9 ms·
Cassette tapes are making a comeback?
- hackingonempty 10mo agoCassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.
- SequoiaHope 10mo agoThese kids and their vapes.
- stemlord 10mo agotrue but j cards hold the torch for diy unique and handmade artwork anyway
- ompogUe 10mo agoReminds me of when I was kid - one of my moms Vietnam vet friends kept his weed in a reel-to-reel box. Which seems even better than an LP.
- hmng 10mo agoIf cassettes are still around, then the standard icons for 'play', 'rewind', etc will still make sense for a younger generation :-)
- _wire_ 10mo ago"In many ways, Bob's Big Boy never left, sir. He's always offered the same high-quality meals at competitive prices..."
- spaqin 10mo agoOf course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever. However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.
- albert_e 10mo agoI agree And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
- Grisu_FTP 10mo agoI personally would never listen through a music player that serves ADs. Might just be me and my insane hatred of seeing ADs tho.
- itintheory 10mo ago> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck.
- valesco 10mo agoI found a French manufacturer called wearerewind.com who uses a heavier brass wheel and better clarity. Quite pricey though, as it is to be expected.
- Touche 10mo agoI've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
- mrob 10mo agoTanashin stopped producing tape mechanisms years ago. The modern "Tanashin" tape mechanisms are Chinese clones.
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
- finaard 10mo agoI started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clunky buttons ideal for kids hands, and you have something even all the dedicated digital kids media players can't compete with.
- ceuk 10mo agoBasically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like. It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish. And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :) If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
- fsckboy 10mo ago>compact since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here. https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette
- stryan 10mo agoTaylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums. Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.
- jghn 10mo agoI lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.
- annoyingnoob 10mo agoI would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss
- devilbunny 10mo agoIf you want the cassette experience without the massive downsides of cassettes, pick up an old Minidisc recorder. Physical media that are nearly infinitely re-recordable (unused ones are expensive but used ones from Japan are not) and nearly indestructible. The NetMD ones have been bid up in price because of transfer speed but older ones that only do real-time transfers are not hideously expensive.
- littlekey 10mo agoAnyone have recommendations for a cassette player?
- turboladen 10mo agoHow about a Nakamichi Dragon? https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA
- creeble 10mo agoLooks just like mine. But for $30, you can't beat this: https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-Earphones/dp/B079BDMPB6/ https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-...
- itintheory 10mo agoYou can definitely beat that for $30. Hit the thrift stores and you can find vintage machines that will greatly outperform this. You may need to replace a belt on some, but many are working just fine.
- tom_ 10mo agoThe cheapest one you can find. They all suck, and this way you'll spend the least amount of money.
- ffuxlpff 10mo agoActually the price and quality range of cassette players is wider than probably in any other format. The good ones were really good.
- nvader 10mo agoPretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre. [0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
- anigbrowl 10mo agoStrong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this: 1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death. 2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War. 3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene. 4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries. 5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player. Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
- AIorNot 10mo agoSo are 80s phones! Lol (I hated both) https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKulIDVBvG-VvdfibJYL9ou9rlXn4 https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...
- behnamoh 10mo agowhatever is old is new again. it's a story as old as time.
- jamal-kumar 10mo agoBeen following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk Anyways, here's the mixes: Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4 Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4 What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed
- 95014_refugee 10mo ago@ooedotech https://youtu.be/urGmmkUDi20 https://youtu.be/urGmmkUDi20 etc.
- jamal-kumar 10mo agoThanks, I was wondering who made the decks that bop was using!
- xg15 10mo agoI find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media. The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices. Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)
- theresistor 10mo agoAs far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.
- snapetom 10mo agoApple has neglected the iTunes store for years. Yes, you can still buy tracks, but it's really crappy. 1) The catalog is nowhere near as extensive as Apple Music. 2) It's AAC 256kbps format only. Not lossless. Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
- flotzam 10mo agoBandcamp is huge
- navbaker 10mo agoI regularly buy full albums and individual tracks on the Apple Store. AFAIK Amazon also still offers the same, both stores are DRM free
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoAmazon are MP3 though. :-(
- eikenberry 10mo agoI only buy archival (flac) downloadable files. Some places I've purchased music from.. - https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/ - https://us.7digital.com/ https://us.7digital.com/ - https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents. Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).
- CompoundEyes 10mo agoDid a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!
- Wistar 10mo agoQuick! Fins a Nakamichi 550 Portable. Amazing sonic and build quality.
- glimshe 10mo agoI remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back. What's next? VHS?
- mistyvales 10mo agoTerror Vision releases modern movies on VHS.. $30+ a pop
- mauvehaus 10mo agoI put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that. I could see dumber things happening.
