13 ms·

Cassette Revolution: 1980s Tape Tech Is Still Making Noise in Our Digital World

41 points by balbaugh 11y ago

userbinator 11y ago
I thought it'd be about software tapes, but I'm not surprised - vinyl records are even older and more fragile in many ways, and yet there's still plenty of interest in them, so why not cassette tape.
- cellularmitosis 11y ago
  That's a bit different, though. Of the popular mediums from the last 50 years, cassette tapes are by far the worst in terms of sound quality. Particularly, the noise floor of a tape is absolutely horrible for anything but constant-volume loud recordings. Ever tried to listen to a delicate classical passage on tape? "hissssssssss...". Vinyl would fare far better. So I'm actually pretty surprised to see a revival of interest in tapes. But I get it: its not about the sound quality. Its about the physicality of the container, about the process of making mix tapes, etc... (Note: there are a lot of things you can do to drastically improve the sound quality of a tape: buy better quality tape, record at high speed, use DBX noise reduction (dynamic range compression), etc. But this article is talking about the bottom of the barrel: cheap tape which can be played in anyone's walkman).
  - cgriswald 11y ago
    Cassette tapes are worst in terms of a lot of things. They lack the width and height of vinyl and CD so album art is not as cool. It is difficult and time consuming to skip a track or skip to a favorite track. And they can get "eaten" by the playback device. I think one of the main reasons cassettes caught on is that people could make mix tapes. Even after I adopted CDs, I always had cassette players and recorders around for mix tapes (until later, when recordable CDs and the computers to record them with became much cheaper). Any revival (I've literally heard of this from nowhere except the article) is probably due to the nostalgic feel combined with the ability to make mix tapes.
andretti1977 11y ago
Maybe OT, but i remember the "power of tape" when i was 10 in 1987, when an italian public radio broadcasted a full videogame (compressed by "turbo loader") every day and it was possible to record and play it on that beautiful commodore 64!
- lholden 11y ago
  Okay, that sounds like it must have been pretty cool!
- tommyd 11y ago
  I seem to recall reading that the BBC did the same for the BBC Micro, although I can't find a reference now. Waiting half an hour for a game to load just to find the tape had got corrupted right near the end ("R Tape Loading Error" on the ZX Spectrum I grew up with) was one of the aspects I less fondly remember!
  - bonaldi 11y ago
    You might be thinking of software on ceefax: they had pages in the high numbers which contained gibberish to the viewer but which could be read by a BBC Micro with teletext adapter
    - billybofh 11y ago
      They also, as I remember, used to broadcast data at the top of the picture (possibly just about off-screen) during 'The Computer Programme' or one of its follow-ups, that a BBC Micro could decipher with some kind of dongle.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    The BBC Micro had a port for a light pen. There was a small rubber sucker attachment that you could stick to a TV screen, with the light pen attached. The BBC (tv station) had a programme (probably MicroLive) that would overlay a flashing block on a small section of the screen. The light pen would read that flashing and you'd have a small program. Here's someone talking about it: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnaught_davis_obituary/#c_2111046 http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnau... The BBC (and Sinclair, and possibly Amstrad) did a lot to make computing accessible. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065
lholden 11y ago
Having grown up with tapes... I just don't understand the appeal. After obtaining one of the early cdrom based boomboxes for the first time, I was perfectly happy to replace my tapes with cd. Sure, there was zero buffering and even the slightest bump caused a skip... But the sound was great! But hey, why not. :)
WalterBright 11y ago
I am glad to be done with cassette tapes. I never liked the hissiness, and the rewinding. I'm tired of car stereos eating the tapes. I'm sick of the 5 tapes in my car that got listened to over and over. My boxes of tapes went in the garbage 10 years ago. My current car stereo I bought for $75 has only a USB port, and I stuck a 32G thumb drive in it with gawd knows how many tunes are on it. Mucho better. I enjoy inflicting disco music on anyone who dares to ride with me.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  Yeap, "Weird Al" Yankovic and all gathered dust after CDs became readily available. I had a $400 Sony Walkman CD player (circa 1986) and a 1981 (!) German impression of The Doors - The Doors album (dull orange silkscreen printing) with the aluminum reflector material extending all the way to the edge of the disc.
- to3m 11y ago
  Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :) I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo switches sides, and the music goes off. It's 2015, and cassette tape technology is still causing me problems. I can hardly believe it. Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. We've already had people wanting CRTs back. I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?
