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Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

As far as I remember, the only advantages tapes had were the fact that you could record to them yourself (making copies, or recording radio sources), and you could play them in a car. The sound quality wasn't better than vinyl, it was just more flexible and portable. But if you're not making your own recordings or playing them in your car, what's the point in bringing them back?

The vinyl revival make a lot more sense. Of course, the biggest pop star in the world selling a few hundred cassettes may not constitute a 'come back' either.

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Portability (also walkmen and boomboxes, not just car stereos), recording (copies, mixtapes, radio recordings), durability & price.

You could loan someone a tape without worrying about scratches. You could make your own mixtape, which became a romantic trope and let people take creative part.

Cassettes were usually cheaper than vinyl or CDs. Also, you could record your own tapes. I have tapes of me talking as a toddler. You could record a lecture or interview. There's a reason people still say "album" and "demo tape." Tapes could be produced in 1s and 10s. Vinyl presses had big minimum runs. So.. underground music happened on cassette tapes.

I would flip it. Vinyl's only advantage was sound quality (assuming the needle was sharp and the record unscratched). Cassetes had every other advantage.

There's a reason they were so popular well into the cd age.

OP said all that:

> Portability (also walkmen and boomboxes, not just car stereos), recording (copies, mixtapes, radio recordings), durability & price.

And the question remains:

> what's the point in bringing them back?

Ah.. well the point is obviously not that they're objectively better. They're a collectible souvenir.

Cassette tapes also lost that advantage around 2000, when CD-Rs became cheap — cheaper than tapes ever were.

Some friends in unknown bands produced ~100 CD-Rs of their music and left them lying around bars and nightclubs. That cost £20 and a lot of time spent swapping CDs at the computer.

True. But I've always found cds awful from a UX point of view. Delicate, needed to be kept in their box and handled with care to avoid fingerprints. And it was sometimes tricky to get them out of their boxes, maybe with one hand while driving. While I used to have tapes scattered around the car, just push a button, eject it and throw it anywhere, pick another, push it in. Perfect format.

Back then, yes, there's a reason they were so popular. But nowadays? What do they bring?

Novelty.

It's so old it's new.

>Portability (also walkmen and boomboxes, not just car stereos), recording (copies, mixtapes, radio recordings), durability & price. You could loan someone a tape without worrying about scratches.

>You could make your own mixtape, which became a romantic trope and let people take creative part.

Whilst I agree, that in absence of any real alternatives, the Compact Cassette had these features/qualities that made them very convenient and ubiquitous. However, it was an inferior medium as they were a pain to look after i.e. if you left them near unshielded speakers or in the car on hot days or try and avoid having the player chew it up, then spend hours trying to spool it back with a pencil, splicing the tape etc. There was also the Zen of Cassette Player Maintenance with the 'head-cleaning' routine..

If I had to bring back a format, it would be the MiniDisc (versus the superior DAT), not only for the nostalgic element but also for it's sheer versatility and durability.

This might sound small but it was a big deal to me: it starts exactly where you left it.

Yes, quality aside, the "stateful-ness" of tape is very useful. Using VHS is quicker to pick a show back up where you left off than DVD.

The SD Card full of MP3s in my van always starts back at the first alphabetical song in the first alphabetical folder every time you turn on the car, or switch to radio and back. It's infuriating.

That's just a reminder of how utterly awful OEM headunits are in vehicles. This was NEVER a problem for the $20 8gb MP3 player you could pick up in the walmart checkout aisle

Some people put a silent track called "A" on their media to make this less annoying.

It's a Quality of Implementation issue.

The tape does this because it was mechanically simpler. But in other systems, where it may not be, this is still what you want. So, a good Implementation should do it anyway.

Portable minidisc players _could_ have been made slightly cheaper by removing the solid state storage, then they would have skipped if jogged like old portable CD players (and unlike a portable tape player). But all the official ones had solid state and so the experience for the end user was that they "didn't skip" even though of course in reality a spinning disc can't achieve that, the solid state storage hides it from you for long enough. Good Implementation. CD players copied this technology eventually as RAM got cheaper.

