Dust Off Your Tape Players...Cassettes Are Coming Back..

http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/music-news-reviews/article22245705.html

Hmm..Cassettes are fetching good money these days and so are cassette players...I have tons of cassettes and 3 nice players (2 boomboxes and a component)...I have been taping some of my vinyl lately..

I can understand the allure of vinyl, but cassettes?  Blech.  Why go back?

No thanks, .I'll stick with CD's and Vinyl.

I like to tape my vinyl..then I can listen to it anywhere and get that vinyl sound which I like way better than digital... so anyone have some good cassettes they dont want?

About 3 years ago a childhood friend came to town for a visit. He brought some old cassettes we made as kids. Quite silly and very funny stuff we recorded back then. But he wanted to give them to me because I have a tape deck hooked to the computer and I was able to digitize the tapes -- good thing too, because these tapes are from around 1981-82. When I rewound them, several broke. Luckily tapes from back then were held together by screws (like the kind in eye glasses). So I took them apart and spliced the tape back together. Took a LONG time but I had spliced tape many times before (I used to work at a radio station and spent many hours in the production studio over the years splicing analog tape). 

So I was able to take his tapes and make them into mp3's for him and myself. He has since passed away so I cherish them more. It's funny because when I made the digital files for him he said "no one in the ENTIRE WORLD would understand these tapes except you & me". Now that he has passed it it just me... Some of them are prank calls we recorded. 

But like Hardkore, I'll stick with CD's and vinyl. No 8 tracks or cassettes for me!

Here's one of the cassette I had to fix:

The 2 best things about cassettes were:

1.  Making your own recordings (as referenced in the above post).
2.  They fit in your pocket quite nicely.

Xid wrote:

The 2 best things about cassettes were:

1.  Making your own recordings (as referenced in the above post).
2.  They fit in your pocket quite nicely.

Yep. I used to tape off the radio for hours on end.. Commercials and all, still have some of them at my dad's. I need to get them and convert them to mp3 and share with the DJ's that are on the tapes, I am sure they would enjoy to hear themselves from 25 years ago.

Give me CD or MP3.  I don't want to go backwards in sound with cassettes and vinyl just makes no sense at all with the extra storage space it takes just to house them.  The crackle of the needle on the actual record is horrible, too.

Despite the article I seriously doubt we will see any serious resurgence in cassette tape sales.  I could be proven wrong though, 10 years ago I never would have believed a limited vinyl comeback.

alldatndensum wrote:

Give me CD or MP3.  I don't want to go backwards in sound with cassettes and vinyl just makes no sense at all with the extra storage space it takes just to house them.  The crackle of the needle on the actual record is horrible, too.

Well taken care of.vinyl is quiet and doesn't pop and crack! I have records that do pop but the ones I bought new are well taken care of and are quiet.

I agree..new stuff and well taken care of vinyl sounds great..i have heard some cd's that sounded horrible... As for space..us collectors have no problem finding it..i have a music room full of shelves stacked with music and books.. I will say finding good used cassettes is difficult..most of the old stuff is worn out...

I live in a small house.  Storage is a major problem for me.  I'd have to buy a bigger house to store records if I owned them.  I have never heard a record that didn't have some pop and hiss to it right out of the sealed wrapper.  The turning of the record generates a small amount of static electricity that the needle will pick up even if the record is purely dust free and scratchless.  That's just the nature of the setup.  Besides, you can't carry a record with you in the car.  If you could, you could never hit any bumps or your needle would skip.

Sorry, folks, but that medium is definitely overrated by even the most diehard collector to me.

alldatndensum wrote:

I live in a small house.  Storage is a major problem for me.  I'd have to buy a bigger house to store records if I owned them.  I have never heard a record that didn't have some pop and hiss to it right out of the sealed wrapper.  The turning of the record generates a small amount of static electricity that the needle will pick up even if the record is purely dust free and scratchless.  That's just the nature of the setup.  Besides, you can't carry a record with you in the car.  If you could, you could never hit any bumps or your needle would skip.

Sorry, folks, but that medium is definitely overrated by even the most diehard collector to me.

I disagree (not with the space issue, that I understand all too well). I have a method for static that seems to work pretty well. My nephew, who also buys only vinyl, has a zero-stat gun. Removes any static electricity from vinyl. 



My method is a little more primitive. If I have a record that has a static charge I place a dryer sheet inside the album jacket (but not in contact with the vinyl). I leave it in there for a day and BAM! Static GONE! You can also put them under the platter mat. I thought if they remove the static out of the dryer why not records? Believe me it work and not only that your records will smell spring fresh! 

Records have NO hiss. Tapes hiss, not records. CD's can hiss too if taken from an analog tape. Records do not suffer from over compression or loudness problems like modern CD's. Lately CD's are so compressed to get all 80 minutes filled up and the loudness is "turned up". The one vinyl record I have that is questionable is Queen's "News Of The World" from Hollywood Records. It sounds fine and plays quiet, however it has that compressed sound. Come to find out Hollywood took the CD master and transferred it to vinyl. This is considered a "no-no" because it would have been best to use the analog tapes. Here is a sample of my Deliverance vinyl and there is no hiss, no pops, nothing but music. The occasional background noise or clicks you hear isn't from the vinyl it is from me moving around. I hooked up the usb and plugged straight into recorder but it also picked up background sounds. 

While I had world class equipment back in the day, I'd never go back to cassettes. Or vinyl for that matter.

I love vinyl. Always have since I was a wee lad. I love the large artwork and the nostalgia of everything about a good old record.
CDs are great for all the obvious reasons.
Mp3s are cool for mass storage and shuffling, though as the older I get, the more I can hear differences in quality.

Cassettes are and have always been trash. Even on "chrome" the sound is hissy and sometimes a bit muffled. Worse part is, it's inevitable that one day your player will get hungry - there's no repairing the sound after that. I used to be meticulous and clean my deck and car player often, and still a tape would get eaten and forever have that crinkled sound at that point. Always hated that !

About a year ago, I was at the Record Alley (last local original music shop about 45 min from me) - they had a huge box of cassettes with huge named titles -for free ! Even though there was everything from Boston, clapton, Hendrix, VH, Springsteen and about 200 more.... no one took any. I went about a month later and they were still there ! 

Moral? You can't GIVE away tapes anymore.

Guilty/Forgiven wrote:

Moral? You can't GIVE away tapes anymore.

Not true!  I gave some to BearDad.

Xid wrote:

Guilty/Forgiven wrote:

Moral? You can't GIVE away tapes anymore.

Not true!  I gave some to BearDad.

Even less true, since G/F himself gave me some of his tapes!

(btw, I'm always welcoming of tapes… they cost next to nothing! )

No kidding - I'll take tapes.

I still have all my old cassettes, I've kept them in good shape and they still sound decent.

I recently put out my tapes and played some demo's on my tape deck.

Btw there is a whole scene for black metal tapes. The more obscure the better.

Actually, I recently discovered a band out of Nashville and they only release new music on cassette and vinyl! No CD's and no digital files other than a few single tracks. Obviously they aren't in it for the money.

MikeInFla wrote:

Actually, I recently discovered a band out of Nashville and they only release new music on cassette and vinyl! No CD's and no digital files other than a few single tracks. Obviously they aren't in it for the money.

Not in it to grow a fan base either.

Metallica re-issued their demo tape on cassette on recordstore day in april. I believe there will be a cd-reissue later this year. But i think it's kinda cool to re-issue demo tapes on real cassettes. More bands should do that.