- Acrobatic_Road 10mo ago>What's next? VHS? Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 10mo agoLots of tapes more or less being given away here. Check your local flea markets!
- asdff 10mo agoVHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
- BigTTYGothGF 10mo agoIt's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.
- jdalgetty 10mo agoYea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- prmoustache 10mo agoYou couldn't instantly record the radio on CD and until computers with CD recorder were common it was harder to share/copy/mix stuff between friends. Tapes were useful before MP3/broadband/p2p file sharing were a thing even long after CD had become common. As a teenager I couldn't afford every CD and vinyl release I liked and even if I had the means the records weren't necessarily available in store locally. Many of us had to rely on that tape being ready in the deck and ninja reflexes to hit the record button fast enough. Minidiscs would have been better but harder to finance/justify as a kid.
- geekamongus 10mo agoVinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever. Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- 2000UltraDeluxe 10mo agoBut what a quality that was!
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoThat and piracy. You gotta love the cahones of the guy that, in the 1970's, opened a record rental store in a college town… and sold blank cassettes as well.
- fsckboy 10mo ago>Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes...their only redeeming quality was the mix tape their ONLY redeeming quality? mix or not mix, did you ever try to record a vinyl?
- geekamongus 10mo agoYeah, I used to have a habit of buying a blank cassette with two vinyl albums each weekend after I got paid so I could listen to said albums in my car. I'd still rock the records at home though.
- parineum 10mo agoI don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm. It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster. I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.
- jsf 10mo agoPersonally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoAh yes, the record player of the 80s. Hipsters gonna hipster...
- singpolyma3 10mo agoEven when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoWell, they kind of never were the height of tech. To be sure, the cassette Walkman was a kind of height of tech (probably in spite of the format though).
- zzo38computer 10mo agoI might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs. (One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)
- bobanrocky 10mo agoWish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..
- abdullahkhalids 10mo agoIf you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent? Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoWhy not MiniDisc?
- SpecialistK 10mo agoThe machines are quite expensive, especially the NetMD models with USB. And for the best choices you need to order from Japan.
- perilunar 10mo agoNever really understood buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was better to buy the vinyl and make your own tapes.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoYeah, if the cost of the pre-recorded cassette were comparable to a blank tape, okay, fine. (But they weren't.)
- dfe 10mo agoDid people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked. Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement. All of this still works, if you have a CD drive. If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes. But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy. Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere. You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
- Touche 10mo agoCDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.
- vel0city 10mo agoI had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data. I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally. I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.
- AngryData 10mo ago
- hereme888 10mo agoWell-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.
- theandrewbailey 10mo agoGreat album. I've been listening to almost nothing but synthwave for years.
- RiverCrochet 10mo agoMy cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily. No they don't. It happens sometimes but really tapes and decks were pretty reliable as long as you didn't have foreign material in the deck. CDs and vinyls are more fraglie. A Sony tape deck my cousin has had a belt wear out, but it was fixable. Unlike your Airpod batteries. > Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that. > and weakens the tape over time. I recall that anything more than a 45-minute tape ("C90") is too thin and could experience this issue. So I never bought C100s or C120s (if those existed). Wearing tapes out wasn't a thing I ever experienced back in the day. > The audio quality is low I don't know the specs of all the Dolby NR stuff (which was a technology on later decks) but decent quality tapes had full frequency range. Given things like the loudness war and the artifacts of compressed audio, tape is perfectly fine for most typical music listening. > and comes with a background hiss. I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. But in most cases were you listen to music in real life, you don't notice it when the songs start playing. The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: you can listen, give, trade, or share the audio without things on the Internet tracking or preventing you from doing it. In a time where digital freedom and creative artistic recognition is becoming less and less, this is one gateway into the offline world, which is going to be where the real interesting stuff starts to happen if current trends continue.
- tom_ 10mo agoAre CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff. (I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoI have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into. My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago> I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into. I remember some people, back in the late 80s (?), using VHS Hi-Fi as some kind of a poor man's reel-to-reel. Audio quality was leaps and bounds above the compact cassette from TFA.
- analog31 10mo agoI sold my Studer-ReVox B77 in mint condition to a collector for the price of a new high-quality digital recorder. The thing was sitting in its original carton, barely used. Between the hassle of hauling it around, and the cost of tapes, I never actually took it anywhere to record anything.
- z3ratul163071 10mo agoweren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?
- floatin 10mo agoShould be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.
