With vinyl sales increasing is there any chance of a cassette revival?

[George]

OK, before anybody laughs, let me put my case. The compact audio cassette is a portable analogue format (vinyl is not portable) so you can enjoy your music in all it's analogue glory including mixtapes on the move. Expensive vinyl will wear out if played too much so preserving your precious vinyl onto cassette and retaining it's analogue quality makes good sense. Cassette can be considered Hi-Fi if a good deck and tape are used. There is still interest in vintage cassette decks and they are still being enjoyed today (just take a look at the tapeheads forum). Does anybody else still use cassette (I certainly do)? Time for a cassette revival? Your thoughts please.[/b]

 

[macdiddy]

say that like vinyl, cassette has always been there in the background waiting for a revival, maybe now is the time.

I still buy new release tapes to use in my yamaha kx 580 cassette deck , my local independent music shop gets them in from time to time.

You may be interested in this link which gives more information:

http://cassettestoreday.co.uk/

happy listening

*music2*

 

[BigH]

No chance. No need for cassettes, you can rip to cd or hard drives or other memory forms, like sd cards or memory sticks. Vinyl is still only about 1% of sales.

 

[fr0g]

In a word. NO.

Why would any sane person want that hissy crap again???? It was fun while it lasted (especially with tape to tape ) but I can buy an MP3 player for £20 that holds 100s of albums and plays in high quality, or I can simply use my phone.

The vinyl experience, I can understand...touchy feely, great artwork etc. But tape... Horrible stuff. I still shudder at how much I wasted on tape albums (which are now on some landfill somewhere!)

 

[Vladimir]

What is a more satisfactory experience? Dropping the needle and handling large picturesque cards, or using small plastic cassettes followed by clicking the rewind button and waiting.

Now if you said revival od RTR, I am sure we are all onboard!

 

[max337]

I see the nostalgia in it but I hope not. Tapes wore out, snapped, stuck. I loved them bitd but a revival? It is possible in this day and age, but I wouldn't see the point.

I say that as someone whose main format in their formative years was cassette. Cool, 80s just not the most reliable.

The Walkman was one of the greatest inventions ever though!

 

[MeanandGreen]

No way.

Tape hiss, rolled off treble. All of that messing about with fast forward and rewind. It doesn't in anyway compare to MP3 or AAC as a portable format. Imagine carrying tapes about.

Also tapes wear out and every 10 or 12 hours or so you've got to clean and demagnetise heads. It's probably the most flawed audio format.

 

[George]

I can answer most criticisms of the cassette format with one word 'maintenance'. Rolled of highs, dull sounding? The heads need cleaning. Chewed up tapes? The rubber pinch rollers need cleaning or rubbers/belts need replacing. Tape hiss? Dolby noise reduction works very well if the heads are alighned properly. I guess this was the downfall for the cassette format, it is certainly not as convienient and easy to use as CD or MP3. But with a good deck and tape properly recorded cassette can sound very good indeed and is well worth the effort. After all Vinyl is not no maintenace, it needs cleaning, the tone arm needs balancing, tracking force setting, stylus needs cleaning/replacing etc... thats part of the enjoyment of a physical analogue format. I believe a lot of people would be amazed at how good the compact cassette CAN sound using a good deck, good tape, knowledge and care.

 

[super]

Bring back reel to reel and then we are really talking. And there is a following out there of these great machines.

 

[JMac]

i remember spending a small fortune on Sony ceramic cassettes in the 90's hoping to get better quality from tape. I dont see what the format offers that would lead to a revival.

 

[Vladimir]

There wont be a tape revival like there is a vinyl revival because tape is something you can record and pirate yourself. Vinyl is something you buy, period. A lot less collector's appeal in cassettes, unlike vinyl.

 

[chebby]

I dont see what the format offers that would lead to a revival.

Amongst other 'delights', it offers you the opportunity to spend at least 90 minutes to record 90 minutes of music* onto an object the same size as a Terabyte HD (that can hold an entire musical library in far superior lossless quality with track listings and artwork).

* Whereas 90 minutes of (lossless) content takes about 2 minutes to rip from CD usually. (With error correction on.)

