BeepBring Back the Burned CD— They’re a love language. And a reminder of the hope we once had.
etchinghillsideCassettes would like to have a word.
That word
Seefra 1It’s the opposite for me. I live in a place that gets fairly humid during different times of the year so cassettes don’t often make it If they were left in a car or a garage or something similar. Whereas most of the CDs that survived my teenage years still work.
By: Lorie Ransom, The Daily Drawing
I call this “road tinsel”, there used to be a lot of it strewn along highways.
rozodruimho in a weird way cassettes were better/more fun. Like wanting to record a song you like so you’d sit in front of the tape deck for hours on end listening to the radio waiting for that ONE song to come on so you could record it. It would take you hours, maybe even days, to make that mixtape of songs you didn’t own.
Also when I was a kid I had one of those fisher price tape decks that had the microphone attached to it. I wanted to make a mix tape of all my favourite songs from my NES games or games that I would rent (like the Battletoads theme song, or the music from the Batman videogame) so I would pop the game in then hold the microphone up to the TV speaker and record the songs.
Um no. Having to rewind the tape was annoying. If you had a janky player it would eat it.
Jumping across the bed to hit record when a song came on is a core memory.
Jo Miran
Cassettes are making a comeback much like vinyl but to a lesser extent. I’ve got 800 or so cassettes and probably 3/4 of them were made in the past 6 years.
Vinyl made sense because of its high fidelity. Cassettes do not make sense unless you enjoy dogshit audio quality
Can’t walk around listening to vinyl.
Well… But you’d have to really steady on the hands. Maybe some jig would work?
Incorrect. I have three NAD 6300s and a Nakamichi Dragon, and with metal tapes it’s transparent to digital. Shit even good type II nearly transparent. Tapes do not sound “dogshit”. Unlike vinyl, you can easily experiment with the many varieties of tape out there and master your own cassette recordings. It’s like rolling tubes in an analog amplifier. Yes, it’s not perfectly transparent to digital on a cheap type I tape, but the warmth of a high end type I rounds off some of the harshness of modern tracks. YMMV, it’s not for everyone, but I think it’s pretty fucking cool.
I mean reel tape kills vinyl and cassette. It surpasses or equals digital in high $$ situations.
*its mostly about the mastering
Yes, its clunky huge and expensive and has a limited catalog. But once you’ve heard one you’ll want more.
I love showing it to people who havent heard great audio.
But yeah, its so expensive. The best part tho is unlike records, tapes are very robust if you keep them in normal temperatures and away from magnets. No surface noise, and most tapes the hiss is hardly noticeable especially on anything 15 IPS.
The good part about the limited catalog is you’re going to always get super high quality from it because its so limited and expensive to do
This is a rare setup. Kind of vintage audio unicorn.
You still have a noticeable noise floor and medium limitations as equalizer, though (“warmer”).
99.999% of decks and surviving tapes do sound like dogshit.