoSpotify does not sound as good to me as a high quality/bit rate mp3.
- smackeyacky 1y agoI occasionally buy mix tapes from op shops. There is something weirdly intimate about listening to them. Part of it is the unique sequencing or the song choices. Part of it the handwriting on the insert. It’s a unique experience and perhaps a little creepy. Fun though.
- noman-land 1y agoWhat's an op shop?
- recury 1y agoA charity shop / thrift store
- tappaseater 1y agoI often wonder why compact disc was the bridge technology to full digital and not DAT.
- ramses0 1y agoSimpler production format! No case, reels, moving parts, stretched/torn tape. If you never saw a smashed cassette on the side of the road with a reel of magnetic ribbon tangled in the weeds and bushes then you wouldn't understand.
- tappaseater 1y agoI've seen plenty and even tossed them as streamers as a kid. I've also seen many scratched CDs lying at the side of the road.
- anotherlab 1y agoI grew up in the 70s and I loved cassettes. I would take my records and copy them to cassettes so I could play them on horrible and not-so-horrible boom boxes at parties. And of course making mix tapes. But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.