alt Hacker NewsAs someone who grew up with cassette tapes, I don’t anticipate this fad lasting too long. They were very inconvenient. With most technology I see resistance from people not wanting to move on. I don’t remember seeing that with cassettes. The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
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Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
Tapes are exceptionally durable when cared for properly. Here's a video of a guy that tests for loss of quality after 1,000 plays.
https://youtu.be/_dgJ4hRHBiw?si=IpjzdgAHJ4Q9yvb5
Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.
Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!
https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA?si=db7QjRt37ENiLMFX
I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).
Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
Cassettes and their cases had a really nice size and shape, fit right in the hand. And it was cool that you could see it moving, unlike (most) cd players. Also the recording paradigm was pretty easy to grasp, just 1:1. And they kinda degraded gracefully, with sound getting weird but still playing, at least until the tape actually came out in a big catastrophic mess and we’d try to rewind it with a pencil.
My last album release made 10x more money with selling the physical cassette then with digital sales! I think people want something in their hands. And by the way, the tape sounds really good. Definitely not lo fi, the opposite actually. Overall better then the compressed Spotify release with in comparison muddy bass and less saturation.
I largely share your sentiment, I had a tape player as a kid, and the second I could get a CD player and burn my own CDs I never looked back. One thing that I don't see mentioned often is how battery-hungry these players were as well.
I think the ‘warmth’ people attribute to older media has been shown to have to do with processing.
Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).
It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
I'd like to see the minidisc come back but the sheer cost of the units is bonkers today :)
Those were the days and gone they have.
Cassette tapes were more practical for portable devices. The last high-end Walkmans were beautifully crafted and barely bigger than the cassette inside whereas portable CD player were always bulkier if only because of the size of CDs themselves.
Minidisc tried to play in that space since minidisc players are very small.
eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone
Minidiscs proved that people were comfortable with lossy compression. It was to be many years before lossless audio became a thing again.
It always amused me how we were told the difference between lossless and lossy compression was undetectable to the human ear up until the big streaming services started providing lossless and even high res, at which point it was suddenly the best thing since sliced bread. However you feel about the audio, one way or another it's gaslighting.
Personally, on most music I can't tell decent quality lossy from lossless, but I listen to a lot of choral polyphony and also perform it so I have a good ear for it. When you're listening to 16 or in some cases up to 40 voices and can follow individual lines (single voices recognisable as particular people) you can hear it, and I disliked minidisc and mp3 players for that reason. High res, though, makes no difference at all as far as I can tell.
> They were very inconvenient.
They were also very affordable!
I wish somebody would make minidiscs and minidisc players. Can (optionally) replace atrac with opus. Fast transfers but 'slow playback' and more durability than cassette or CD.
What do you mean by "fad"?
It's not like metal, dungeon synth and PE/noise artists have just now started publishing on cassette. They've done it for years and years, and you'll find a lot of them on Bandcamp, e.g. https://duckpropaganda.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-chokehold .
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.