Cassettes were also the first and last audio storage medium where mainstream consumers could purchase an affordable, ready-made appliance for home listening that could also act as an audio editing system, recording the result onto another cassette. This is what enabled mixtapes.
With formats that came later, CD-recording remained expensive until personal computers were becoming widespread, and while CDs could be ripped or mp3s could be remixed on computers, you needed software that was often commercial and rarely included.
Digital audio then de-emphasized removable storage, re-introducing friction between exchanging music and listening to it on a portable player. Nowadays, most music exchange happens online, but the appeal of exchanging music in person endures even for generations that grew up with the Internet.
Cassettes had excellent usability for sharing: ease of duplication, ease of remixing, more rugged than vinyl, easier to hold than CDs, and maintaining its playback position at rest [1]. Couple that with authentic nostalgia, or yearning for an aesthetic and mood of times past. While the vinyl revival is centered around the deliberate experience of browsing, playback, and large-size album art, like enjoying an artisanal product made by skilled craftsmen, cassette revival celebrates the versatility of the format, its lack of restrictions, the opportunities for creativity, and its physicality on a very human scale.
How many cassettes do you own? When was the last time you gave someone a cassette? I bet it's been over a decade, because cassettes suck. The backups are made in linear time, you can only share them with someone who is physically next to you, it's a giant pain to edit cassettes at a specific point in time, mashups are impossible because you have to have very expensive analog equipment to beat match, and pitch shift is then a problem. If you want to listen to a custom playlist you have to have thought of that well in advance, and you can only have as many as you have room for bulky cassettes.
There's a reason nobody has a cassette deck anymore. It's not some conspiracy, and it's not because the kids don't understand. It's because they aren't very good.
If I recall correctly, I had a $400 HP Pavilion with a CD-RW around 2000 and used CoolEdit Pro ($20) to create fitness mixes. I used it to cross fade and beat match. CoolEdit was since bought by Adobe and is now Adobe Audition.
But if all you wanted to do was create mix CDs. While not especially cheap, parallel port CD writers were available for PCs for less than $300 by 1999 and bundled with Eazy CD Creator. This was also around the time where ISPs were giving away PCs to sign up for dial up.
The easy recordability of cassette tapes had another bonus. Both tapes and records wear out a little each time you listen to them. But you could buy a record and dub it onto a tape, then listen to the tape. If you eventually wore out the tape, you still had the original record with only one playthough on it, so you could always dub it onto another tape.
It's nice these days being able to listen to music and not simultaneously feel like you're treading a slow path to destroying the music you're hearing.
> Digital audio then de-emphasized removable storage, re-introducing friction between exchanging music and listening to it on a portable player.
And then, ubiquitous mobile internet (including to the most common portable music players) happened and re-removed that friction. DRM-free digital files are a lot simpler and lower friction to edit and share than audio-on-cassette ever was.
Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. Cassettes only sounded low-fi because most people listened to cheap tapes on cheap players with cheap speakers. Even some of the better portable players from the 1990s sounded very transparent if you attached them to a good pair of headphones or a good stereo system.
I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed. Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.
Cassettes have terrible fidelity. Dolby attenuates some of the hiss but doesn't remove it, so it's always there in the background.
The original Type I tapes have the same frequency response as an old person with hearing issues. Type II Chrome is a bit better, but the low end has a hump and rolls far short of 20Hz, and the top end is nowhere close to the ruler-flat response of a 44.1k WAV or FLAC.
You needed $$$$$$$equipment$$$$$$$ to get real hifi out of cassettes. The only brand that really solved the hifi problem was Nakamichi. The engineering on their high-end decks was legendary, but so was the price - the Dragon would be around $6500 in 2019 dollars.
But... the terrible fidelity makes the sound more interactive. I started listening on cassettes, and when I moved up to a more revealing mid-fi vinyl system I was surprised to find that sometimes I liked the music less.
With cassettes, I could interpolate and imagine details I wanted to be there. When I moved up to hearing the details that really were there, I didn't always enjoy them as much.
> I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well.
Not sure what you mean by 'transparency'. Either way, go back and look at an 8k scan of 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'The Sound of Music'. The image quality is robust and resolves everything perfectly.
