Cassette tapes make a comeback

Cassette tapes make a comeback

Four years ago, cassette tapes were headed toward their funeral. In 2007, British tabloid The Sun declared the death of the cassette, after the announcement that a major electronics retailer in the United Kingdom would cease selling cassette tapes. In 2009, the webzine Pop Matters bid cassettes good riddance: “Some mediums are just meant to die and never experience a revival. Cassettes seem destined to fall into this category.”

Then, last year, cassettes began to rise from the dead. In the fall, NPR reported that cassettes were having a “kind of” revival, with at least 25 labels in the United States putting out new music exclusively on tape. In a lengthy essay in Pitchfork, contributor Marc Hogan detailed examples of the “broader underground resurgence” of cassettes.

So, are cassettes at death’s door or enjoying a healthy renaissance? It depends on whom you ask. Cassette culture has never waned in certain circles, specifically among noise and experimental bands. But cassettes have gradually been popping up in non-underground places. Lady Gaga probably won’t be releasing music on cassette tape anytime soon, but well-known independent bands such as Animal Collective, Deerhoof and the Mountain Goats have all put out cassettes this year.

San Francisco-based rock band Deerhoof released its 10th album, “Deerhoof vs. Evil,” on Polyvinyl — a heavy-hitter in the world of independent labels — in January on three formats: digital, vinyl and cassette. They put out 500 tapes, each retailing for $8, which included a download of the album.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cassette-tapes-make-a-comeback/2011/04/28/AFP91a8G_story.html?hpid=z2

I very happily switched completely to CDs 10 years ago.

AIN'T goin' back.

My 2002 car came with a casette player. A few weeks after I got the car I was cruising my favorite thrift shops and came across a big basket full of tapes selling for 25 cents each. Got a whole bagful - folk groups, big bands, Ferrante and Teicher, Broadway, and holiday music. Scooooooooore!

-

Cassettes have the benefit of being freely recordable and copyable, because they are analog from go. People who are of the mindset people should be able to freely play music on any compatible device, and having been bitten on the ass by DRM and other restriction technologies, may be seeing this as a sort of way of distributing their music with this principle in mind.

What could possibly be the advantage?

any kind of digital media. My ears aren't good enough to tell the difference, but evidently there are people who can.

...in the quiet passages where the CD's linear Pulse-
Coded-Modulation ("PCM") simply isn't using enough
bits to avoid "quantization noise". This got better
as engineers figured out how to use better "noise
shaping" but it's still a problem that can't
be completely mitigated.

This is *NOT* a problem with newer encoding schemes
such as 24-bit/96 KHz audio; these are better than
any analog recording scheme.

Tesha

They've never had the audio fidelity of vinyl,
let alone high-end digital, they don't have the
convenience of either vinyl, CD, or digital,
they store very little music per-volume, and
they have the durability of a Republican candidate
at an actual Press Conference.

USB keys storing digital media are far superior
in every possible way.

What's next? An "Eight-Track" revival?

Tesha

If it's done properly. Tape has to be run fast to get good sound. From personal experience 7 IPS (inches per second)seems to be the threshold. Cassettes run at 3 3/4 IPS and in my opinion that's why they always sounded a bit dull. I keep a few reel to reel's around because of the sound quality they create when they are running fast. Digital sounds good, but there is something about a tape's sound when it's done properly, just like using vacuum tubes in a audio amplifier. It's one of those things you have to experience for yourself.

:hi:

:rofl:

Cassettes from the 70's and 80's, really don't work so well. There the issue with tape-speed as you mentioned, resulting in lower signal-to-noise ratio, which results in tape-hiss on cassettes. That, and tapes tend to stretch and wear over time, so degradation is inevitable.

Pro-level reel-to-reel rigs work much better, but you can't exactly keep one in your pocket and take it jogging - they're not made for casual consumers.

And even with chromium dioxide and high bias,
they were still just barely passable as "Hi Fi".

15 IPS tape can sound pretty good, but nowadays,
it can't hold a candle to a good digital recording.
And then there's print-through, loss of high fre-
quencies due residual head magnetism, wow and
flutter, overall speed inaccuracies, and a host
of other distortions.