  - byuu 11y ago
    > Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P > I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV? CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies so much warmer!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
Htsthbjig 11y ago
I make arrowheads for my DIY bow from bottle glass and stone because I want to know how it was like hunting thousands of years ago. I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. I actually lived casettes and HATE them. I sold all my collection, burned the piece of furniture that held it in a night of San Juan fire. Great memories (the fire and the party on the beach, it became useful after all). Now with just Garageband and audacity I could do 100 times more that I could do with cassetes and hold thousands of times more recordings and songs without the nonsense analog noise in my pocket. I couldn't help when I read PR like this to think that someone else needs to find "a bigger sucker" in order to get rid of their cassete junk in their parent's garage or something and make a profit out of it. In 2015 CDs sell for as much as $15? Wow, it is not like people could connect to youtube, download any song of the world with youtuve-dl with better quality that cassete could ever dream about. And better talk about even more outdated tech like vinyl without talking about itunes or dozens of music web sites and social networks as alternatives for "music lovers" so the article does not sound as the piece of PR it is.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. Oh, cassette tapes are great for people with kids! Unlike CDs or vinyl, you can hand over the collection with only limited risk of damage, as they are substantially scratchproof and unbreakable even when used as ballistic projectiles or impromptu teething devices. Durable medium! (Occasionally one will have its guts ripped out, though. Nothing's foolproof.)
  - mhd 11y ago
    But even then it's usually not strong enough to e.g. serve as a strangulation device a younger brother might employ on a older, yet not much bigger one. Or so I've heard.
- nnbvv 11y ago
  > I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. That's quite a condescending and misinformed attitude. Tape recordings have never gone away in certain music scenes, and those scenes are occupied mostly by older music listeners for whom it's a matter nostalgia or aesthetic preference. Tape hiss goes well with certain extreme styles of music, IMO.
amelius 11y ago
DJ'ing was a lot harder then.
stinos 11y ago
I would like to see MiniDisc get the same attention. Guess that'll never happen again as it was always a bit niche while tape was as mainstream as it can get. Ok it's digital and somewhat more expensive but apart from that it imo is very similar (easy to record, share, portable) yet has much advantages over tape (noise, portables last way longer, medium does not lose signal under normal circumstances, less mechanical parts, higher density in same form factor)
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  >easy to record, share This was actually one thing leading to minidisc's demise. The DRM doesn't allow you to extract your recordings digitally. They fixed this eventually, but it was too late and flash memory had already taken over.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Crazy thing is that if you could get your hands on a pro market minidisc deck, you could extract all you liked. I think another thing sunk it, write speed. To write to Magnet-Optical media, you first use a laser to heat the surface until it becomes magnetic. Then you zero the bit using a readwrite head much like on a HDD or floppy. Then you set it to the zero or one you want to actually be. All this back and forth means that MO can't really keep up with HDD or flash.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  I often wonder how things would have been if Sony had released MD as simple storage medium. It got out in 1992! Imagine having rewritable hundreds of megabytes at the time.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.
chiph 11y ago
The attraction to mix-tapes for me was the artwork. They had this "college band" vibe to them, where someone had cut out art from a magazine, or maybe drew something in pen & ink, then used transfer letters to put a title on it, and ran it through a photocopier until it had a street grunge to it, and looked like something you didn't want your parents to know you had.
jhallenworld 11y ago
Reel to reel at 7 ips was quite good. I remember my dad's Akai player from the 50s even supported quadraphonic. Too bad this isn't catching on..
- ams6110 11y ago
  There used to be some specialty cassette decks that would record 4 track audio on a cassette (it used the full width of the tape rendering it one-sided). Used often for demos, or low-budget studio work, etc.
pjc50 11y ago
People are clearly choosing tape for the same reason as vinyl: a desire for embodiment of the music. With digital music, no one piece is more present than any other. Everything is equally close, and therefore equally emotionally distant.
kwhitefoot 11y ago
1980s? Philips cassettes were widespread long before the 1980s. The first one I had was in 1972 and it was a long way from the earliest. Philips launched the system in 1963.