Even an '80s title captured on 35mm that is scanned properly will hold up against something shot on an Arri Alexa today. The 'blurry' reputation comes only from the subsequent formats like broadcast television and VHS that people caught a lot of these titles on.
Dolby isn't licensing their NR tech anymore, so "new" cassette players sound hideous. AND there is only one company making the mechanical movements, and they're not very good quality.
I found this out when I was trying to archive some books on tape and had to resort to buying 20-year-old decks, as opposed to new electronics which I naively assumed would be better. There are some decks with something equivalent to dolby B which I believe was a 9db roll-off.
My friend has an old cassette boom box hooked up in his garage to nice speakers and plays The Cure and old Industrial music from cassette tapes and it honestly feels like the music was written for that specific medium.
> With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording.
When I was in my 20s, I could easily hear the difference between cassettes and vinyl on the same stereo. The cassettes had an annoying SSSSSS and the crispness of the notes was mushed over. The 12" vinyl singles sounded even better, especially the "promotional" ones.
Now that I'm older, I no longer hear the difference and so it doesn't matter to me.
You should watch Top Gun again. The Blu-Ray version is good, and parts of it were definitely cleaned up (eg the title cards), but there are plenty of film scratches and grainy moments throughout the film.
Personally i enjoy listening to vinyls becaule of the whole "ceremony" browse the albums, pull one, take it out of the sleeve, clean it, put it on the turntable, lower the tonearm and listen to the small imperfections until the music starts. Its like cooking vs ordering food.
It used to be that when you visited someone’s place, you’d see their collection of books, or music, or movies, or games sitting on a shelf and it was a low-friction way to find something in common to talk about. Now that everyone’s collections are digital, it’s all “out of sight, out of mind” and nothing has really replaced that function.
Or pulling a cork out of a wine bottle vs opening one with a screw top. The screw top is superior in every way in terms of its ability to protect the wine from spoiling, but people still prefer corks because of the romance of the de-corking ceremony.
Amen. One underinvestigated aspect of streaming is "people" (and I'm talking about my kids here) don't know what they are listening to, it's super easy for them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost.
On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.
I enjoy the same things but with CDs. CDs are gonna come back big time as they offer all the conveniences of quality and the ritualistic aspects of vinyl records.
Ya, it's a ritual. The other thing I like about Vinyl is that you have to actually listen to the music. Well, you don't have to, but if you're going to all that trouble it's likely because you want to actually listen to the music -- I mean, listening to the music is the activity that you're doing. With spotify, I usually flip it on to fill the background while I do something else. That's not true for vinyl (for me). Spotify is for hearing music, vinyl is for listening to music.
Agreed so many times over. Music on the radio, or from the computer/ipod and most of my CD listening is background music. Putting on a record is a ritual, a conscious choice to sit in front of the stereo and listen intentionally.
CDs do sort of straddle the boundary between background and intentional listening. I own music that I treasure on CDs that I don't own on vinyl. While it's more convenient than records, I sometimes put it on with the intention of focusing on the music.
What's interesting is that a few recordings work better on CD than LP for me. I came to love the Allman Brothers Band in University[0], and Mountain Jam spans two sides of a Eat a Peach on LP[1], requiring an interruption to change the record and hear the whole thing. On CD, it flows seamlessly.
[0] I got into them backwards from most people. Blues Part II by Blood Sweat and Tears got me into longer-form rock, and I found Mountain Jam by searching for mp3 files over 10 or 15MB on the school's network. I have since bought perhaps half a dozen albums I'd have never discovered otherwise.
[1] The Eat a Peach version is the definitive version. The July 5th version from Live at the Altlanta International Pop Festival remains my favorite, but I digress.
I found vinyl a bit annoying in college--but that was probably because as the only person at my end of the hallway who didn't smoke marijuana I kept getting asked by people to handle operate their turntables when they wanted to listen to music while high.
Cassettes can be operated by even the most baked person with little risk of damage to the cassette or the tape deck.
Yes, couldn't agree more, the whole experience of manually browsing and playing records physically is something else. I also find that visiting record stores is great for discovery, at least in my case. One reason probably is that when browsing online I get lost in a sea of options and waste more time. Not saying its better but its a fresh change.
