Cassette Logic: Technology That Never Dies but Is Already Dead

Thanks. Digging out my shoebox of college mix tapes right now.

People are real quick to declare things obsolete without thinking about Pareto frontiers.

Tapes and floppies are "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about malicious controllers embedded in flash media or hard drives.

Paper is "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about cost per square inch of displaying static information, or about running without batteries.

They are surprisingly durable. I have a tape I made in 1990, it's followed me across continents and been in cardboard boxes, basements and attics. It still plays flawlessly.

Not wanting to push my luck, I archived it. On Minidisc.

I have quite a large CD collection. Two albums from the same era are unplayable due to oxidization, same band Banco De Gaia, pressed at the same plant in the UK too.

There is a reason they are often used as archival medium.

Yep, but the tape often "overspeaks" with the next winding, so you can already hear what comes in the next 2 seconds. :-) Quite interesting effect.

Pretty much..the combination to listening to a song about vampires on a cassette seemed like the perfect metaphor!

> Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes

Yea, I use Type II cassettes to record on my Tascam 246. I did an experiment where I recorded a track I made digitally to tape and then back into the DAW. I A/B'd them and struggled to differentiate. That being said, I have used some really poor quality Type II tapes, where the difference was obvious.

I grabbed a cheap one for my 5 year old with some blank tapes. I remember how much I loved recording my voice, or the TV, and eventually LOTS of radio. Tangible media has more weight than just the physical object. Especially in something as durable as a cassette.

It comes in bursts but when he's into it, he has a ton of fun, The manual nature of it is confusing for him (he's used to instant gratification), like waiting a few seconds at the beginning of the tape so he can record, but something about a cassette makes the whole process easier to explain and, I hope, to understand and visualize.

I hope you bought archive grade media. Also I hope the people who make such media did their work well!

Sorry, but cold storage HDD archiving is much more reliable in the long term then DVD. Also easier to execute. Simply copy on two different HDDs from different manufactures and you are more or less safe to go.

If the track played though a cassette is that much of an improvement, couldn't you have a mastering step that runs the track through a cassette player? Or is there a je ne sais quoi that even that would fail to capture?

There's something about analog I can't quite put my finger on it. Take digital photography for example. No matter how sharp, how "vibrant" the photos from a really good digital camera of today, it doesn't feel the same as photos from some 50 year old Nikon or Canon. Call it nostalgia if you will, but digital for all its strenghts seems to miss something

We are on our third run of tapes now (50 each). Chrome-Oxide tapes can sound surprisingly good.

Our main reason is that people want to buy music at gigs and just offering solitary paper sheets with download codes doesn't really work. A tape is tangible and (for our audience) sexier than CDs and with the download code included many buy the tape even without having a suitable playback device as you observed as well.

For musicians tapes have the advantage that you can totally DIY them much easier and with less up-front cost than vinyl. And they rake less space and weigh less.

Vinyl starts to get economic after after 150 or 200 pieces depending on the pressing plant.

The thing I like about recorded music is that the listener’s equipment is part of the performance; in a sense, it’s the actual instrument, being played remotely over time and space by an engineer who’s never seen it and musicians who made a different performance in a different room on different instruments, as well as here and now by the listener herself. Every person and piece of technology in the chain shapes the experience, and every performance is unique, even if it’s you listening to Gimme Shelter on repeat on a crappy mp3 player and cheap earbuds.

You’re right, being able to hold the music is nice. PDF liner notes aren’t the same. For your next release you might be interested in the cassette label run by a friend of mine: helloamericalit.com

What's an op shop?

Simpler production format! No case, reels, moving parts, stretched/torn tape.

If you never saw a smashed cassette on the side of the road with a reel of magnetic ribbon tangled in the weeds and bushes then you wouldn't understand.