[touron]

[Brucester]

Remember that Maxell poster?

[boot up]

I threw away boxes full of cassettes a few years back. Remember "bleed through"? Sound ghosting through due to the layers of tape bleeding through residual magnetism in storage?

[contour5]

I have several cartons of old mix tapes. I spent about ten years reducing more than 4000 blues albums down to about 200 tapes. Then another ten years mixing 3000 reggae albums down to a couple hundred more tapes. Then the punk and the rockabilly and the lounge jazz and the weird stuff. Finally sold off the last of the vinyl about 15 years ago, except for a couple boxes of jazz 78s. The tapes still play fine, and rotate in and out of my car, which also features a broken CD player. Lost about 200,000 mp3s in a disastrous multiple drive failure a few years ago. After a brief period of anguish, I just switched over to listening to music on YouTube. Some of my tapes are 30 years old and still work perfectly. As long as you avoid dust, direct sunlight, prolonged exposure to high heat and moisture, they hold up fine. Avoid 120 minute blanks...60s and 90s are far more durable.

[Bedivere]

Hard to believe that tapes are actually cheaper to produce in quantity than CDs nowadays given that CDs get cranked out by the millions still but tape production is a niche thing.

[whitebark]

Cassettes are trendy again? I guess the next fad will be Edison-style wax cylinders! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder

[boot up]

[tigermn]

Heck now everything is digital. I still usually buy the CD but also download or rip the MP3 and just use that in my iPhone... Amazon gives you both. I can't imagine anything going back to cassettes. It would have to be transferred to something usable anyway. I'm surely not going to put a cassette player in my car.. lol...

[More Cowbell]

I still have my Sony Professional Recording Walkman. Works great and made many audition tapes for myself and students. Now I have to use Garage Band which works much better for sound and editing but isn't nearly as portable.

[contour5]

I actually prefer analogue audio in terms of sound quality. Analogue just sounds warmer and fuller; with more "live" presence, when compared to the cold lifeless vacuum of digital sound. Vinyl had a wider bandwidth than most of the current digital formats, which use all sorts of compression that tend to deaden the sound. Digital has sharp, tinny highs and a FLAT bass response that hits a brick wall around 20khz. Analogue recordings sound more real, with a huge, punchy bottom end that MP3s will never have, and most CDs are incapable of reproducing. Ripping vinyl to tape (when done properly) produces sound quality which far exceeds that found in any bitrate mp3s and nearly all CDs. A good metal or chrome tape on a medium to high end tape deck with proper calibration and bias mode will wipe the floor compared to anything digital has to offer. Of course cassettes can't compare to an overclocked reel-to-reel running 1 inch tape at 45 inches per second through a good pair of studio-grade monitors. Besides, in the end, it's all just noise that we use to distract ourselves from our own thoughts. Give me the whispering breeze, birdsong or the sound of a rushing creek any day.

[tigermn]

Not a lot of debate that analog sounds better, but it sure isn't as convenient. Now all I have to have is my phone and I can have 10,000+ songs locally on my phone at my fingertips, even more if you account for streaming services.

[boot up]

[mike]

A friend of mine finally has enough $$$ to afford those $20k speakers + kit. Problem is he only has 5k ears anymore.

[Brucester]

You skate or ski, if so you might want these for your Sony Sports Walkman: DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) 20 bucks for 4.

[MtnGoat]

I'm still making and using mix tapes. They can be abused a little more knocking around in the rig and no one wants to steal them or the tape deck. Pioneer still makes pretty decent auto reverse car decks, available at Crutchfields for $100. I find that the compressed dynamic range compared to digital is an advantage on the road. With CD's in, if it's loud enough to hear the faint bits over road noise, the loud bits are too loud, and vice versa. This problem is much less evident with cassettes. Plus, there's an entire universe of songs out there on youtube, in stereo. They didn't plan on some knuckledragger feeding audio out... into a nice Nakamichi cassette deck.