As someone who grew up with cassette tapes, I don’t anticipate this fad lasting too long. They were very inconvenient. With most technology I see resistance from people not wanting to move on. I don’t remember seeing that with cassettes. The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.
Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!
I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).
Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
Cassettes and their cases had a really nice size and shape, fit right in the hand. And it was cool that you could see it moving, unlike (most) cd players. Also the recording paradigm was pretty easy to grasp, just 1:1. And they kinda degraded gracefully, with sound getting weird but still playing, at least until the tape actually came out in a big catastrophic mess and we’d try to rewind it with a pencil.
My last album release made 10x more money with selling the physical cassette then with digital sales! I think people want something in their hands. And by the way, the tape sounds really good. Definitely not lo fi, the opposite actually. Overall better then the compressed Spotify release with in comparison muddy bass and less saturation.
Cassette tapes were more practical for portable devices. The last high-end Walkmans were beautifully crafted and barely bigger than the cassette inside whereas portable CD player were always bulkier if only because of the size of CDs themselves.
Minidisc tried to play in that space since minidisc players are very small.
I largely share your sentiment, I had a tape player as a kid, and the second I could get a CD player and burn my own CDs I never looked back. One thing that I don't see mentioned often is how battery-hungry these players were as well.
I think the ‘warmth’ people attribute to older media has been shown to have to do with processing.
Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).
It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
It's not like metal, dungeon synth and PE/noise artists have just now started publishing on cassette. They've done it for years and years, and you'll find a lot of them on Bandcamp, e.g. https://duckpropaganda.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-chokehold .
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
I wish somebody would make minidiscs and minidisc players. Can (optionally) replace atrac with opus. Fast transfers but 'slow playback' and more durability than cassette or CD.
eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone
Minidiscs proved that people were comfortable with lossy compression. It was to be many years before lossless audio became a thing again.
It always amused me how we were told the difference between lossless and lossy compression was undetectable to the human ear up until the big streaming services started providing lossless and even high res, at which point it was suddenly the best thing since sliced bread. However you feel about the audio, one way or another it's gaslighting.
Personally, on most music I can't tell decent quality lossy from lossless, but I listen to a lot of choral polyphony and also perform it so I have a good ear for it. When you're listening to 16 or in some cases up to 40 voices and can follow individual lines (single voices recognisable as particular people) you can hear it, and I disliked
minidisc and mp3 players for that reason. High res, though, makes no difference at all as far as I can tell.
All these suck so badly compared to the last Panasonic I had. Japanese portable cassette players were incredible pieces of engineering. They were more a wrapper around the cassette than a player that you inserted the cassette into, with elaborate mechanical designs for bi-directional playback, auto skipping, etc.
All these devices use the same exact mechanism from the last factory in the world making cassette mechanism. Of course, the last factory is not the one that was making the high quality stuff with all the noise reduction technology; the last holdout is the cheapest mechanism there ever was. It's bulky and can't even take advantage of any noise reduction tech.
A banged up old cassette player from Sony will produce higher quality sound than a brand new mechanism.
I love this site. Earlier this year I was working to revive my sister's old WM-EX170 and was able to find a service manual for it here.
It made me appreciate how these devices are like pieces of beautiful clockwork!
I only had to replace the belt so it wasn't a complicated repair. But, in comparison to the level of documentation manufacturers of any modern electronics offer today, looking at that service manual was a reminder of what we've lost.
Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.
There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.
Tbh, i loved my minidisc player, robust and shock resistant (I guess it buffered ?) rewritable media. Compared to even CD players it was ahead of the game.
I wonder why in every movie about Steve Jobs, he is somehow "inventing" the mp3 player / iPod as a better alternative to the walkman, only to find ourselves in 2025 wanting to buy a walkman and not even knowing what iPod is?
Same for vinyls and CDs btw. Maybe music is more than just a fancy animation of album arts.
Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
The problem with all of these is they use the same components because only one factory makes them any longer, they're quite bulky, and relatively low quality, for anyone interested in this you're better off getting an old used player.
I love the aesthetic of cassette tapes and players -- there's just something really satisfying about the size and tactility of putting in a cassette. Beyond that, it feels better to choose to listen to a particular album rather than putting endless playlists on shuffle.
There's definitely space for tape to persist as a medium, even if quality and longevity is lower -- not everything has to be audiophile level, and the listening experience is far more than just sound quality.
> it feels better to choose to listen to a particular album rather than putting endless playlists on shuffle.
Isn't that something you can do with streaming services as well?
I understand that many people choose to go with playlists, but it's not like the choice of listening to full albums has been taken away (yet).