Tape is deservedly dead, whether open-reel or
cassette.

Tesha

I've only experienced that once with a very old recording from the 60's. I thought Teac handled the speed problem rather well by using stepper motors. As for tape speed you are right, all of these years i thought it ran at 3 3/4 IPS

:) :)

called Digital Rights Management.

You don't actually own most digital music - you license it at the pleasure of the recording company

Analog media is inherently free of these restrictions

That said, I'd prefer vinyl over cassettes any day

You can digitize analog music all you like and it
won't have one iota of DRM included in it unless
you put it there.

And there are certainly recoding programs out there
that can remove the owner's legal DRM if that's what
you want to do.

Alternatively, you can convert anything to analog
and re-code it to digital.

The cassette isn't needed anywhere along in this
process.

Tesha

worked well for me.

not dried out, stretched, stretched to breaking or run through a damaged machine.

I have and love my vinyl, reel-to-reel and cassette music.
I am not a fan of CD's. Everything I have worth moving forward, I move digital onto appliance..


Tikki

While a nice direct drive Studer (or its consumer
cousin, the Revox) will keep on going nearly
forever (except for the brake bands giving
you trouble), cassette decks tend to have
rubber belts or rubber friction-drive wheels
that will die of old age by stretching, hardening,
or both.

Tesha

*Found in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

Wow...those machines are drop dead gorgeous. I have a reproduction Victrola that I use to play 78s. I'd love to shop in this store. Wow.

cd`s are to dam expensive and why would i buy music to put into something i can lose?

The tape decks are hand made and can cost above $10,000.

The tapes come directly from the original master tapes in very limited quantities, and can be as expensive as $600 each.

It must be nice to have that kind of money to waste.

tapes that I taped or bought in the 80s and they still play but they are faded to the point that you can just barely hear them.

after all - cassettes are a way to "download" and share music....

I'm sure someone will be pontificating about how 'real' cassette tapes sound. Trust me, I spent a good 2 decades listening to them in my cars. They sound 'real'; real crappy.

Is the world economy in such bad shape that four thousand dollars in (anticipated, not yet achieved) retail sales is newsworthy?

i know, i know, i need an upgrade but i keep thinking the car will die soon enough and i'll upgrade then. (i'm holding out for a cheaper hybrid!)

NO Aux input either, just a CD player. Even a lot of new cars have just a CD player.

But they are standard in some

its pretty high tech for an 84, LOL

Some were still offering tape players less than 10 years ago. Many don't even have AUX or USB inputs, just a CD player.

If you have a smartphone, you'll be more likely to dump satellite radio if you can plug your smartphone into the car stereo and stream whatever you want.

Don't listen to the music channels much

I think it's safe to assume that a cassette adapter would work
for them. ;)

Tesha

or Lasediscs?

...the best analog audio recording available to amateurs.
The FM recording used for these tracks offered a very wide
bandwidth combined with an exceptionally-good signal-to-noise
ratio.

This was ironic since the basic VHS mono/stereo sound tracks
offered some of the *WORST* fidelity audio ever offered to
consumers.

Tesha

Tapes degrade over time, and their fidelity, even when brand new, is nowhere close to a clean vinyl copy. Still, it's fun to see the rebellion against digital continues.

CD's would never do that EVEN if the hardware they played on stayed the same (which it won't).

While it's true that some pressed CDs had problems with
their aluminum metalization, it's a good bet that many will
still be readable far into the future. The gold-metalized ones
are probably readable forever.

And the estimated life on some of the CD-R dye systems is
in excess of 100 years.

Tesha

Name brand CD-Rs tend to be higher quality than the store brands.

I had a huge number of very expensive import CDs from the late 80s-early 90s bronze. What a frustration that was; still waiting for some of them to be reissued.

:rofl:


:hide:

...Isopropyl A. and the Q-Tips! They were the best!

