Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.

And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)

If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6

Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.

Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.

Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.

And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.

The only real down sides of cassettes other then the obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!

All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.

It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:

The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.

Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.

The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.

My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.

Edit: according to gemini AI:

* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)

* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)

So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.

> There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing.

I had this conversation with someone at the weekend. It's hard to find new music on Spotify because it's too easy to find stuff you already like.

I'm in my early 50s. I grew up in the 80s, in a fairly rural part of the UK with basically one music shop nearby and the next nearest a good four hours each way on the bus.

In 1988 when I was 15, a load of awesome albums came out that I really wanted and mostly couldn't afford. I bought Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, Iron Maiden - Seventh Son, 808 State - Newbuild, and probably a couple of others. I'm sure I got into FLA and and The Pixies round about then too.

These tapes were about a tenner each and I had to repair quite a lot of Amstrad satellite receiver power supplies in my weekend job, and if I spent it all on tapes I'd have no money left for beer.

An awful lot of my tapes were pirate copies from friends, which we swapped at school. To this day I'm convinced that Appetite For Destruction was mixed to sound "right" when copied onto a battered old TDK D90 that's been rattling around in your schoolbag for a month by your mate's big brother who bought the CD because he's got a good job earning nearly £5/hr working on a fishing boat and has a really nice stereo.

The upshot of this is that I listened to a lot of things that I simply did not like very much, because it was new and I hadn't listened to it a million times. That being said, I don't think there was much I heard and thought "yeah I don't care for this at all", but there were definitely tapes I listened to that I wouldn't have picked out by myself.

I wouldn't have listened to 10,000 Maniacs if someone my dad worked with hadn't put it on in the car, and gave me his copy of the tape. I might not have listened to Dire Straits so much if another of my dad's friends hadn't given me a handful of bootlegs of their concerts and a copy of Making Movies, and one of the bigger kids in high school (hi Aaron, hope you're doing well) hadn't given me a pirate copy of Brothers in Arms.

I've since bought all of these on at least one other format.

I wouldn't have listened to Suzanne Vega I don't think, if my aunt hadn't given me a copy of her eponymous first album for Christmas when I was about 12 or 13 (it hadn't been out long in the UK), and I absolutely love Suzanne Vega. Loved her stuff from the first note of "Cracking". Have you ever listened to or watched something that you wanted to play at ten times speed just so you could put it into your head faster, then play it again at one tenth speed so you could pick up all the details?

This doesn't even touch on mixtapes, where someone else puts the effort in to curate a collection of things they think you will like, that represents who you are to them. Mixtapes were beautiful.

Now, with any luck, people will get into media they can hold in their hand. Even just things like MP3s on an SD card in some homebrew Arduino blob of a player.

There's more to music than just the noise it makes.

Also, the phrase demotape for an up and coming musician to my recollection was often with a cassette tape due to it's accessibility.

(I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)

CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.

About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.

Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.

> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.

Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.

> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:

Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.

The one frustration is that continuous FLAC playback appears to be an arcane programming challenge that only a select few developers have mastered. Especially on mobile.

And unless you set up a server the business of getting files onto and off devices is insanely perverse.

But in terms of sound quality and convenience, lossless rips win over anything else.

Going back to physical seems almost pointlessly decadent.

While it's convenient to just listen to anything with a click, the joy of the experience is gone. Purposefully pulling out an LP and setting it on the turntable, sitting on the couch to meaningfully listen while reading the album cover is a much more engaging musical experience.

Yes, I don't have time to do that much anymore either. But when possible, it is much more enjoyable.

I recall one point around 10-15 years ago, websites were simultaneously proclaiming the death of CDs because sales for the year had just dropped below 100 million, and the revival of vinyl because sales were approaching 1 million in the same timespan. Of course, the takeaway for many young people was that vinyl was outselling CDs.

I'm pretty sure these articles are planted by PR firms working for the music publishers they talk about. There are plenty of people happy to be told what's currently "cool" and they'll obediently go out and buy them.

Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)

I also don't really see the appeal of cassette tapes, personally, and the quality of digital media like CDs and even MP3 files is arguably superior.

I guess a good middle ground is one of those modern audio players that don't have smartphone functionality and take an SD card or so. FiiO I think is quite popular. Might give it a try some day.

No, but people still use candles or LEDs that resemble candles, including the flickering.

People also read paperback books. It's not always about practicality.

Waiting for the writeup about the steel wire recorder resurgence now.

"Portable" (they couldn't even fit in a pocket) CD players were the worst thing imho. Too sensitive to even small shocks, which was particularly annoying while taking longer walks, and draining batteries like crazy. I switched from cassette players to MP3 players, almost completely skipping the era of CD players. I've tried it once or twice because my sister had it, and never again.

Cassettes were good for mix tapes, but once their were CDs and MP3s I never really looked back.

> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?

It not quite the same comparison. Not sure about a kerosene lamp, however a kerosene/paraffin stove does have it uses.

You would be surprised what people are using. I spend a lot of time walking/cycling up canals and people are using wood hearths and similar to keep the boats warm in the winter. Wood is literally everywhere along the side of the canals and so it is literally free energy.

Some of the boats have solar panels, generators, full internet but quite a few of the boats only have relatively basic amenities by today's standards.

It also helps heat the shed in the winter, which is when it's mostly likely to be dark when I want to do some work in my shed.

Here's a nice resource where you can read more about kerosene lamps! https://www.sevarg.net/2022/10/09/keropunk-part-1-kerosene-l... (not my website, but great for learning about kerosene lamps)

To be fair, there really is nothing like the gentle hiss of a tilley lamp while there's a storm blowing outside.

And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.

The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck.

Actually, I don't miss that at all.

I could see dumber things happening.

Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.

You gotta love the cahones of the guy that, in the 1970's, opened a record rental store in a college town… and sold blank cassettes as well.

their ONLY redeeming quality? mix or not mix, did you ever try to record a vinyl?

It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster.

I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.

That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.

Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.

That's a big part of why they're cool.

Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.

I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.

Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.

1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.

2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.

3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.

4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.

5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.

Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.

Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos).

There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.

I remember some people, back in the late 80s (?), using VHS Hi-Fi as some kind of a poor man's reel-to-reel. Audio quality was leaps and bounds above the compact cassette from TFA.

The thing was sitting in its original carton, barely used. Between the hassle of hauling it around, and the cost of tapes, I never actually took it anywhere to record anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette

According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)

The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.

- https://bandcamp.com/ - https://us.7digital.com/ - https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents. Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).

if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.

every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone. its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh

Exactly. We need DAT Walkman back [1] [2].

[1]: https://www.dcaudiovisuel.com/product_info.php/products_id/1...

[2]: https://www.just-cassette.com/post/digital-audio-cassette-da...

I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.

https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RIAA-2024Yea...