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Can you think of a cheaper, more cost effective medium?
CD-Rs. You can get quality CD-Rs now for like 20p each, and probably pay a lot less for if you don’t care about them delaminating in six months’ time. How much are new blank cassettes going for? First hit I got on Google was over a quid each.
Hell, you can get USB pendrives for like £2 these days, probably a lot less if you bulk buy.
People give them away as promo items at conferences.
Covers 2 just of the things I suggested. Just because they aren't for you, doesn't mean they're redundant.
I'll see what a musician I know says.
I'm sticking to my minidisks for when they come back in fashion. could be a while.
It was ridiculously good. And that demonstrated to me how very capable magnetic tape is as a medium for audio. Very high fidelity.
There comes a point beyond which the source doesn't matter. You can store computer data on magnetic tape and that has to be a 1:1 reproduction of the original. And as soon as the process is digital then copying becomes reading and writing and a 15th generation copy will be as good as the original.
The same is true, if more subjective, of reproduction. You might prefer a little more bass or treble than someone else but sooner or later (and as we get older this tends towards "sooner") the bottleneck for sound fidelity is your ears. All the £200 mains cables in the world ain't gonna help you with that one.
But yeah. Reel-to-reel machines were much better than cassettes for the fairly self-evident reasons you suggest. You could get ones that fed tape faster than your mate's even - full tilt was 30"/sec and all other speeds were fractions of that. They're a bit harder to stick in your pocket though.
Why would anyone want to go back to Cassette?
..because no other musical medium can reproduce the buttock clenching panic of a car tape deck chewing up your favourite album whilst you're hooning down a country lane at night?
Covers just of the things I suggested. Just because they aren’t for you, doesn’t mean they’re redundant.
They're redundant for all practical purposes outside of the hypothetical fringe novelty application you've just made up.
I’ll see what a musician I know says.
Let us know how what he says.
We called it the “tape loop” so the tradition was probably established before CD-Rs were a thing. It was pretty cool.
I still think having someone send you a music mix on any physical thing is cool,tape,CD,pendrive,it's all good.Doesn't even matter (as Darthpunk says) if you love it or not,just the fact that someone has made the effort to set up a playlist to share ,then mail it to you.:-)
Yep love cassette, that all my car plays! 🙂
And there were a lot of crap cassettes, personal stereos and midi Hi-Fis about in the 80s. Maybe that’s why the reputation was so poor?
Indeed. The quantum leap forward with CD was to remove the dependence on quantities of precision analogue electronics stuff to make the sound good. The audio part of the electronics was reduced to a DAC, which in the scheme of things is a pretty cheap component. The playback mechanism didn't need 'tuning' or compensating or cleaning, at least to anything near the level of a tape. Yes it was pricey to begin with but as ever mechanisms came down in price.
And yes, there was a lot of cheap and awful tape gear around. Two words - ghetto blaster.
Yep love cassette, that all my car plays! 🙂
Heh.
To put that into context, I was going to a gig a couple of years ago and thought "I'll listen to one of their CDs on the drive over." Got into the car and was astonished to find that there wasn't a CD player. Astonishment number 2 shortly followed when I realised that I'd had the car for a year and had never noticed.
It'd play from USB, SD card, Bluetooth, a cornucopia of Android Auto apps, probably a bunch of other trickery, but CDs are seemingly now considered obsolete.
Two words – ghetto blaster.
Two words: Saisho, Matsui.
A very talented musician, who I bought a few tapes off (via Bandcamp) fairly recently, says:
"..it's the need for a solid medium that isn't CD, and which also allows for creative packaging and generally making an interesting object.
The fact that they sound good and force you to listen in a linear fashion is also a bonus..
It was a nice project for me to work on as it allows for creativity and can be homegrown/diy"
Three words BINATONE ghetto blaster.
When I was about seven, I thought my sister's Bush* would benefit from a few drops of 3-in ONE on the capstan. It didn't.
