The return of cassettes

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rbrumble@reddit

Like many xers, I bought albums and recorded them onto cassette for use in my car. If I close my eyes I can see the soft green glow from my Alpine deck, it never ate a tape all the years I owned it.

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bluealien78@reddit

Recent cassette collector here! Specifically, my OCD is hooking into completing the entire set of the UK editions of “Now That’s What I Call Music”. I’m up to Now 23.

I gotta say, amidst all the great music we had, that was a non-zero amount of absolute shite. 😅😅

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elcad@reddit

Long time cassette collector here. Never knew the "Now" albums came out on cassette. Maybe they weren't released in the US, but I have 9 from 4 to 69, plus a "Then" and a "Now #1s" on CD.

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bluealien78@reddit

Double cassettes! Also the UK editions were completely different track listings, release cadences, and release years than the US equivalents.

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Not really the same, but if you have a cassette recorder with aux-in jacks you can get torrents of the entire 122 volume collection very easily. I am in the US, so I have the whole 90 volume USA version.

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bluealien78@reddit

Yah, I've also built lots of them as playlists in Apple Music. For me, though, the cassette collection seems be more about my sentiments of having the original cases, original artwork, liner notes etc.

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moopet@reddit

I buy new stuff on cassette from artists on Bandcamp sometimes. They're often hand-made, quirky things and you get the digital download as well anyway. It's fun. If you're going to go the physical "own it" media route, it's somehow more personal (not to mention affordable) than vinyl. As for CDs, I'll only buy them if the album isn't available any other way.

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timwtingle@reddit

We only had cassettes because 8-track was worse and playing records on the go was not going to work. They fucking sucked.

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Blue_Henri@reddit

Totally agree. This is just dumb.

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Oh_No_Its_Dudder@reddit

Cassettes have the advantage of fitting easily into an empty 5.56mm ammo bandolier, each one holding 7 cassettes. Military grade cassette storage.

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kevbayer@reddit

That is just about the nerdiest thing I've ever heard. I am here for it and approve!! (I am a self-confessed nerd)

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narcissistssuck@reddit

VHS is back, too. I am not kidding.

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friartech@reddit

I believe that as soon as I get rid of some old crap - the world starts collecting that “retro” that was taking up storage in my closet for so many thankless years.

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BrilliantAd4857@reddit

Won't 30 year old cassettes just sound awful from age alone?

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GilligansWorld@reddit

They are making them again - either way they sound horrible but I’m not a big fan of vinyl either so…..

A lot of people tell me it sounds so warm and what not but you’re just listening to distortion. Some people like that personally I like to hear the music the way it was laid down so I like CDs.

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Milo_Minderbinding@reddit

And the fact that they are cassettes.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

If they're blank, depends what they were recorded on. Blank or pre-recorded, it depends on what they're played on and how they were stored.

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BrilliantAd4857@reddit

Stored? Don't you just pull them out and drop them in the center console?

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ChoakIsland@reddit

I would tape hours of pirate radio broadcasts. Never bought any commercial music on them tho.

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Plenty_Cress_1359@reddit

Get your pencil ready!

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T_Noctambulist@reddit

Bic crystal pens were better.

Fight me.

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eefreeland@reddit

The ultimate cassette fix it kit: pencil, scissors, tape

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Stare_Decisis@reddit

My late father had an eight track player in his old Cadillac. To play it, you had to jam the large hardcover book sized tape into the receiver and hope the devices internal mechanism could compensate for the car's vibration.

I think my first cassette that I purchased was the Ghostbusters sound track.

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OriginalMcSmashie@reddit

Who you gonna call???

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mwithington@reddit

I don't know why cassettes have made a comeback. To me, their only upside was being able to play on a Walkman where you could move around or dance. Now we have ipods, mp3s, streaming, etc. for that.

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KalistoCA@reddit

The movement back to physical media is a bit about services removing content and it is no longer available

You see it a lot in video streaming I dunno about music

I did just cancel my steaming services for music for a 200 cd changer and loaded up all my cds and hit shuffle

I really only listen to music at home so this tracks up for me

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imzadi111@reddit

Only 200 CDs? 😄

I look at boxes and boxes of them now and only see wasted money.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

I was lucky enough to glom a lot of mine off my college radio station. Still though, I miss the closet space.