Sure, the implementation is lackluster, with gaps between tracks when there shouldn't be one (really annoying on ambient/atmospheric/drone tracks), but still better than nothing.
This thread is dripping from nostalgia, in a good way.
I wonder how things are going to be in 25 or 50 years, what will today's kids look back with the same kind of devotion and nostalgia.
A lot of things are intangible/immaterial now (for non-geeks/non-hoarders, their inbox, online playlist and photos will likely be gone, they won't have any paper letters or plastic-framed holiday slide photographs or anything like that).
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. I suppose that's part of why legit Walkmans are going for so much now. I love cassettes and it would be cool to have a good portable tape player again, but it really can't compete with my phone. Unless we go back to carrying around all the individual things a phone can do. It's tempting but just not as convenient.
I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
Yeah, Walkman is a name; we don't usually pluralize individual components of a name, we just add an s or an es, or sometimes (but not always) a trailing y becomes ies. But if we did plural by components it would be Walksman. :p (Personally, I try to pluralize compound nouns this way, cause I think it's fun. Even if it's not always appropriate or correct.)
I always saw it as an unmarked plural (like sheep/fish/etc). I also find it hard to not prefix it with Sony in my head. But I would definitely use Walkmen over Walkmans if pushed.
Personally, I don’t like non-standard plurals and take the opportunity of a new word not to carry the mistake through. I prefer “mouses” as well, for the plural of a computer mouse.
We recently dug out my portable cassette player (Not as small as a walkman, takes D cell batteries) so my daughter could listen to my wife's Disney cassettes from her childhood in the early 90s. I was amazed how a 5 year old immediately figured out how to manipulate the tape player and flip over cassettes etc. I suppose it was similar for me at the same age. We even found a NOS Disney cassette on eBay that my wife didn't have.
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
wow, back in the day, well after the cassette walkman, the FM walkman was actually a BIG DEAL! they didn't even make a 2-in-1, not even an AM/FM! i loved <3 mine
Bluetooth and is nice, but it's probably a better buy to get an antique portable cassette recorder. It's really something how primitive these look in comparison to the what was on the market in the 1980s.
It’s amazing to see this. How good are the transports in these modern units? I seem to remember when cassettes died the first time, the whole ecosystem went away, from Chrome Dioxide cassettes to good quality transports, which took a long time to get right. How do these compare to a good quality unit from the 80’s and 90’s?
Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
They’re not very good. As the other comment said, they all use the same mechanism. It gets the job done, but that also means the “premium” models are rip offs. Basically lipstick on a pig, so to speak.
Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
I dunno but it seems like anemoia. Maybe a few folks want to listen to a mixtape from their teen years that's gathering dust but is likely to break than play properly.
Also, it's difficult to top the school bus yellow Walkman Sports photo from Playboy that pretty much crystalized the zeitgeist.
Buying anything like this contributes to eWaste in a really silly way, because cassette tapes are inferior to digital in quite literally every objective measure. As far as unnecessary consumption is concerned, this is more unnecessary than most of it.
Where are the modern tape decks for cars? Or something equivalent where the medium is robust enough to throw in the passenger footwell, and big enough to be safely grabbable and changeable while driving?
USB front slot with USB memory sticks? One stick per playlist/album. Different form factors so you can locate the right one without taking your eyes off the road. Possible to embed into larger enclosures if you find them to small.
(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).
yeah I still have my old Panasonic SL-SX410 from 1999 or so, barely larger than the CD itself and with included AAA rechargeable NiMH batteries - kind of special at the time and it would charge the batteries itself (no separate charging station needed). I actually still have the original batteries and they still hold a very small charge. Maybe can listen to one or two songs lol
al_borland|2 months ago
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
masklinn|2 months ago
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
jochem9|2 months ago
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
tmountain|2 months ago
https://youtu.be/_dgJ4hRHBiw?si=IpjzdgAHJ4Q9yvb5
Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.
Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!
https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA?si=db7QjRt37ENiLMFX
I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).
Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
burnto|2 months ago
Aldipower|2 months ago
mytailorisrich|2 months ago
Minidisc tried to play in that space since minidisc players are very small.
foxrider|2 months ago
port11|2 months ago
Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).
It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
cess11|2 months ago
It's not like metal, dungeon synth and PE/noise artists have just now started publishing on cassette. They've done it for years and years, and you'll find a lot of them on Bandcamp, e.g. https://duckpropaganda.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-chokehold .
4k93n2|2 months ago
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
brnt|2 months ago
keyle|2 months ago
Those were the days and gone they have.
WorldPeas|2 months ago
SirFatty|2 months ago
omnicognate|2 months ago
It always amused me how we were told the difference between lossless and lossy compression was undetectable to the human ear up until the big streaming services started providing lossless and even high res, at which point it was suddenly the best thing since sliced bread. However you feel about the audio, one way or another it's gaslighting.
