Tape cassettes have been making a surprising (if small) comeback in recent years, with a growing number of musicians releasing albums in the format.
Sure, they don’t have the same level of sound quality as CD, vinyl, or even Hi-Fi digital streaming. They’re not as convenient as digital, since you have to manually fast forward or rewind rather than skipping tracks. And even if your tape doesn’t get tangled up at some point, there’s a good chance that the more you listen, the more you’ll wear it out, degrading the audio quality even further.
But… that’s part of the appeal for some folks, as is the analog nature of the format. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia. Anyway, people seem to be paying money for music recorded in the not-quite-obsolete format.
That doesn’t mean you have to forego modern conveniences like Bluetooth headphones though — because now you can back a crowdfunding campaign for the “World’s First Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player” in hopes of having one delivered later this year.
Tapes are comfy. I've seen them on some band's sites and they are often sold out.
Jackson Russell
Just the latest hipster/audiophile wannabe trend. Lets see which bunch of dick riding bands latch on to this one like some did with viynl.
Easton Thompson
Whoever wrote this article never listened to cassettes and probably doesn't know what saturation is or what it sounds like. Granted they said "the same as," and not "as good as," but a good rock or R&B jam on cassette can blow the shit out of a CD….
…and digital streaming is just godawful and makes me want to stab my ears out sometimes. We have better bandwidth than DSL on our phones now and streaming services are still venturing down below 128kbps.
Jack Butler
oh I forgot… that being said, fuck rewinding and tape wear or finding a player that won't eat your tapes. This technology is best left to hipsters.
Daniel Howard
Silly story that doesn't look into the facts. The reason tapes are growing is they are allowed in most prisons while CDs are not.
Cooper Gomez
MP3 players are allowed in prisons. Who the fuck is going to want a collection of cassettes in a 36 sq foot prison cell?
Asher Jackson
Yeah, why would anyone want a physical object that could later be traded as a form of alternate currency in a place where any sort of wealth is difficult to come by? I hope you never go to prison, you're too fucking stupid to survive it.
Alexander Parker
Satellite radio is allowed in some prisons and jails. TVs are allowed in all prisons. Smart cellphones are allowed in some prisons… and jails?
Austin Price
you could pull all the tape out and strangle someone and the wind it back up… Camo garot
Cameron Edwards
Even the best ones are shit compared to a CD or any lossless file format.
Wyatt Evans
Best spelling of vinyl I’ve ever seen.
Cooper Jones
So not saying your economic theory is unfounded but I know people who are and have been in prison. I work for an organization that places ex cons in jobs and housing and there ain’t nobody using tapes in there.
Kayden Lopez
See this guy has never listened to one either.
Lossless and distortion free are two very different aspects of sound. That’s why people still listen to vinyl and tape and still use tube equipment.
The kind of loss that you hear with MP3 is just horrible digital garbage. Saturation and intermod and turntable cartridge response, tho, are all forms of harmonic distortion that add to the character of music the way the wood and varnish of a well-made guitar does. But if you are listening to skrillex on your Apple headphones you’re never going to notice it so you just have to fall back on what you think the experience of listening to music should be.
People still use analog cameras for the same reason. It’s a totally different sound and it’s not better or worse. You can’t compare it. Don’t shit on what you don’t understand. Find a good quality deck and listen to a good tape. It’s not going to be easy. They’re really scarce these days and the shit they’re selling in Best Buy today is all digitally mastered and isn’t going to sound like a good cassette release from the 80s.
William Allen
Is there a line between masochism and enjoying the taste of shit, is it possible that line has been crossed here?
Nathan Morales
vinyl is not a fad you philistine pig.
Connor Ramirez
ALL tape decks manufactured today are going to be using the one mechanism which is still being manufactured… and that mechanism is a single-head one that was used in cheap shitty walkmans and boomboxes in the 80's. If you must play a cassette over bluetooth, get a dedicated, quality deck from the 70's - 90's and run it through an amp with bluetooth instead.
Angel Wood
Yeah that's basically it. If everything is digitally recorded "clean" and produced by same boring pro studios that pump out modern music, how do you ever get the black metal sound from the 90's again. Instead you just get the boring, uninspired modern music.
Jose Murphy
I basically never stopped buying vinyl and have a decent teac cassette deck. A position II chrome or IV metal tape with dolby sounds good enough and tape mashes the sound in its own way. Having said that, I don't see why should I be using tape in this millennium. The vinyl, I understand. It is a physical object, a 30 years old vinyl kept vertical and sealed will sound like new. A tape will probably exhibit demagnetization crosstalk and mechanical trouble, plus you need to align the tape head. All for getting a sound quality that is beaten by a 160kbps vorbis.
You should instead back up your old cd and dvd roms, those are rotting as we speak.
Ethan Murphy
Nice but I'd rather have had trips.
Jacob Myers
too bad hahahaha
Christian Ortiz
fail probably done by same retarded hipsters that call 3 1/2 diskettes "floppy"
while i agree on your stance on vynil, audio tapes were good, provided you weren't buying nip shit (quality of nip product was regarded with same disdain as current day chink crap) philips, in particular, were good.
Leo Brown
Ah it’s not that big of fucking deal, switch to decaf
A vinyl is like a shitty precursor to the CD. It does what a CD does but the read head is a pin instead of a laser, which somehow makes it amazing (even though a lot of modern vinyl is just digital stuff imprinted on one, and quite literally nothing more than a lower quality copy of what you'd have on a CD in the first place). If you get an old vinyl however, of an original recording, then it might be worth it for the rarity of hearing it as it "was intended" (even though that intention was nothing more than a lack of access to any better medium than vinyl).
Pure hipster-tier. Literally just a worse recording. "Pleasing" sounding distortion claims are nonsense, given that CDs have a bitrate high enough that their uncompressed audio files (which aren't MP3's) don't affect the audio in any noticeable way. The 16-bits are a limitation in theory, but in reality nobody will hear the difference between between 16, 24 or 32 bits as long as DAC output/input to amp is line level (100%), and not scaled down "digitally", which causes loss of bits and quality.
These do introduce "pleasing" distortion (subjective). It's still objectively simply a worse replication of the source, but it's like a hardware EQ. You can technically replicate a lot of it with an EQ and some effect(s), but it's easier to just get a tube.
They use these for some film productions to get a specific feel. Also, when you digitise them, you can get a pretty good resolution out of them. That's why you can have old, old movies in 1080p and whatnot, because film is a physically very dense medium. Same with images (movies/pictures are essentially the same anyway). Since film has a pretty high resolution, even though the objectives may be noticeably worse, you still get a good image with specific qualities to it.
If you do that you're either: A) Mentally retarded, and/or B) A lazy hipster
Jackson Brooks
To clarify here, it's similar to tubes in terms of adding flavour (although much less impactful), but with a tube you keep the source high quality. Cassettes are retarded because the idea there is to degrade the source itself for your desired sound, which is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching the whole thing.
The claim is "nonsense" in the context of his claim, i.e. digital MP3 distortion vs. analogue cassette distortion. CDs don't use MP3, and are such a high bitrate that it's a non-issue. In other words, it's not a choice of which distortion you like more, it's either virtually no distortion (CD/high-bitrate FLAC) or a lot of distortion, inherent to the source, and more over time (cassette).