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ruet_ahead@reddit

If you're lucky, your tinnitus will be in the same range as the tape hiss.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

Nature's own Dolby.

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IamTheMan85@reddit

Cassettes were your lease favorite? You must have missed 8-tracks.

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Build68@reddit

I still have my high end denon with Dolby b, c, and dbx. Time to see if the old girl still runs.

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brumac44@reddit

Cassettes were great because for the first time you could record what you wanted, in the order you wanted. But they weren't too durable.

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Ok-Rock2345@reddit

Yes, but I think people now are collecting pre-recorded cassets. This boglesnthe imagination because the sound quality is crap and they don't have sleeves or artwork like an LP.

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savedbytheblood72@reddit

It's been going on for a decade or so

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aluke000@reddit

The folks that had good equipment and took care of it enjoyed cassettes for what they offered and the unique ways that people used them. This was generally in the minority however, as most other folks that had lower quality equipment and/or more importantly didn't clean or take care of their equipment tend to be the ones who had bad experiences (e.g. tapes getting stuck/eaten, poor recordings, etc)

I was one of the former with nice Nakamichi gear at home and nice Alpine gear in the car, and took good care of them. I used good quality type II tapes from TDK, Maxell and Denon. Never had one of my own recordings fail or have a problem, and with Dolby S towards the end of the era, had some very good sounding recordings.

But it is a bygone era now, more of a niche for younger gens that grew up with listening to music on a phone with no tangible physical media and are just now discovering and enjoying the tactile-ness of records and tapes. Unfortunately most are going to buy cheap gear and not clean them, and follow the same cycle of disillusionment with tape when they eventually when their neglected tapes fail too.

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vodeodeo55@reddit

And for me cassettes were quasi-disposable. I recorded my albums onto trashy Memorex DBS tapes with my trashy "high speed dubbing" enabled boombox. The sound quality was atrocious but my vinyl stayed pristine and if I left my copy of "Shout at the Devil" in a field after getting blackout drunk I could just make a new one.

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aluke000@reddit

Yeah same. My live recording were echoes, but I would also buy new records, clean them, then record to tape for listening on the go. As a matter of fact some of my old records from that era may have only been played a couple of times and then stored, then CDs replaced the tapes years later.

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thebiglerm@reddit

If you had a loud stereo back then you had to have a tape player because cds would skip.

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bb9116@reddit

I've been playing CDs at ear-splitting volumes for forty years and this has never happened to me.

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thebiglerm@reddit

Sorry I meant to say car stereo my fault

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borkborkbork99@reddit

Cassettes can go the way of the dodo and 8-tracks as far as I care.

I still have a sleeve of CDs in the car, and a couple shelves’ worth of vinyl at home, but let’s be honest - nothing compares to the ease of streaming or an iPod filled with MP3s.

But let the youngsters discover the experience of playing cassettes and vinyl. There’s no harm in it.

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jk_pens@reddit

Cassettes look cool. They are nostalgic. And for over 20 years they were the only option for portable music of your choosing.

Having said that, a while back I needed to play some old cassettes and found out that they do in fact degrade over time and it is (or was?) very hard to find a working tape player. Just too many mechanical and electrical components that go bad over time.

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TheDude4269@reddit

Cassettes are awful. Vinyl is not great either, but at least you get a nice big piece of artwork that looks cool.

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jk_pens@reddit

“Vinyl is not great” … guess who is going to be hunted down by a mob of angry Xennials with mustaches!

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AdditionalTip865@reddit

My daughter got into cassette collecting in a big way, and got a vintage Walkman to play them on. She likes going to vintage record stores and picking up old cassettes of Bowie and Fleetwood Mac and Elton John. I tell her that cassettes were the MP3 of their day: a format that was dominant not for quality, but for convenience and the ability to rip and mix music. But my own music collection in the 80s was all cassettes, so to some extent I get it.

I think they're attracted to the idea of an easily portable format that is still a tactile thing you can collect and own. And that also attracted us. Today, the lower sound quality and the physical glitches just give it some retro charm.

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MhojoRisin@reddit

Same with my daughter. She’s walking around campus listening to early 80s punk on her Walkman. She’s cooler than I ever was.