*s****
There's something a bit 'mission impossible' about them
By that I mean 'This tape will self-destruct' after an indeterminate number of listenings
Ill never forget my Phillip ghetto blaster chewing up my mates Blood Sugar Sex Magic as I was trying to copy it 😬
I enjoy music however it’s delivered. At work/on the train it’s streaming. At home it’s mostly vinyl.
I don’t know about participating in and revival as such, but I did buy a late 90s Pioneer tape deck a couple of years ago for £10 with loads of bells and whistles that’s worth £300 odd.
I never chucked my tapes out- been great fun putting them on. From bedroom mixtapes to dj sets from the radio and recordings of early 90s pirate radio. I’ve also got a couple of amazing Andrew Weatherall (RIP) sets from when he played at a friends club that I know nobody else has got or heard.
So for me they hold some great music/history/nostalgia but you sneery types sneer away!
A very talented musician, who I bought a few tapes off (via Bandcamp) fairly recently, says:
Fair enough, if it worked as him as a (one-off?) project then great. I stand by what I said though, it's still a novelty item. He's selling cassettes because they're now a novelty item.
Actually, I've just thought of another niche market which is still using tapes. Retro gaming. People are still buying, selling and collecting cassettes, and new games are occasionally being released on tape even.
A novelty item that contains some great music that you can't get anywhere else. And in buying that item I've supported someone who makes new music that I love. So yeah, it should be assigned to history as a novelty. Cool for those who don't give a **** about new music or the musicians making it.
Jeez chill out, other formats are available.
I'm sure they could explore more [s]pretentious ****[/s] innovative concepts with Laser Disc or HD-DVD.
I play in a Manchester based hardcore band. We have put stuff out on cassette. Why? Cos the kids these days demand it. Is it a fad? Certainly. But the public gets what the public wants.
Blinkin heck,just searched for Sharp GF-555....£100!!,only took mine to the tip last year (broken aerial ,tapes running slow).
I used to take it all over the place,great at parties with extra speakers wired in 🙂
At least the Digital Compact Cassette won't make a comeback as it never really arrived.
I still have a mini system in the garage with cassette, minidisc & CD, only really ever gets used for Mini-discs
@fasthaggis - bet it only needed new belts. Aerial could've been sorted. Bit late now though!
Some of those old ghetto blasters can fetch a few quid.
I bought a few bits at a local auction a couple of years ago including a monster Hitachi ‘D5500m’ tape deck from 1979, that they only made 100 of. A solid piece of engineering that weighed over 15kg. What I didn’t realise was it was missing the remote which had the play/stop buttons on it. I chucked it on eBay for spares/repairs as I couldn’t operate it and a German enthusiast bought it for over £500. There’s one on there for £2k at the moment.
Madness I know: you could buy a set of wheels for that..
I still have some mixtapes made by friends and ex-girlfriends. Setting them up on Spotify isn't quite the same experience.
@fasthaggis – bet it only needed new belts. Aerial could’ve been sorted. Bit late now though!
Aye Derek, probably would have been an easy fix, but I had already moved my old tape deck out to the shed (where the last of the tapes live)and I can't remember the last time I listened to any radio on AM or FM,so out it went.
It was an impressive bit of kit back in the day.
I play in a Manchester based hardcore band. We have put stuff out on cassette. Why? Cos the kids these days demand it. Is it a fad? Certainly. But the public gets what the public wants.
I think I've seen you play (with Sikkapillu) and have a couple of your cassettes. Are Dave Duck and Neurotic Myke in your band?
In here maybe...?
👍 good tape display 🙂
Yes. CDs are my favoured medium. Cassette tape for stuff that isn’t, never was, or never will be on CD. Digital files for having a listen before you buy CDs. No interest in vinyl records anymore, but cassettes, yes.
This is exactly me. Although perhaps I’m a little more obsessed with CD not only as a medium but for the engineering, mathematics and science behind it. Ive read too many books on the subject. I love that people love vinyl. It just doesn’t light my laser.
I'm all for embracing whatever medium you choose. The music is far more important than the listener straining to hear the differences in the different mediums available. Let's face it, it's really not as important as a lot of you think. I appreciate a certain level of quality of course, but let's not ruin it with format wars...