This is the same for TV channel up/down on most digital TVs. It's very slow. Why? Well, mechanically changing channel is more complicated, and so by default it will be slow. But that's not really _why_ the real answer is that consumers prefer a cheaper TV that has poor Quality of Implementation and so those have won. Vendors could spend $5 extra on the BOM (duplicate tuner and decoder circuitry following adjacent channels) and a few hours engineering to make it nice and fast, but why bother when customers won't pay a dime extra?

For small indie artists, cassette tapes make perfect sense. Releasing digitally is of course the easiest way these days but artists usually want a physical artifact as well. It's easier to sell a tape than a download and it's nice to be able to touch your achievement. Vinyl pressing is insanely expensive in comparison and usually requires much larger batches to be produced

But.. why not CDs?

Maybe because of the misconception that CD is a compressed digital format like mp3?

Cuz it's not. CDs use the same sound encoding method as vinyl, just stored in variable reflectiveness instead of variable height. The "files" you see when you pop one in your computer is an abstraction generated by the operating system, they're not really there, there's not any digital data after the table of contents.

Well, no, CDs are definitively digital, hence the format being called CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio). Everything is encoded as binary, not variable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details

But still, that hardly makes cassettes better sounding.

That's not true. CDs store discrete data and vinyls continous data. However, it is true that CDs can store formats of higher quality than mp3s that cause no sound degradation.

I think the point I was trying to make was that tape is something different than digital. You can download high fidelity files as well and if you buy a CD you'll probably end up importing the files anyway.

With that said, cassettes are definitely not a hifi option and I'm quite sure it's genre dependent as well.

There was this thing called Digital Audio Tapes, for what it’s worth. Never got much consumer traction though, eventually repurposed for digital data storage, DDS.

And there was also DCC, the Digital Compact Cassette.

DAT, of course, saw reasonable success in the recording industry for transferring 2-track digital lossless audio to and fro studios and such before CD burners were commonly available. DCC saw very little, if any, success anywhere :)

Of course, you are completely wrong as other posters have pointed out -- CD is indeed a fully digital format (but it does not have a filesystem, just a continous stream of binary data with a TOC section near the beginning of the disc to tell the CD player about the timecode location of the tracks)

I thought it would be worth mentioning that you may be confusing CD with Laserdisc, the video format. Those look a lot like huge CD's but are in fact analog and work more like what you describe.

Because everyone sells CDs. On tape you have a distinct feeling.

The weirdest album I've seen for sale at a show was a Sega Saturn (or maybe it was a Megadrive) cartridge.

It would have been a Megadrive cart then, because the Saturn used... you guessed it, CD's ;)

Because CDs are boring?

Isn't burning CDs just as easy as making tapes, if not easier? It's also better sound quality and you'd have a larger audience of people who have a CD player lying around than people who have cassette players.

At least, I imagine anyone who has a cassette player also has a CD player while many people who have CD players don't have a cassette player.

Also walkmans and other cassette players did not spy on you!

Don't forget the Walkman, you could put a device in your pocket and listen to music using headphones while out walking or even running.

Cassettes seem very durable compared to CDs and vinyl.

> Of course, the biggest pop star in the world selling a few hundred cassettes may not constitute a 'come back' either.

I saw that figure of 540 cassettes in one week, and it reminded me of the article "How Many Copies Of An Album Do You Need To Sell To Hit #1 On The Australian ARIA Chart" [1]. TLDR: Ed Sheeran got to #1 with just 3777 album sales across digital & CD.

[1] https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/how-many-copies-...

I think it was 2004 when Hillsong topped the AU chart with a worship album for the first time. It turns out having a conference with ~10,000 people who are all inclined to buy your new CD lets you top the album chart for a week.

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