There’s a site called Tapehead City that sells cassettes. I bought a stack of tapes from there as a Christmas present for her.

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CountHonorius@reddit

Thanks for the info. I'll be heading toward Tapehead City.

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MhojoRisin@reddit

I never listened to any of the tapes personally, so I can't speak to the quality. But, they shipped the orders promptly and she never complained.

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blindside1@reddit

And my 2000 Tundra still has a tape deck!!!

I am retro cool!

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Danktizzle@reddit

I just grabbed my old kenwood tape deck from my moms a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t used it since the 90’s and it’s prolly been in a closet for at least a decade.

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Serious_Blood6554@reddit

I saw the trend happening, so I’ve spent the last couple of months unloading my extensive cassette collection on ebay and various facebook collector groups. I can’t believe what these Gen Zers are paying for 30 and 40 year old cassette tapes. I was getting $5-$20 each and sold several rarities for well over $50 each. One even went for $80! For a tape! I don’t get it, but thanks! I guess they actually were worth holding on to!

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Lopsided_Tomatillo27@reddit

Tapes were love/hate. They were the only way to record your own music, so they were essential. But they were fragile and wore out eventually, if they didn’t get eaten by a tape player.

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Waffuru@reddit

I've had too many cassettes chewed up by players to ever go back to that format. Also, having to rewind if you want to listen to the same side again is for the birds. Give me record or CD any day.

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Sumchap@reddit

Yes cassettes would lose some of their range after a while it seemed, and would just sound a bit dull. Then of course there was the dreaded birds nest situation that could happen while driving. You'd see cassettes with their innards spewing out on the roadside in those days...

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Big_Beach123@reddit

When it starts to sound dull, that's when you flip on the 'Mega-Bass' switch on your boom box. 🤣

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another_bibliophile@reddit

My college age kid asked for a cassette player for Xmas. Was super excited to find a box of 90s era tapes in our storage room

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Keefer1970@reddit

I don't miss cassettes at all. Terrible format.

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tunaman808@reddit

so people are into collecting cassettes now?

More like 5 years ago, but sure.

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VecchioDiM3rd1955@reddit

You can go in a hi-fi shop or online and buy a good cd player or a good turntable, cartidge and needle. You could buy now a cassette recorder, Tascam/Teac still makes a couple models, but they are low end models for the standards of the '90s and don't have Dolby NR because nobody makes the needed ICs anymore. The Teac double deck costs € 449 in a brick and mortar shop but for 400 euro you cold get an Onkyo CD player with a 6 disc loader.

Prerecorded tapes weren't of high quality, people recorded on tape from vynil or CD.

I still have a 3 head cassette recorder but I'm more inclined to buy CD or vynil than cassettes, except if I find some very interesting stuff.

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phalanxausage@reddit

Underground bands have been putting out special cassette releases for 10 or 15 years now. It's an easy way to tell that somebody didn't grow up with the goddamn things. I had a hard time maintaining respect for bands with a bunch of cassettes at their merch table. They are fucking terrible.

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CountHonorius@reddit

But the cassette bootlegs of live performances were pure gold, especially Stones / Zeppelin performances.

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phalanxausage@reddit

Oh yeah, if you work at it you can make a decent recording but they are terrible as a playback medium. Not to mention it's always better to listen to a mediocre recording of a fantastic performance than a fantastic recording of a mediocre performance.

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gnombient@reddit

Yeah, it's really odd. Some of those niche underground music scenes seem to consider it a real point of pride and cred for an artist to put out music on cassette (and sometimes ONLY on cassette.) I get the lo-fi aesthetic and nostalgia to a point, but at this point cassettes are terrible for everything except ease of reproduction.

I was joking with a friend recently that we need to start an obscure underground scene where the artists only do physical album releases on Minidisc.

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analogpursuits@reddit

My 1999 Toyota has a tape deck. I've been rocking The Replacements, Catherine Wheel, INXS, Peter Murphy, AC/DC, Motley Crue, The Cure, et al. since owning that thing. I'm the one buying up all the cassettes. 😎 Hell, I still have a mix tape a friend made for me in the early 90s and it gets airtime!

