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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

We lost a pretty awesome record label in my city at the beginning of the pandemic. They released exclusively on cassette and hosted a lot of experimental music events.

Cassettes and tape are my favourite medium right now. Nebraska was my favourite Springsteen album. The Beetles recorded on four track. It blends well with experimental/electronic music. It has become a symbol for the DIY/indie spirit in modern art.

I hope it sticks around and I hope someone finds and licenses the recipe and process to make those Maxwell Type-II’s again.

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My favorite way to listen to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is how I originally heard it via cassette. My tape was second-hand and well used by the time I got it, and often unravelled. The introduced distortion was amazing.

I've heard it said that people remember media not for it's fidelity, but for it's flaws.

I've come to appreciate over the last several years that seeming imperfections often improve a medium in ways that are difficult to quantify or to convey. For instance I've noticed it's much more comfortable for me to read eink than to read from an LCD, and I think it may be because the eink has imperfections. I think the balls don't always rotate, and it creates a subtle noise texture in the background.

It reminds me of comfort noise that's played on telephone systems.

eink doesn't use rotating balls. You're confusing eink with gyricon from Xerox. That product died ages ago.

Thank you for the correction, eink is a more diverse and interesting set of technologies than I was previously aware.

To me, Sting's / Eric Clapton's It's Probably Me always ends about 2/3 into the song. Because it was how it was recorded on the cassette I heard it for the first time from.

And ELO's Twilight will always have "twilight's gone awaAaAy" because the tape was stretched around that syllable :)

The Beatles may have recorded on 4-track very early on, but they were certainly known as a group that pushed the limits of technology in the studio.

yes, one of the many ironies here is that the groups people associate with the nostalgia for outdated recording tech would absolutely choose the new stuff if they were recording today.

I’m biased and collect and restore 4-track machines. I’m currently working on a restoration of an RCA SRT-301 mono reel-to-reel. And I absolutely do record on them.

I use digital DAWs and often “finish” songs in Ableton, but I mostly write, record and mix on a 424.

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