Audio cassettes are produced again

Thierry

Tape with a passion
When I worked in a big chain music store in the early 1990's, cassettes were strictly for the people who couldn't afford CD's. Cassette tape was the bottom of the barrel for audio reproduction, for reasons that seem to have been completely forgotten. I love watching people having to relearn things, especially the hard way.
 
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I think it’s great, and it fills a gap right now. A friends nephew is into cassettes which he plays on a boom box. It seems the music he likes isn’t getting pressed on vinyl, so they record it on cassettes and sell them to fans.

I’ve recently gotten back into cassettes. I have a gorgeous Teac Z-7000 and a really nice Aiwa M700B. I’m really enjoying making my own mixed tapes again.

Thanks for the info Thierry!
 
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cassettes can be spliced together in case of breakage by most people .. i have never found anyone that can successfully splice a cracked cd .
back to the topic i have recently seen new cassettes on sale in the large tescos
 
My daughter has been buying tapes for quite a while now. I thing she has over 100. It seems they are "mix" tapes, from what I hear. I'll have to look to see.
 
When I worked in a big chain music store in the early 1990's, cassettes were strictly for the people who couldn't afford CD's. Cassette tape was the bottom of the barrel for audio reproduction, for reasons that seem to have been completely forgotten. I love watching people having to relearn things, especially the hard way.

I'm not the biggest fan of cassettes, but some of the CDs in the 90's were terrible. Besides, this news is about blank tape, not pre-recorded stuff (which often sucked). I'll take a cassette on this new RTM media properly recorded on a good Nakamichi 3-head deck over a big-chain sold pre-recorded CD any day. Having recorded open reel on SM900, I guarantee it would hardly be "bottom of the barrel". Then again I'm old and forgetful, but I'm also thankful to RTM for producing this media once again.
 
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BTW, today is CassetteTapeDay at participating stores. My brother's record store was listed on the internet as a vendor, he said no way, they had 5 tape guys show up.
 
I was happy to switch from cassettes to cd.

Still have a deck and a few tapes but rarely use them.
 
There are other tape companies that have been creating tapes. There were a number of indie bands that released new albums on tapes, over the last couple years.
 
BTW, today is CassetteTapeDay at participating stores. My brother's record store was listed on the internet as a vendor, he said no way, they had 5 tape guys show up.

I went to a local store they listed for Cassette Store Day, and did find some of the listed releases, so I bought 2. They didn't have a big selection of CSD releases on hand, so we bought 8 older/ used releases. The wife made me buy The Original Movie Soundtrack of The Wizard of Oz..........Most new release titles were not of interest to me. BUT, it is far away from a Record Store Day event.

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I still use them, mostly in my CJ7. Restored this old Pioneer to make it happen. Have a nice “briefcase” full of cassettes under the seat.
 
I think it’s great, and it fills a gap right now. A friends nephew is into cassettes which he plays on a boom box. It seems the music he likes isn’t getting pressed on vinyl, so they record it on cassettes and sell them to fans.

I’ve recently gotten back into cassettes. I have a gorgeous Teac Z-7000 and a really nice Aiwa M700B. I’m really enjoying making my own mixed tapes again.

Thanks for the info Thierry!

Yeah it's definitely the smaller artists and groups driving it vinyl's revival was partially driven by newer bands putting out albums because they thought it was a neat thing to sell. But now so much of the limited production capacity is tied up with repressing older albums that it's harder for a small band to feasibly do plus it's pricey. On the flip side cassette is still pretty cheap to do and there's something neat about it. My girlfriend totally wants me to buy a cassette deck so that she can play around with making mix tapes. Which is a good excuse to buy a nice 3 head deck to play with. But I'm totally down for the general revival of what was essentially dead tech like vinyl and cassettes. Sure they're imperfect especially the cassette but I like that the niche exists to play with. I feel like the industry was too bent on moving on and killing everything over the years.

Edit: In the end I think it's a testament to people's love of fiddly things and minor inconvenience. While I appreciate the simplicity of streaming and modern tech I still think there's a place for knobs and switches and tactile media.
 
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it is totally cool to offer samplers/full-albums in retro technology. cassettes are probably the
easiest to self-do with that "wow" factor.
 
When I worked in a big chain music store in the early 1990's, cassettes were strictly for the people who couldn't afford CD's. Cassette tape was the bottom of the barrel for audio reproduction, for reasons that seem to have been completely forgotten. I love watching people having to relearn things, especially the hard way.
. Actually, with the right player and tape, cassette is a very viable format. It's analog so just like reel to reel or records, it can pick up quite a bit of data. They are also very durable. I've had tapes driven over and crushed by mistake and by using a donor case, I transferred the spools and recovered most of the content. The first years of cassette decks, it was considered high end. Even the portable units were very good. But, like most mass produced stuff, the more you make and the cheaper the price point, you lose quality. My first CDRs I made were 3 dollars a piece for media.. X1 media.. circa 1996 ish.. now it's a quarter or less for the media.. but the old stuff is still readable but the new stuff dies after a few years even in storage.

This is a good article the cassette and the history of it
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/Issue...ry:+the+Philips+Compact+Cassette?res=nonflash
 
I'm glad to see cassettes starting to pop back up - they were my first exposure to recorded music/audio, and audio gear as a child, and after spotting tapes for sale at some fairly recent local gigs, I decided to get back into tapes.

We never had very high end hifi gear growing up, so when I played a tape on a nice deck for the first time (and also the first tape I had listened to in probably over a decade), I was quite surprised at how good even a pre-recorded tape can sound on good gear - it has that lush analog sound I like, which was got me into vinyl beforehand.

National Audio Company is supposedly coming out with their new "Super-Ferric" Type I tape soon - I look forward to being a guinea pig for them once they're available.
 
main thing i remember is we were given cassettes and the industry DAT i suppose it had to be that way at the time .
 
Cassettes have been big in the underground since forever. Big downside is I have not seen any lately that are Chrome, all seem to be normal bias. S/N is usually crappy lately.
 
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