My son has gotten into cassettes. From what I've observed, a lot of it is "the thrill is in the pursuit." He rides his bike across town to the used record shop, where he meets his friends, browses through bins of cassettes (and vinyl records), brings them home to play. All of that effort and expectation before he can hear if it's any good. All for a buck. He's brought home everything from classical to hip-hop.
> an attachment not just to a record, but to a specific record, which hiccups in a specific place and has a specific rip on its sleeve
My first rock album was a CD copy of Nevermind, which I found in a roadside ditch while walking home from school one day. It was so scratched up and many tracks were damaged or not playable. I listened to that broken CD for years. Opened my eyes to a whole world beyond the country I was raised with.
The thing is, at least according to Techmoan's videos, no one makes good cassette decks any more. They are all made at the same factory as cheaply as possible with bad motors and no noise reduction at all. So unless people are using old equipment the sound they are getting out of their cassettes is really terrible.
I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to kickstart a high end cassette deck
As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, the place to start such a high-end cassette deck effort is with the late 70s Nakamichi 550. It is a true standout. Kind of like the Porsche 911: a bad idea raised to the level of perfection.
It's indeed compression, but not the mp3 / ogg / whatever compression.
It's the dynamic range compression [1] that makes everything louder, makes everything "pop" more, so there are no nuances left. This is, of course, a mixing / mastering step. But vinyl records of 60s-80s applied it much less than the CD records of 90s-2010s. Those who produce vinyls now still follow the tradition, and the customers expect it.
Maybe the article author is confusing data compression with dynamics compression [0]. The latter is a real problem with the terrible "loudness war" [1] going on for a long time, with many audio pieces (dynamics-)compressed to death. And in that regard, many albums are indeed better on vinyl: not because the format is better than modern digital formats... but because the vinyl version is often mastered separately, with much less dynamic compression than the digital versions. It's really sad that one has to buy the worse format to get the better mastering...
A mainstream master, intended for an ordinary consumer, is created with low dynamic range to sound "loud", which is perceived as "better". Also, mastering engineer knows that most of listeners will listen to this on a very shitty speakers and adjusts frequency balance accordingly.
However, when you do a separate vinyl master, you can safely assume that your audience will not compare this version to others on youtube or radio, and that they will have better equipment - so you relax the compression settings, switch off L2 maximizer and allow the track to breathe a little.
The second album I ever bought was Fragile by Yes. There was a deep scratch in the first song on the second side, deep enough to cause skipping and jumping.
Even on the CD version of that album, I still "hear" the scratch. The unscratched perfect version sounds wrong. Can't get it out of my mind.
The fact that it’s digital, and not analog, means it’s (more) lossy in comparison to the original sound source. It’s not so much the compressed part, but the digital part. If it’s digital, it’s approximating points on the sound waves with “steps” (looks more like stairs than a smooth wave) and missing the nuance between those steps, where as analog, in this case vinyl, is a closer representation of the actual, continuous sound waves.
> The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice.
In fact, musicians used these things for recording demo tapes, well into the 1980's, using equipment like the Tascam Portastudio (a four-track recorder using both directions of the tape at the same time).
I get it, but I still prefer CDs because the sound quality is better, I can losslessly rip them, and they don't break. It's a little frustrating to me when the only physical version of an album is a cassette tape.
I grew up with cassettes, and random access (lack thereof) was always the big drawback for me. Even vinyl, their predecessor, gave you that. With tapes you're shuttling the tape for a seeming eternity, then going forward & back by trial and error, to find the beginning of a specific song. The technology is better for listening in order. Hence mixtapes.
Footnote: from hearing certain songs in the same order many times, like on my best & most-played tapes, I eventually grew to expect the next song upon hearing the previous one end. So even though I quickly and enthusiastically abandoned the technology of cassettes, I did recreate some of those mixes as digital playlists.
One even reads nice things about the way cassettes sound, like in this Medium post from Aubrey Norwood: “The sound tape gives is warm. Saturated. It promotes a degree of imperfection, and creates an underflow of infamous tape hiss that leaves the format feeling nakedly honest, which is gold dust for the sincere-inclined musician.”
I hope this kind of sickly-sweet format necrophilia gains further ascendancy, making it easier to offload some of the defunct media on the bay to unsuspecting users; who want to justify this kind of 'authentic' experience.