Personally, on most music I can't tell decent quality lossy from lossless, but I listen to a lot of choral polyphony and also perform it so I have a good ear for it. When you're listening to 16 or in some cases up to 40 voices and can follow individual lines (single voices recognisable as particular people) you can hear it, and I disliked minidisc and mp3 players for that reason. High res, though, makes no difference at all as far as I can tell.
extrabajs|2 months ago
They were also very affordable!
jwr|2 months ago
philistine|2 months ago
A banged up old cassette player from Sony will produce higher quality sound than a brand new mechanism.
fifilura|2 months ago
https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s55
The design was amazing, Apple designs of that time. Extremely slim and I can still recollect the tactile feeling of closing the lid.
I felt like a king owning one.
socalgal2|2 months ago
arionmiles|2 months ago
It made me appreciate how these devices are like pieces of beautiful clockwork!
I only had to replace the belt so it wasn't a complicated repair. But, in comparison to the level of documentation manufacturers of any modern electronics offer today, looking at that service manual was a reminder of what we've lost.
sceptic123|2 months ago
Nursie|2 months ago
I had one of these in black - https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s30
Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.
StrangeSound|2 months ago
https://youtu.be/2DWtkSVNvTg
worthless-trash|2 months ago
isodev|2 months ago
Same for vinyls and CDs btw. Maybe music is more than just a fancy animation of album arts.
StrangeSound|2 months ago
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
jpfromlondon|2 months ago
jsmailes|2 months ago
There's definitely space for tape to persist as a medium, even if quality and longevity is lower -- not everything has to be audiophile level, and the listening experience is far more than just sound quality.
klez|2 months ago
Isn't that something you can do with streaming services as well?
I understand that many people choose to go with playlists, but it's not like the choice of listening to full albums has been taken away (yet).
Sure, the implementation is lackluster, with gaps between tracks when there shouldn't be one (really annoying on ambient/atmospheric/drone tracks), but still better than nothing.
jll29|2 months ago
I wonder how things are going to be in 25 or 50 years, what will today's kids look back with the same kind of devotion and nostalgia.
A lot of things are intangible/immaterial now (for non-geeks/non-hoarders, their inbox, online playlist and photos will likely be gone, they won't have any paper letters or plastic-framed holiday slide photographs or anything like that).
IAmBroom|2 months ago
encom|2 months ago
kylec|2 months ago
https://www.theverge.com/24295971/we-are-rewind-fiio-cassett...
mingus88|2 months ago
A review of one unit said that it didn’t honor the cutout tab so if you accidentally pressed record with any tape you would dub over your music
I shopped for a while and came to the conclusion that these are mostly kitsch.
zoklet-enjoyer|2 months ago
I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
GeekyBear|2 months ago
I can't imagine choosing a cassette walkman over an mp3 player just based on how much music fits on the device.
galleywest200|2 months ago
burnt-resistor|2 months ago
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
iberator|2 months ago
Kerrick|2 months ago
jansan|2 months ago
toast0|2 months ago
sceptic123|2 months ago
pkulak|2 months ago
mrexroad|2 months ago
changadera|2 months ago
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
fsckboy|2 months ago
https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/sony_tokyo/fm_walkm...
(i wasn't against cassette walkmans, but i was against carrying enough tapes to mimic the variety of music that they played on the radio)
thomassmith65|2 months ago
Probably of interest to people here is this article from the dawn of the Walkman: https://time.com/archive/6697378/living-a-great-way-to-snub-...
jay_kyburz|2 months ago
https://www.fiio.com/echomini
sceptic123|2 months ago
Are they talking about cassette tapes? Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don't remember that being a thing back in the day.
klez|2 months ago
TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA
nickt|2 months ago
komali2|2 months ago
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
I don't have the video saved sorry.
ares623|2 months ago
Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
112233|2 months ago
burnt-resistor|2 months ago
Also, it's difficult to top the school bus yellow Walkman Sports photo from Playboy that pretty much crystalized the zeitgeist.
eudamoniac|2 months ago
normie3000|2 months ago
47282847|2 months ago
(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).
firesteelrain|2 months ago
maratc|2 months ago
mycall|2 months ago
joombaga|2 months ago
ivolimmen|2 months ago
amatecha|2 months ago
4dregress|2 months ago
actionfromafar|2 months ago
NetMageSCW|2 months ago
cal_dent|2 months ago
LargoLasskhyfv|2 months ago
actionfromafar|2 months ago
qazswx|2 months ago
qazswx|2 months ago