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Of 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
by spaqin 11mo ago
Of 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 11mo agoI agree And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
- Grisu_FTP 11mo 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 agoI miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape… Actually, I don't miss that at all.