- nickt 10mo agoLike DCC (1992)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
- jasonjayr 10mo agohttps://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-should-use-encode-tape-cassettes https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-s... According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw) The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
- nottorp 10mo agoWhat I'm saying has nothing to do with modern DATs of course but iirc the zx spectrum tapes were like 10 kb per minute... They did have to work with any crap tape recorder and the interface circuitry wasn't much.
- Acrobatic_Road 10mo agoCan confirm. I've bought around 20 cassette tapes over the last 2 years - mostly new releases or re-releases of old stuff from the CD-era. I get way more enjoyment out of tapes than CDs. I think its because they're more hand's on, and I find the sound of my cassette deck soothing.
- aidenn0 10mo agoThe most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza: It used to break my heart when I went in your shop And you said my records were out of stock So I don't buy records in your shop Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'
- jackdoe 10mo agoI stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate. But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :) Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth. We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.
- ValentinPearce 10mo agoI'm looking at cassettes that way as well, a physical limitation to avoid instant gratification and to take my time.
- yourusername 10mo ago>but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 10mo agoYeah, with high-end vintage decks in good shape, tapes can sound pretty decent, more than enough for day-to-day listening. A type I tape recorded on a modern player? It'll sound horrible.
- cellularmitosis 10mo ago> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious: The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape. Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this. The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes. My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid. Edit: according to gemini AI: * Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits) * High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits) So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo agoI still have a Nakamichi in storage Another consumer deck I loved was made by Philips, who I once read "invented the tape deck" I still have a Sony portable line level deck and powered stealth mics, too, for live taping. Concerts are way too expensive these days, though Heck I still have a HHB CDR850 for converting from analog to digital I gave away my Digi001 I still have 100 or so tapes, I gave away the rest I remember buying 100s of Maxell XLIIs, Tower Records became the goto source I'm not sure I have the ears anymore to notice the improvements, if any, of modern equipment over "vintage" But most music produced today sounds like crap to me anyway. Too loud
- AngryData 10mo agoNot for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don't have reliable service, but I doubt 99% of people experience even that these days.
- kakacik 10mo agoIts the same hipstery thingie like LPs are with similar talk about quality, experience and whatnot. People still do it, heck people do a lot of seemingly weird stuff that is far from optimal behavior. Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos). There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.
- karlkloss 10mo agoAs soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back. Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times. Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it. Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
- kevin061 10mo agoWhile I agree with the overall sentiment, streaming services have also degraded our behaviours by prioritising instant rewards and locking us into a platform you cannot escape easily from, and that once you escape, you lose literally everything, for you never owned those songs. Then you have social media notifications interrupting your songs, no headphone jack, and no physical button feedback when playing music on your smartphone. I also don't really see the appeal of cassette tapes, personally, and the quality of digital media like CDs and even MP3 files is arguably superior. I guess a good middle ground is one of those modern audio players that don't have smartphone functionality and take an SD card or so. FiiO I think is quite popular. Might give it a try some day.
- Mashimo 10mo ago> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night? No, but people still use candles or LEDs that resemble candles, including the flickering. People also read paperback books. It's not always about practicality.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 10mo agoIt's perfecly legitimate to do stuff simply because you want to. This is a site for tinkering people, so it's kind of expected people tinker with stuff. Quite often that includes old stuff. :) Waiting for the writeup about the steel wire recorder resurgence now.
- a5c11 10mo agoI used to code at night with a kerosene lamp sitting on my desk. I love the light spectrum of a live fire. "Portable" (they couldn't even fit in a pocket) CD players were the worst thing imho. Too sensitive to even small shocks, which was particularly annoying while taking longer walks, and draining batteries like crazy. I switched from cassette players to MP3 players, almost completely skipping the era of CD players. I've tried it once or twice because my sister had it, and never again.
- AndrewStephens 10mo agoCassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming. Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player. [0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_web.html https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...
- kh_hk 10mo agoMy car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?
- yourusername 10mo agoA common point of failure is the belt that drives the mechanism, it will deteriorate with time. You can buy the belts off aliexpress for a few cents.
- andrewstuart 10mo agoI understand the return to vinyl records, cd and dvd. I do not miss audio or video tapes.
- chakintosh 10mo agoFrom today : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201381
- Gravityloss 10mo agoTapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.
- jjav 10mo agoJust a couple months ago I converted to mp3 some cassettes I recorded in the very early 80s of a local band. Not perfect audio, but sounded quite good still. Not bad for a ~45 year old tape.
- KaiserPro 10mo agoCassettes suck hard. Sorry, but apart from being smaller and failing in a different way to CDs, they suck hard. Yes they were portable, and if you want a "pure" sound experience (you're not going to get that from cassette, you're going to get tape hiss and pitch wobbling) I can sorta understand. But DAT is where its at if you want that. Cassettes have terrible dynamic range, and hiss like a mother fucker. Sure it evokes a sound of your parent's youth, in the same way that those tedious fuckers talk about vinyls "warmth" but objectively they both suck bollocks. The casing though, thats great. I do like the album art. thats nice.