My cassette recordings of the John Peel show from the late 70s and 80s are priceless. Most of the tracks are on Youtube these days but that can't capture the selections and John Peel's legendary commentary between each track. I hope to pass them on to my grandchild one day.
I recently found a cassette of recordings of bedtime stories that my dad made with me over 30 years ago. I played it back on a ~15 year old very cheap “stereo”. The quality was excellent.
Cassettes were extremely popular in their heyday which means there are still quite a bit of them laying around, along with the hardware to play and record on them. It’s a very inexpensive medium, which is also why DIY musicians never completely abandoned the format. Add to that millennials driving around cars from the ‘90s and you get the mini resurgence you see now, with labels like Burger Records being defined by the format.
[+] [-] niftich|6 years ago|reply
With formats that came later, CD-recording remained expensive until personal computers were becoming widespread, and while CDs could be ripped or mp3s could be remixed on computers, you needed software that was often commercial and rarely included.
Digital audio then de-emphasized removable storage, re-introducing friction between exchanging music and listening to it on a portable player. Nowadays, most music exchange happens online, but the appeal of exchanging music in person endures even for generations that grew up with the Internet.
Cassettes had excellent usability for sharing: ease of duplication, ease of remixing, more rugged than vinyl, easier to hold than CDs, and maintaining its playback position at rest [1]. Couple that with authentic nostalgia, or yearning for an aesthetic and mood of times past. While the vinyl revival is centered around the deliberate experience of browsing, playback, and large-size album art, like enjoying an artisanal product made by skilled craftsmen, cassette revival celebrates the versatility of the format, its lack of restrictions, the opportunities for creativity, and its physicality on a very human scale.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20332150
[+] [-] Godel_unicode|6 years ago|reply
There's a reason nobody has a cassette deck anymore. It's not some conspiracy, and it's not because the kids don't understand. It's because they aren't very good.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
But if all you wanted to do was create mix CDs. While not especially cheap, parallel port CD writers were available for PCs for less than $300 by 1999 and bundled with Eazy CD Creator. This was also around the time where ISPs were giving away PCs to sign up for dial up.
[+] [-] Nition|6 years ago|reply
It's nice these days being able to listen to music and not simultaneously feel like you're treading a slow path to destroying the music you're hearing.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|6 years ago|reply
And then, ubiquitous mobile internet (including to the most common portable music players) happened and re-removed that friction. DRM-free digital files are a lot simpler and lower friction to edit and share than audio-on-cassette ever was.
[+] [-] OrgNet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThJ|6 years ago|reply
I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed. Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|6 years ago|reply
The original Type I tapes have the same frequency response as an old person with hearing issues. Type II Chrome is a bit better, but the low end has a hump and rolls far short of 20Hz, and the top end is nowhere close to the ruler-flat response of a 44.1k WAV or FLAC.
You needed $$$$$$$equipment$$$$$$$ to get real hifi out of cassettes. The only brand that really solved the hifi problem was Nakamichi. The engineering on their high-end decks was legendary, but so was the price - the Dragon would be around $6500 in 2019 dollars.
But... the terrible fidelity makes the sound more interactive. I started listening on cassettes, and when I moved up to a more revealing mid-fi vinyl system I was surprised to find that sometimes I liked the music less.
With cassettes, I could interpolate and imagine details I wanted to be there. When I moved up to hearing the details that really were there, I didn't always enjoy them as much.
[+] [-] l33tbro|6 years ago|reply
Not sure what you mean by 'transparency'. Either way, go back and look at an 8k scan of 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'The Sound of Music'. The image quality is robust and resolves everything perfectly.
Even an '80s title captured on 35mm that is scanned properly will hold up against something shot on an Arri Alexa today. The 'blurry' reputation comes only from the subsequent formats like broadcast television and VHS that people caught a lot of these titles on.
[+] [-] oceanghost|6 years ago|reply
I found this out when I was trying to archive some books on tape and had to resort to buying 20-year-old decks, as opposed to new electronics which I naively assumed would be better. There are some decks with something equivalent to dolby B which I believe was a 9db roll-off.
[+] [-] pssflops|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
When I was in my 20s, I could easily hear the difference between cassettes and vinyl on the same stereo. The cassettes had an annoying SSSSSS and the crispness of the notes was mushed over. The 12" vinyl singles sounded even better, especially the "promotional" ones.