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ONROSREPUS@reddit

Really? I guess I haven't noticed anybody around my area looking for or inquiring about cassettes. News to me but in the Midwest we are always the last to know new fashion trends.

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Witty-Atmosphere-211@reddit

Maxell is introducing a new, Bluetooth, portable cassette player.

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brinehart-cincy@reddit

I loved tapes, especially being able to make mix tapes. (Mix tapes are my love language.)

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Olelander@reddit

Honestly I feel like CD’s are even dumber as a “collectible”. Fragile media that gets fucked up without fail if you actually use it regularly, and even if you don’t it’s digital data that degrades over time. It’s a disposable media and it makes me cringe that people are “collecting” it like they’ve found a rare vinyl LP.

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Fish-Weekly@reddit

I always bought the album on vinyl and made my own cassettes - Maxell and TDK anyone? 😁

When CDs came out, I mainly switched to those and when the iTunes Store launched, I switched to digital. I stopped there, no streaming services for me.

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CountHonorius@reddit

Maxell MX Position Metal!

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Fish-Weekly@reddit

Still have a few of those laying around, they still play great!

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Sintered_Monkey@reddit

I understand the appeal of vinyl, but I'm with ya on cassettes. That's one retro trend I don't get. Crappy sound quality, having to rewind, and when your tape got eaten, dealing with that tangled mess of brown ribbon. I'd prefer that reel to reel came back instead.

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Misterhan1@reddit

Metal cassette tapes (Type IV) by TDK or Maxell sound just as good as vinyl on high end decks like a Nakamichi. However, I do agree that mass produced albums on cassette always sounded like shit.

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Sintered_Monkey@reddit

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that the mass produced ones were recorded at a higher speed. Not sure if that's true. But I'm sure they also used the lowest grade tapes they could buy.

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Misterhan1@reddit

Yeah, they were of low quality. When you switched on the Dolby noise reduction to reduce hiss they sounded worse. No highs...no lows. Total garbage. You were better off using at least a Chrome tape to make a decent copy of an album.

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Sintered_Monkey@reddit

I just remembered that I had a dubbing tape deck. I could take a terrible quality mass produced album and then make an even worse copy of it.

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CountHonorius@reddit

Nakamichi! Those were awesome mid-80s decks. Yeah position Metal tapes by Maxell are still in great shape nearly 35 years later.

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Misterhan1@reddit

I still have my RX-505 with the mechanical auto reverse where it flips the cassette.

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potsofjam@reddit

There has been collectors for cassettes for quite a while. People collect 8-tracks too, some of the most desirable are the ones produced near the end of the life of 8-track tapes like Madonna or Prince, especially the ones you could only get if you just happen to be still be getting Columbia House music club and quads of course, because who can live without quadraphonic sound.

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CountHonorius@reddit

Columbia House reel-to-reel would be the holy grail

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DominusGenX@reddit

I rather MiniDisc return, I was a big fan

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CountHonorius@reddit

You knocked me over with a feather! MiniDiscs! Still have a few around...Billy Joel, GoGos...

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Icy-Package-7801@reddit

Clear tape and some scissors and you were back playing albeit with a gap in play. I had hundreds of albums on cassette and hated giving them up for cd's. Tapes didn't skip from rough roads and strong bass.

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Its_noon_somewhere@reddit

I’m a 1978 so cassettes were barely present by the time I had my own music, and I hated them. Only my very first portable CD player had a skipping problem, but it was a very cheap model. Once I replaced it with an anti skip discman the problem went away.

CDs skipping in cars just wasn’t something that I experienced, but I was heavily into car audio in the mid nineties when I started driving and the equipment was very expensive.

Because I’m a young genXer basically CDs were our primary media before mp3s (which were burned onto CD anyway)

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CountHonorius@reddit

CDs will always be the mainstay for me. I burn new ones a few times a month. Have never had a Spotify playlist...did have a Last.fm one, though.

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Entiox@reddit

Clear tape and some scissors and you were back

Hell yeah. In high school I got a reputation for being really good at repairing cassettes and people would routinely ask me to fix theirs.

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pocketdare@reddit

I think people just like "analog" media now and enjoy the ability to collect things.