- thw_9a83c 10mo ago> Cassettes suck hard. Exactly. We need DAT Walkman back [1] [2]. [1]: https://www.dcaudiovisuel.com/product_info.php/products_id/16/language/en https://www.dcaudiovisuel.com/product_info.php/products_id/1... [2]: https://www.just-cassette.com/post/digital-audio-cassette-dat https://www.just-cassette.com/post/digital-audio-cassette-da...
- K0balt 10mo agoBased on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations? I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/stream processing being an optional step so that legacy compatibility would be perfect, and even dual head setups that could do on the fly conversion. But perhaps the data density of the tape just isn’t there? Though it seems like with the type of data stuffing tech we use it flash memory and hdd these days to quadruple up on bits per domain, that it should be possible.
- stinos 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
- K0balt 10mo agoI think this used a spinning head, similar to video? The trick would be to use a static head and still record 4 or More digital tracks on a 4mm tape, with enough headroom for robust ECC. I’m pretty sure it could be done at ~kbps with contemporary recording head litho at 8 tracks per mm. That makes 16 tracks per side, 32 for the full 4mm (both sides). It would even be possible to convert existing tapes to digital in one play/pass using a 2 head system, or a read-store-record setup.
- zeristor 10mo agoI'm waiting for the revival of computer games on cassettes.
- kgwxd 10mo agoSimple "mp3" player with terrible screen/interface, low-capacity SD cards with some wav files, decorated like a mix-tape, curated for straight-through listening. Perfectly scratches the retro/disconnected itch for me.
- Anthony-G 10mo agoA friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
- tclancy 10mo agoYeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”. That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
- Aldipower 10mo agoGood cassettes played with a good tape deck are actually really good for music. It naturally saturates and compresses the audio material which often leads to much more homogeneous musical experience. Also the frequency spectrum tends to soften too harsh recordings, which is also cool. It all depends on the genre of course. The typical high resolution classic concert is probably better to be listened from HQ flac or whatever. Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.
- bigmealbigmeal 10mo ago> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. That's a big part of why they're cool. Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music. I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds. Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.
- Aldipower 10mo agoShameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/ https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/ BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
- sirfz 10mo agoSounds great!
- Aldipower 10mo agoThank you! :-)
- MisterTea 10mo ago> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)
- Aldipower 10mo agoYeah, mostly DDA, and some songs are live mixed on the console, this is DAA then? Anyway.. :-) I think the real shift to digital was around 1994-95 when professional digital recording equipment became somewhat affordable even for smaller studios. My Roland DM-80 4-track digital hard disk recorder, you also find on the albums webpage, was more then 20.000$ back in 1991, so most studio easily stood with 16-tracks on analogue tape.
- miek 10mo agoExcellent work! Reminds me (though maybe inaccurately) of soundtracks from old CGI laser discs that were basically long demos.
- coldtea 10mo agoThe answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait. That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs. At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement. Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.
- abanana 10mo agoIndeed, the title is the usual nonsense. Sales within a niche like this will always fluctuate. When someone spots a slight increase, they jump at the chance to wheel out this kind of headline. The article itself doesn't give hard numbers, just says UK sales "reached their highest level since 2003" - meaningless since cassette sales had died long before then. It links to an article that says there were "195,000 units sold last year" - so, next to nothing. I recall one point around 10-15 years ago, websites were simultaneously proclaiming the death of CDs because sales for the year had just dropped below 100 million, and the revival of vinyl because sales were approaching 1 million in the same timespan. Of course, the takeaway for many young people was that vinyl was outselling CDs. I'm pretty sure these articles are planted by PR firms working for the music publishers they talk about. There are plenty of people happy to be told what's currently "cool" and they'll obediently go out and buy them.
- Spivak 10mo agoThe title is less nonsense than it first appears. Cassettes are riding the coattails of vinyl getting popular again as collectibles. Lots of medium sized bands added vinyl to their merch stands to great success with their fans but the total manufacturing capacity of vinyl is small and everyone was suddenly competing for it. Not to mention when Taylor Swift drops an album and buys it all. Enter cassettes, another piece of physical media that's easier for artists to get their hands on and has similar collectible properties. Neither vinyl nor cassettes are going to make a dent in terms of music distribution, but that's because they compete in the same market as band t shirts.
- amelius 10mo agoI want consumer digital tape drives to make a comeback, for my backup needs. The enterprise models are way too expensive.