Tesha

Nothing wrong with that, but a lot of modern-day tape enthusiasts give nary a shit for "clean" audio, or high-quality sound. We are into cassettes BECAUSE of the hiss and imperfections - and because a lot of us grew up with tapes, and we enjoyed the portability of them, the tactile, physical artifact they embody, and the democratic ideals they represent (THe Mountain Goats recorded their first few albums on a tape recording boombox and sounded GREAT - the hiss and dropouts became elements of composition; Guided by Voices's early work, mostly recorded on homemade 4-track cassettes, STILL sounds revolutionary and otherworldly). The cassette underground thrived throughout the 1980s, with artists like Smersh and the Cleaners from Venus recording large bodies of work through the medium of home recording and trading through the mail. Cassette-only labels have been thriving for the last few years - I'm surprised it's taken the MSM this long to catch up. Say what you will about low fidelity, but there are effects one can get recording to analog tape that are unacheivable through more technologically advanced means, esp. if one is recording to a portable 4-track.

So in other words, people who are bringing up issues of audio quality here are missing the point. Audio quality issues do not enter into the picture - we love cassettes and record music to them for other reasons. My friend and collaborator Tom, who records under the name The Last King of Poland, is one artist in the noise underground who records his music to tape. One reason why is that his music is largely improvisational, and thus an IMMEDIATE, transitory form of art, and he doesn't have the means or the desire to record what he does in a large studio or to press up runs of hundreds of CDs. So he'll record a session in an hour, record it straight to his cassette deck, then make 10 copies with original artwork to accompany the tape, then sell it at his shows. That way, his fans and friends get a more intimate, personalized, heartfelt product/artifact/documernt - one he put his own energy into at each stage of production. This is homemade, democratized art. This is how a lot of the cassette-oriented noise/experimental musicians in the scene do it these days. We don't give a fuck about "clean" audio - we're about immediacy and doing it ourselves.

nt

Nowadays, it becomes an affectation. A poor kid has way more access to a cheap lap-top and a cd burner, for example, than a cassette based 4 track.

Dedicated digital multitrack recorders (like the micro BR from BOSS) are also cheaper to purchase and use.

"My friend and collaborator Tom, who records under the name The Last King of Poland, is one artist in the noise underground who records his music to tape."

Again, a small digital recorder with a built in condenser mic will do the same job cheaper and easier. Nothing wrong with the medium being part of the message. But it becomes more artifice and less DIY at this point, imo.

Used music stores and pawn shops are still selling old Tascam 4-tracks, DAT recorders, all sorts of outdated musical recording gear for below-cheap prices; or perhaps their older brothers, uncles, etc. have handed down their old gear. A kid can easily get a hold of an old, beat-up tape recorder pretty easily. A case could be made that both cassettes and vinyl LPS are "affectations," or objects fetishized beyond functionality, but there are a substantial number of underground musicians out there for whom cassettes still facilitate a certain amount of creative autonomy.

BTW, Tom prefers the hiss, static, and ambient noise that cassettes capture in the moment. He has digital recorders, as well as GarageBand and other computer recording equipment and software - but his muse (and mine) really enjoys the lo-fi aesthetic for its intimacy and immediacy as well as for its sound.

"BTW, Tom prefers the hiss, static, and ambient noise that cassettes capture in the moment. He has digital recorders, as well as GarageBand and other computer recording equipment and software - but his muse (and mine) really enjoys the lo-fi aesthetic for its intimacy and immediacy as well as for its sound."

Perhaps you are aware of the hip hop producer J Dilla (r.i.p.)? He was a big fan of analog noise (i.e. tape hiss, vinyl "pops", etc.) too--but his "instrument" of choice was a digital sampling sequencer known as the MPC line from Akai. The solution? Various samples of hiss and pops, often degraded through a digital bit cruncher. Nowadays, there is a really good free plug called Izotope Vinyl that achieves a similar result (all digital!) and HUNDREDS of .wavs of analog hiss available for download on the internet.

and the premise in the article to backup that statement are bullshit...

you can store so very very very much more on a tiny flash drive than you can on a much larger cassette

find a decent inexpensive recorder/player for those cheap cassettes though, that's the challenge.

I like tapes.