The quality for all of these things is lower than digital. It cracks me up when some people insist that records are superior to a fully digital track.

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Pupation@reddit

The only part of cassettes that I miss is the mixtape. We used to spend hours getting a good mix together, and put movie quotes and random sounds between the tracks. Then we’d listen to them while we designed the J card. Good times.

But yeah, cassettes are lousy for sound, and they’d get eaten.

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CountHonorius@reddit

All of my homemade tapes are mixtapes -they remind me of people, places, highways...good to be able to hear them again.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

Yeah, I blame Guardians Of The Galaxy and its Awesome Mixtape for this one. I think Stranger Things reinforced the desire for Z kids to get involved since it was such an '80s thing, and now you've got them on r/cassetteculture making lo-fi music on old Portastudios.

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CountHonorius@reddit

That's good! They'll get to hear real music for a change, even if their motivation is hipsterish.

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LordsOfWestminster@reddit

Cassettes were a disposable medium and never meant to be long-lasting or sound great. But, hey, I’ll sell mine for 5-10 bucks each.

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CountHonorius@reddit

In the late '90s and early '00s I combed through thrift stores looking for old cassettes to digitize. Found some gems like The Washington Squares that way.

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liddybuckfan@reddit

My daughter's boyfriend made her a mix tape. Like an actual tape. Some of these kids love analog stuff. They're both 19 by the way.

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CountHonorius@reddit

That's beautiful! Glad to see the tradition going :)

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smallwonder25@reddit

Mine is 17 and loves mix tapes. The 90’s nostalgia is real and becoming kind of, surreal? lol

Personally, I love it.

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Cool-Sell-5310@reddit

I think we need to bring back 8 tracks. Lol

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CountHonorius@reddit

I wouldn't mind - as long as Reel to Reel returns as well lol

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CountHonorius@reddit

Bought a new cassette player a few years back to listen to my 20 and 30 year old tapes. Some of them snapped right away - especially the ones that had spent years in cars being equalized over and over. Others - the homemade ones on Maxell, BASF and TDK tape - are going strong.

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Proof_Duck9754@reddit

I took a friend to the Supreme store and they had a pack of five or six Maxell tapes for like $40. I was still producing and releasing cassettes with streaming codes in 2015. Now I have to buy blanks from a top tier fashion brand if I want to get back in the game? Cassettes were huge in the DIY scene at least before Guardians of the Galaxy revived them. I’ve been out of the scene for awhile.

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tnic73@reddit

it makes sense to me you can put whatever you want on a cassette and if you don't like it you can change it

young people love to personalize their things

cassettes were my go to up until my 20's

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Minimum_Republic_600@reddit

Out of all the physical media of our generation, cassettes were the worst. It's a magnetic media with moving parts. In addition to that, the tape has to physically contact the device to be played, which degrades it.

Vinyl has no such failure points.

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phalanxausage@reddit

The needle has to make physical contact with the record in order to play back, and this degrades the medium. Vinyl can skip, warp, & scratch, and is functionally not portable.

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Minimum_Republic_600@reddit

I will say again: the proof is in the pudding. Cassettes wear down at a much greater rate that records do.

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phalanxausage@reddit

Please don't mistake my response for a defense of cassettes. I fucking hate cassettes. They are inferior to everything but possibly wire spool or wax cylinders. I'm just saying that vinyl is also delicate and degrades with use. I believe CDs are the best medium, with lossless streaming a close second.

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claude3rd@reddit

Except i had to tiptoe around the house when mom played her Perry Como LPs or they’d skip and sometimes develop scratches when skipping.

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Minimum_Republic_600@reddit

You are conflating two things. Vibration around a playing record player could cause it to skip, but that is no enough to scratch the record.

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toocleverbyhalf@reddit

How do your records play without the needle touching the groove?

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Minimum_Republic_600@reddit

Apples and oranges.

That's a fine needle riding in a groove. With a cassette the entire face of the tape is rubbing against a head that as the ability to erase it.

And the proof is in the pudding. It was very common for a well loved cassette to have to be replaced from getting "worn out." Either from the tape wearing or from stretching.

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UrsaMajor7th@reddit

LPs>Cassettes>CDs

Cassettes were the first step in musical freedom: on the bus, in the library, delivering newspapers, walking to/from school, in the car...