- raumfisch 10mo agoI don’t think so. I spent a huge amount of time in my youth recording, trading, buying, and selling audio tapes (all from the metal/hardcore/punk underground). It was a lot of fun, but everyone I know was glad when other ways of sharing and spreading music became available. As a niche, yes otherwise no.
- nemomarx 10mo agoPlenty of bands on Bandcamp selling tapes as merch in my experience. I think they're more of a physical collectable item instead of a genuine medium for most of the buyers though?
- guizadillas 10mo agoYeah on bandcamp they are collectables first and medium second
- zkmon 10mo agoMusic sounded different when there were physically moving things that produced it. Live music, turn-table, cassette spindle that have a visible action. It's not fidelity. It's about connecting the sound to real world. We know tape is not producing the sound, but we know that it moves and movement causes sound. Sound without any visible action or movement is a bit weird for our animal instincts.
- geldedus 10mo agoThey aren't. They remain a fringe hipster staple. Like the vinyls.
- bovermyer 10mo agoThat's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label. I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
- Xerox9213 10mo agoThe vinyls are a billion dollar industry. Small compared to streaming, but definitely non-negligible. https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RIAA-2024Year-End-Revenue-Report.pdf https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RIAA-2024Yea...
- forinti 10mo agoI understand the allure, but ultimately they just represent more plastic pollution (along with vinyl). Digital media is a great chance to not collect more plastic stuff.
- Aldipower 10mo agoOK, why not high res scan all those Picassos then and burn the original paintings? Should be sufficient to have this _piece of art_ in the digital domain.
- forinti 10mo agoI don't understand the analogy. Picassos are not mass produced artifacts.
- Aldipower 10mo agoYou assume that cassettes are all mass-produced artifacts. But that's not true. Many of them have a limited edition of perhaps 50 copies. But what I wanted to say was something completely different. People like to own art in a physical way. But to implicitly tell someone whether or not they should own something made of plastic is, in my opinion, crossing a line.
- pixelpoet 10mo agoQuestion marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?
- wkjagt 10mo agoAre you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
- pixelpoet 10mo agoA bunch of things are on their way out among native speakers, e.g. singular vs plural (there is / there are), much vs many (how much people / large amount of people), past vs present tense (build / built), ... as a German we have to pass English classes else we get held back a year, what's going on in English schools?
- neilv 10mo agoI recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie. And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches. It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people. Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation. Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell. The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
- nephihaha 10mo agoCassettes were fairly good for car radios and little else. They aren't large enough to lead in cover art like LPs or even CDs. They are terrible for snapping and getting chewed up. I still have some cassettes from years ago but definitely not the best format by a long shot.
- Libbum 10mo agoI predicted this back in 2004 as an angsty teenager: https://evilschemes.livejournal.com/3007.html https://evilschemes.livejournal.com/3007.html
- themadturk 10mo agoI don't miss cassettes, but they were an important thing to me in the 1980s. When my wife and I got married we were as poor as could be. Our first stereo was a little radio/cassette deck with four inch speakers. We played a lot of cassettes on that thing. I moved to digital players as soon as I could afford them. The most memorable (before the iPod) was the Creative Nomad with its 5GB hard drive. It was too big to fit easily in my jacket pocket, but I shoved it in there anyway. I didn't have to choose the tapes I had on my long bus commute anymore. And when the second-gen iPod came along, it was like heaven. I'd never go back to cassette...but it was great when there was little else available.
- ompogUe 10mo agoThere's some really cool stuff going on in the "tape delay loop" space. People make and sell all sorts of cassettes for many different "sample lengths". The designs of how they fit the tape in the box are pretty amazing. https://www.etsy.com/ca/market/cassette_tape_loop https://www.etsy.com/ca/market/cassette_tape_loop
- foxyv 10mo agoI've been tempted to make a little electronic boom box for my Mom. Just a box similar to the stereos in cars that play MP3s with FAT32 USB drives. Then I would put her favorite music on various drives that she could plug in whenever she wanted. Make sure it has some nice speakers on it and an Aux jack. Edit: Also a must have is some faux wood grain! The interface will just be a standard play pause stop skip rewind with big fat buttons. Preferably the most satisfying ones I can find on Mouser. Nice and clicky. Cassette tapes are cool, but they are a pain. I still remember the horror of hearing my walk man turn my Top Gun Soundtrack cassette into plastic waste. Never again!
- harhargange 10mo agoDVDs and BluRay should definitely be much more mainstream. They can save you tons of money on cloud storage. I keep hundreds of GB of old video lectures series, books and more on DVDs and plan to move to a Bluray setup soon.