Are cassettes still good?

I think he simply looks at it with different eyes than users or audiophiles do. I can't know for certain, of course, but the 'vibe' I got from him is that at age 91 and long since retired, he still is the quintessential inventor in attitude, looking back at his invention without nostalgia, with no other passion than to wish to improve existing technology. I liked about him that he was perfectly fine with the idea that 'his' cassette, once used by hundreds of millions of people, was mainly a thing of the past now and that he didn't try to cling to its former 'glory'. Just as he was saying about himself, by the way: 'My time has past as well, new people have taken my place, and shortly I will disappear altogether. That's perfectly all right; it is how things go.'

He admitted that he was proud of his invention, though.

 

But really it is sad that a lot of these technologies have died and not lived on in some form or another. I have a CD player I purchased in 2006 and that had a tape deck in the front but you can't currently buy blank tapes to put in it, at least not now. I had trouble finding them in 2006 let alone now.

BTW the unit is still in use except I can't play or make tapes. But the radio and CD portion work fine.

 

I still keep a PC with a 5.25" floppy drive around for that very reason. Still have a dual cassette deck, a Betamax VCR, and virtual machines with OS/2, Windows 3.0 - current, several flavors of Linux, etc. You never know. And if it tells you anything about why, I've used a Windows 98 key within the last month for work, so...

 

Oh, what baloney. I used cassettes, like crazy. The only thing they were good for, is recording off live radio. Then internet streaming of radio stations occurred.

Having used them, I can talk about this.

Point 1 in the video: if you have the right equipment and blah, blah, blah. So, who's going to go get the right stuff to make cassettes sound good? Nobody but the Youtube maker and the channel he referred to, that's who. Further more, it's not just about having the right stuff -- a tape, like a CD or a digital file, only sounds as good as the mastering effort put into it. A number of things have been simply remastered for CD release. And when the tape wears out, it sounds bad. Further more, CD's offer a listening range not possible on tapes. Case in point: I bought a score on cassette and then on CD; the CD was not a remaster, it was just put on CD. With the CD I heard details and clarify I never heard before, and I didn't have to busy any "right" equipment to achieve it (and it was a CD/cassette boombox).

Another point he made:
Portable -- you can put it in your pocket.
LOL, who does that? When is that a need?
"Put internet streaming aside -- I got a cassette tape! In my pocket! Now all I need is a cassette player. Which doesn't fit in my pocket."

Another point he made: Cassettes are more durable and Cd's get scratched. Yeah, only if you treat your CD's like shit. They have a protective plastic case too -- a jewel case. If a tape wears out, that's it; if a CD gets scratched, you can fix certain scratches with a repair kit of buffing machine.

And cassette tapes get chewed up. And you have to re-wind them. And you have to take them out to play the other side. One could argue that if you are listening to a CD that's a double or more disc set, you have to take out the CD and put in a new one -- good point, but your typical CD can safely hold (in order to play on most players) 79 minutes. That's a long time. How often, really, do you even play that much? And cassette players can get dirty and need cleaning, just like VHS players.

There's more variety on CD. And if you don't like CD, there's probably even more variety with downloads, depending on your region.

 

I have a cassette tape of the soundtrack to Star Trek VI I bought in 1991 that I still listen to in my car.

 

Even after CD's were in vogue, but CD recorders (even in computers) weren't, I liked recording LP's onto cassette.

Most boomboxes had/have CD & cassette players.

 

I have a copy of Dave Warner's Time The Musical on tape because I could never find a digital copy, not sure if it's available now though.

 

With the right computer set-up, you could rip the tape to .mp3's. It would still be cassette quality, but you'd have it.

My last desktop had a Creative sound card with a front bay module that had all manner of audio inputs, including RCA jacks.

I ripped a few cassettes that way.

 

I still have Oxygene, Equinoxe and The Rendez-Vous on casette, does it sound inferior to CD.. only the quirks of the technology makes them slightly less, but anyway, back in the day there was nothing better, copied the Equinoxe part 1/5 single to a fresh high end casette and enjoyed playing it all through school on a generic plastic brick walkman, I still have that thing and it still works and so do the casettes.
While a tad obsolete it's solid tech, I also still have a "portable" Philips Reel to Reel tape recorder, build in 1964 and they certainly don't make things that way anymore..

 

I ripped the BBC radio adaptation of the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov from the cassettes I own to MP3 and did some cleanup of the audio. Sounds a lot better than the very hissy version that's available on audible.com. I did similarly with other cassettes in my collection that have either never been available on CD or as digital downloads of adequate quality.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-F...f=a_search_c4_1_6_srImg?qid=1501185834&sr=1-6

 

I did some cleanup of one cassette track. It's easy to overdo the hiss cleanup and make it sound like it was recorded in a bucket

 

Quite true. It took a bit of trial and error to achieve the desired result.

 

As long as you make sure your ripped file(s) is backed up, you're good

 

Interesting thread.

Back in the 70s, the only portable choices were cassettes and 8-tracks. The first time I heard a song fade out in the middle, "thunk-thunk" as the track changed, and then fade back in, I knew I would never, ever buy an 8-track tape. Cassette wasn't perfect, but it was useful, and better than the then-popular alternative. Mostly, I recorded tracks from albums that I liked and occasionally off the radio. Also, when I worked at a radio station in the mid-80s, I filled maybe 40-50 90-minute cassettes with songs I liked, from classic rock to the then-current pop. (I was young...) I recently bought a gizmo that I can plug into my PC to turn those recordings into MP3 files. A daunting project that I need to start...

I knew that an era had passed when my family prepared for a road trip last year. We planned to travel in a new sedan we'd purchased instead of our 2003 van. However, I realized we'd have to change how we listened to music. The van has a cassette deck, and I'd been using a gizmo that allowed me to plug my older MP3 player (Creative ZenStone) into the stereo through a cassette shell that fed the signal to the heads. The new car has a CD player but no cassette. But it does have a jack I can plug my MP3 player, iPods, etc, into. I've looked into the mini transmitters, too. So we can still have a wide variety of music, but not have to carry a stack of CDs...

 

Well there's always LEGO

A Lego record player

 

Sound advice.

 

My current Jeep no longer had a hard drive in the radio unit, but it has an aux jack, a USB port and an SD card slot. I have a 128GB SD card in with over 200 albums.

 

Nice! Definitely the wave of the future...

 

The only thing cassettes are good for now is making vaporwave.

 

So, in twenty years CD's or mini discs will make a come back. Right?

Right?​

Right?​