Now that I'm older, I no longer hear the difference and so it doesn't matter to me.
[+] [-] kalleboo|6 years ago|reply
"Cassettes - better than you don't remember" https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA
[+] [-] btgeekboy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuralRiot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kd5bjo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|6 years ago|reply
Or pulling a cork out of a wine bottle vs opening one with a screw top. The screw top is superior in every way in terms of its ability to protect the wine from spoiling, but people still prefer corks because of the romance of the de-corking ceremony.
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.
[+] [-] spectramax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonestamp2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mauvehaus|6 years ago|reply
CDs do sort of straddle the boundary between background and intentional listening. I own music that I treasure on CDs that I don't own on vinyl. While it's more convenient than records, I sometimes put it on with the intention of focusing on the music.
What's interesting is that a few recordings work better on CD than LP for me. I came to love the Allman Brothers Band in University[0], and Mountain Jam spans two sides of a Eat a Peach on LP[1], requiring an interruption to change the record and hear the whole thing. On CD, it flows seamlessly.
[0] I got into them backwards from most people. Blues Part II by Blood Sweat and Tears got me into longer-form rock, and I found Mountain Jam by searching for mp3 files over 10 or 15MB on the school's network. I have since bought perhaps half a dozen albums I'd have never discovered otherwise.
[1] The Eat a Peach version is the definitive version. The July 5th version from Live at the Altlanta International Pop Festival remains my favorite, but I digress.
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
Cassettes can be operated by even the most baked person with little risk of damage to the cassette or the tape deck.
[+] [-] pacomerh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notathing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris5745|6 years ago|reply
My first rock album was a CD copy of Nevermind, which I found in a roadside ditch while walking home from school one day. It was so scratched up and many tracks were damaged or not playable. I listened to that broken CD for years. Opened my eyes to a whole world beyond the country I was raised with.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|6 years ago|reply
I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to kickstart a high end cassette deck
[+] [-] Wistar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
?? Compression doesn’t mean lossy. Nuanced, does that mean introduction of sound artifacts due to the mechanical nature of the medium?
[+] [-] nine_k|6 years ago|reply
It's the dynamic range compression [1] that makes everything louder, makes everything "pop" more, so there are no nuances left. This is, of course, a mixing / mastering step. But vinyl records of 60s-80s applied it much less than the CD records of 90s-2010s. Those who produce vinyls now still follow the tradition, and the customers expect it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Musi...
[+] [-] starsinspace|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
[+] [-] golergka|6 years ago|reply
A mainstream master, intended for an ordinary consumer, is created with low dynamic range to sound "loud", which is perceived as "better". Also, mastering engineer knows that most of listeners will listen to this on a very shitty speakers and adjusts frequency balance accordingly.
However, when you do a separate vinyl master, you can safely assume that your audience will not compare this version to others on youtube or radio, and that they will have better equipment - so you relax the compression settings, switch off L2 maximizer and allow the track to breathe a little.
[+] [-] jdsully|6 years ago|reply
Thus different frequencies have intentionally different noise floors.
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
Even on the CD version of that album, I still "hear" the scratch. The unscratched perfect version sounds wrong. Can't get it out of my mind.
[+] [-] nvrspyx|6 years ago|reply
At least, that’s how I understand it.
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
In fact, musicians used these things for recording demo tapes, well into the 1980's, using equipment like the Tascam Portastudio (a four-track recorder using both directions of the tape at the same time).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio
Check out some of the notable users, like Bruce Springsteen and Weird Al Yankovic.
[+] [-] whenchamenia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drngdds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wistar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tech2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|6 years ago|reply
Footnote: from hearing certain songs in the same order many times, like on my best & most-played tapes, I eventually grew to expect the next song upon hearing the previous one end. So even though I quickly and enthusiastically abandoned the technology of cassettes, I did recreate some of those mixes as digital playlists.
[+] [-] p1esk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnycab|6 years ago|reply
I hope this kind of sickly-sweet format necrophilia gains further ascendancy, making it easier to offload some of the defunct media on the bay to unsuspecting users; who want to justify this kind of 'authentic' experience.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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