 

[MeanandGreen]

I can answer most criticisms of the cassette format with one word 'maintenance'. Rolled of highs, dull sounding? The heads need cleaning. Chewed up tapes? The rubber pinch rollers need cleaning or rubbers/belts need replacing. Tape hiss? Dolby noise reduction works very well if the heads are alighned properly. I guess this was the downfall for the cassette format, it is certainly not as convienient and easy to use as CD or MP3. But with a good deck and tape properly recorded cassette can sound very good indeed and is well worth the effort. After all Vinyl is not no maintenace, it needs cleaning, the tone arm needs balancing, tracking force setting, stylus needs cleaning/replacing etc... thats part of the enjoyment of a physical analogue format. I believe a lot of people would be amazed at how good the compact cassette CAN sound using a good deck, good tape, knowledge and care.

I used to keep my decks and tapes in tip top shape. Cleaned, demagnetised, I used to use TDK, Sony & Maxell Cro2 and metal tapes. I used to calibrate bias for each blank and spend ages experimenting finding out how far I could push the recording meters into the red. They sounded pretty good, but in direct back to back comparisons with digital sources tape is really lacking in dynamics. Overall an ok copying format when there was nothing else.

Once CD-R became available and I had in car CD players I never touched cassette again. Now I can connect an iPod in the car I won't use CD-R for portable audio again. Carrying physical formats is an inconvenience and fast forwarding cassettes tapes is prehistoric.

I personally think vinyl is seriously flawed too. It's a dinosaur technology, it is cool again because of nostalgia. However vinyl always sounded better than pre recorded cassettes to me. I can understand the appeal of 'needle dropping', the smell of the vinyl, the pops and crackles. I can understand that, though it doesn't appeal to me.

I still have a fondness for the CD. Technically it does offer the best resoloution, the highest dynamic range, the best signal to noise ratio, the lowest wow and flutter and flattest requency responce of all of the above. Plus you can choose and skip tracks as you please and requires very low maintence.

I still buy albums on CD and rip them to iTunes for making long and varied playlists. I like the physical CD it's not too large, it isn't too fragile and it doesn't wear out. You still get the artwork as you would with vinyl.

I still use my CD player for listening to an album in full or if I just want to spin a couple of tracks. Ditgital storage I use for in the car or varied/long playlists at home.

For me cassette has no place anywhere today. I don't see any advantages to it, but many negatives.

I think the terms 'analogue' and 'digital' are somewhat abused. Everything we listen to is analogue, even if it is on CD or MP3/AAC or FLAC or whatever. It all gets converted to analogue before the amplifier. The whole 'analogue sound' thing is really just a nostalgic rose tinted view of the older formats flaws.

 

[fr0g]

Amongst other 'delights', it offers you the opportunity to spend at least 90 minutes to record 90 minutes of music* onto an object the same size as a Terabyte HD (that can hold an entire musical library in far superior lossless quality with track listings and artwork).

* Whereas 90 minutes of (lossless) content takes about 2 minutes to rip from CD usually. (With error correction on.)

Never mind lossless, a 96 Kbps AAC is superior in every way sonically to even the most esoteric cassette player. A Nakomichi Dragon is inferior in every way to an iPod Nano playing 128 Kbps AAC tracks!

I have "some" fond memories of cassette, and indeed, the Walkman was probably the most influential portable music device, ever. But I also have major regrets at the money wasted on what was a horrible format if we're being honest.

 

[chebby]

Amongst other 'delights', it offers you the opportunity to spend at least 90 minutes to record 90 minutes of music* onto an object the same size as a Terabyte HD (that can hold an entire musical library in far superior lossless quality with track listings and artwork).

* Whereas 90 minutes of (lossless) content takes about 2 minutes to rip from CD usually. (With error correction on.)

Never mind lossless, a 96 Kbps AAC is superior in every way sonically to even the most esoteric cassette player.

I partly agree with you (320k AAC VBR is my preferred rate when ripping) but I didn't want to bog the thread down with a secondary and off-topic debate about lossless vs compressed. That's been done to death.

 

[Vladimir]

I remember there was resolution comparison between different media (can't remember the link, possibly on xiph.org) and cassette was at 8bit resolution, vinyl was 10bit or something like that and studio master tape with high IPS was at best ideal conditions when new 13bits. The worst CDP ever made, a 14bit AIWA shoebox sized CDP from the 80's beats them all in resolution. So how do they get high resolution like DSD from AAD and ADD?

Things get even weirder when you realizes the best professional studio microphones are frequency limited to 20kHz and people go crazy over the frequency range limitations of CD to 22.05 kHz. And none of us can hear above 15kHz, and even if we did that information there is just useless annoying shusshing with almost no musical information whatsoever.

I think it is safe to assume that we have ALL gone mad in this hobby. What's a cassette revival going to hurt anyway...

Carry on.