41 points by balbaugh 11y ago

I thought it'd be about software tapes, but I'm not surprised - vinyl records are even older and more fragile in many ways, and yet there's still plenty of interest in them, so why not cassette tape.

cellularmitosis 11y ago
That's a bit different, though. Of the popular mediums from the last 50 years, cassette tapes are by far the worst in terms of sound quality. Particularly, the noise floor of a tape is absolutely horrible for anything but constant-volume loud recordings. Ever tried to listen to a delicate classical passage on tape? "hissssssssss...". Vinyl would fare far better. So I'm actually pretty surprised to see a revival of interest in tapes. But I get it: its not about the sound quality. Its about the physicality of the container, about the process of making mix tapes, etc... (Note: there are a lot of things you can do to drastically improve the sound quality of a tape: buy better quality tape, record at high speed, use DBX noise reduction (dynamic range compression), etc. But this article is talking about the bottom of the barrel: cheap tape which can be played in anyone's walkman).
- cgriswald 11y ago
  Cassette tapes are worst in terms of a lot of things. They lack the width and height of vinyl and CD so album art is not as cool. It is difficult and time consuming to skip a track or skip to a favorite track. And they can get "eaten" by the playback device. I think one of the main reasons cassettes caught on is that people could make mix tapes. Even after I adopted CDs, I always had cassette players and recorders around for mix tapes (until later, when recordable CDs and the computers to record them with became much cheaper). Any revival (I've literally heard of this from nowhere except the article) is probably due to the nostalgic feel combined with the ability to make mix tapes.

andretti1977 11y ago

Maybe OT, but i remember the "power of tape" when i was 10 in 1987, when an italian public radio broadcasted a full videogame (compressed by "turbo loader") every day and it was possible to record and play it on that beautiful commodore 64!

lholden 11y ago
Okay, that sounds like it must have been pretty cool!
tommyd 11y ago
I seem to recall reading that the BBC did the same for the BBC Micro, although I can't find a reference now. Waiting half an hour for a game to load just to find the tape had got corrupted right near the end ("R Tape Loading Error" on the ZX Spectrum I grew up with) was one of the aspects I less fondly remember!
- bonaldi 11y ago
  You might be thinking of software on ceefax: they had pages in the high numbers which contained gibberish to the viewer but which could be read by a BBC Micro with teletext adapter
  - billybofh 11y ago
    They also, as I remember, used to broadcast data at the top of the picture (possibly just about off-screen) during 'The Computer Programme' or one of its follow-ups, that a BBC Micro could decipher with some kind of dongle.
- DanBC 11y ago
  The BBC Micro had a port for a light pen. There was a small rubber sucker attachment that you could stick to a TV screen, with the light pen attached. The BBC (tv station) had a programme (probably MicroLive) that would overlay a flashing block on a small section of the screen. The light pen would read that flashing and you'd have a small program. Here's someone talking about it: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnaught_davis_obituary/#c_2111046 http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnau... The BBC (and Sinclair, and possibly Amstrad) did a lot to make computing accessible. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065

lholden 11y ago

Having grown up with tapes... I just don't understand the appeal. After obtaining one of the early cdrom based boomboxes for the first time, I was perfectly happy to replace my tapes with cd. Sure, there was zero buffering and even the slightest bump caused a skip... But the sound was great! But hey, why not. :)

WalterBright 11y ago

I am glad to be done with cassette tapes. I never liked the hissiness, and the rewinding. I'm tired of car stereos eating the tapes. I'm sick of the 5 tapes in my car that got listened to over and over. My boxes of tapes went in the garbage 10 years ago. My current car stereo I bought for $75 has only a USB port, and I stuck a 32G thumb drive in it with gawd knows how many tunes are on it. Mucho better. I enjoy inflicting disco music on anyone who dares to ride with me.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bmir-alum-007 11y ago
Yeap, "Weird Al" Yankovic and all gathered dust after CDs became readily available. I had a $400 Sony Walkman CD player (circa 1986) and a 1981 (!) German impression of The Doors - The Doors album (dull orange silkscreen printing) with the aluminum reflector material extending all the way to the edge of the disc.
to3m 11y ago
Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :) I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo switches sides, and the music goes off. It's 2015, and cassette tape technology is still causing me problems. I can hardly believe it. Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. We've already had people wanting CRTs back. I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?
- byuu 11y ago
  > Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it. Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P > I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV? CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies so much warmer!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