Portable CDs skipped too much while moving and CDRs weren't pragmatic for me as they weren't reusable like cassettes were. Besides, I already had it on LP and cassette; I'm not buying it on CD too!

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Its_noon_somewhere@reddit

CDs>cassettes>LPs

Fixed that for you. Skipping was only a problem on cheap portable cd players. Sound quality of vinyl is horrendous, cassette is much better, CD is superior

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UrsaMajor7th@reddit

Fixed it for yourself- you should have bought better gear. Besides, open reel and Super Beta HiFi beat all of those for audio sound quality. CD sound wasn't universally "superior"- quality depended on the recording's SPARS code- DDD, ADD, or AAD.

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Its_noon_somewhere@reddit

I did buy good gear, CD players. Vinyl was my parents media (born 1948) and cassette tapes were already on decline before I was old enough to purchase (born 1978)

I owned only about a dozen cassettes and I’ve never had a vinyl record, my parents had many, and the sound was awful. Popping and clicking, grainy and imperfect. Crisp and clean digital is my preference

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Reasonable-Proof2299@reddit

My nephew has had a bluetooth record player. Didnt know cassettes were back

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heffel77@reddit

My turntable has a Bluetooth function so I can listen to it anywhere around the house but I can’t say I pine for the days of cassettes.

Especially when you have a cassette or cassette player where the speed is off and then you finally hear how it’s supposed to sound and it’s like a brand new track.

I remember getting Grateful Dead tapes where the reel to reel was running out of batteries and it sounded deep and really funky and then when I heard it at the correct speed it was like the Chipmunks,lol

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Jimmasterjam@reddit

I had two cases worth of tapes stolen from my car back in the day. I do wish I still had some but just like all my cds they’d just be stored away.

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JimTheJerseyGuy@reddit

The beginning of Say Anything as Lloyd's driving down the road and has to jam a pack of matches into the radio's cassette player to stop that exact thing from happening...

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JoshuaAncaster@reddit

It’s like the crappy quality point and shoot cameras back in popularity, if you have an old Canon PowerShot in a drawer, make some $$.

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Administrative-Bed75@reddit

Yep my 18 yo is newly obsessed with our old one she found. Trying to have a less phone focused life, she says.

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FergusonTEA1950@reddit

I would say that's not a bad thing!

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Apprehensive_Judge_5@reddit

I kept all my vinyl and since added more. I sold all my cassettes back in 1991 when I was still able to get a little bit of money for them. I don't miss cassettes one bit.

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Back_Alley420@reddit

Yah cassettes sucked and the young ones are pay big money for them . Cds and vinyl are way better

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Ok_Replacement4702@reddit

VHS and cassettes were both horrible formats, anyone bringing them back either wasn't around or has a weird nostalgia boner.

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BmanGorilla@reddit

Cassettes were certainly a big step backwards in audio quality, but people liked the convenience over records. 8-track were… whatever.

VHS worked pretty well, though, and was the only real option if you wanted to record video, so I’ll give it a pass. I’ll also admit that I miss just putting the tape in and watching the movie rather than being stuck with long loading times and unavoidable previews and nonsense on DVD/Bluray.

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RCA2CE@reddit

They are like the lowest sound quality and the tape itself doesn't last very well, I think its a fun idea but you really can't beat streaming. Spotify has lossless or something like that, you just have to plug into your car to get high quality (it clips on wireless carplay) - I like wireless carplay but im fixing to plug in and see if I can hear a difference.

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gahlol123@reddit

Ill take cassette demos of bands i like. Fingers crossed cassingles never come back though. Worst format ever.

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Mikeyjf@reddit

That's the first I've heard of it. Seems like a dumb thing to do, it's worse quality and microscopic album art. Vinyl is where it's at!

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Historical_Project86@reddit

I remember actually buying tapes and thinking they were great. I think there were even decks developed which could skip tracks automatically. I even had a couple of tapes in presentation boxes, from Factory records - I think one Joy Division and one New Order.

I'm not au fait with the technical merits (or otherwise) of tape, but it seems to me that they probably had lower fidelity than vinyl, so I only bought them because it was before I had a CD player and I only had a ghetto blaster for company.