Htsthbjig 11y ago

I make arrowheads for my DIY bow from bottle glass and stone because I want to know how it was like hunting thousands of years ago. I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. I actually lived casettes and HATE them. I sold all my collection, burned the piece of furniture that held it in a night of San Juan fire. Great memories (the fire and the party on the beach, it became useful after all). Now with just Garageband and audacity I could do 100 times more that I could do with cassetes and hold thousands of times more recordings and songs without the nonsense analog noise in my pocket. I couldn't help when I read PR like this to think that someone else needs to find "a bigger sucker" in order to get rid of their cassete junk in their parent's garage or something and make a profit out of it. In 2015 CDs sell for as much as $15? Wow, it is not like people could connect to youtube, download any song of the world with youtuve-dl with better quality that cassete could ever dream about. And better talk about even more outdated tech like vinyl without talking about itunes or dozens of music web sites and social networks as alternatives for "music lovers" so the article does not sound as the piece of PR it is.

fennecfoxen 11y ago
> I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. Oh, cassette tapes are great for people with kids! Unlike CDs or vinyl, you can hand over the collection with only limited risk of damage, as they are substantially scratchproof and unbreakable even when used as ballistic projectiles or impromptu teething devices. Durable medium! (Occasionally one will have its guts ripped out, though. Nothing's foolproof.)
- mhd 11y ago
  But even then it's usually not strong enough to e.g. serve as a strangulation device a younger brother might employ on a older, yet not much bigger one. Or so I've heard.
nnbvv 11y ago
> I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. That's quite a condescending and misinformed attitude. Tape recordings have never gone away in certain music scenes, and those scenes are occupied mostly by older music listeners for whom it's a matter nostalgia or aesthetic preference. Tape hiss goes well with certain extreme styles of music, IMO.

amelius 11y ago

DJ'ing was a lot harder then.

stinos 11y ago

I would like to see MiniDisc get the same attention. Guess that'll never happen again as it was always a bit niche while tape was as mainstream as it can get. Ok it's digital and somewhat more expensive but apart from that it imo is very similar (easy to record, share, portable) yet has much advantages over tape (noise, portables last way longer, medium does not lose signal under normal circumstances, less mechanical parts, higher density in same form factor)

TD-Linux 11y ago
>easy to record, share This was actually one thing leading to minidisc's demise. The DRM doesn't allow you to extract your recordings digitally. They fixed this eventually, but it was too late and flash memory had already taken over.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Crazy thing is that if you could get your hands on a pro market minidisc deck, you could extract all you liked. I think another thing sunk it, write speed. To write to Magnet-Optical media, you first use a laser to heat the surface until it becomes magnetic. Then you zero the bit using a readwrite head much like on a HDD or floppy. Then you set it to the zero or one you want to actually be. All this back and forth means that MO can't really keep up with HDD or flash.
agumonkey 11y ago
I often wonder how things would have been if Sony had released MD as simple storage medium. It got out in 1992! Imagine having rewritable hundreds of megabytes at the time.
- pjc50 11y ago
  They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.

chiph 11y ago

The attraction to mix-tapes for me was the artwork. They had this "college band" vibe to them, where someone had cut out art from a magazine, or maybe drew something in pen & ink, then used transfer letters to put a title on it, and ran it through a photocopier until it had a street grunge to it, and looked like something you didn't want your parents to know you had.

jhallenworld 11y ago

Reel to reel at 7 ips was quite good. I remember my dad's Akai player from the 50s even supported quadraphonic. Too bad this isn't catching on..

ams6110 11y ago
There used to be some specialty cassette decks that would record 4 track audio on a cassette (it used the full width of the tape rendering it one-sided). Used often for demos, or low-budget studio work, etc.

pjc50 11y ago

People are clearly choosing tape for the same reason as vinyl: a desire for embodiment of the music. With digital music, no one piece is more present than any other. Everything is equally close, and therefore equally emotionally distant.

kwhitefoot 11y ago

1980s? Philips cassettes were widespread long before the 1980s. The first one I had was in 1972 and it was a long way from the earliest. Philips launched the system in 1963.