zyzzle

Dammit! And the one media of REAL lasting value, the audio CD, is going the way of the dodo. People (hipsters, or whomever) are stupid, and the capitalists feed on their stupidity.

hdnmickey

And Guardians of the Galaxy.

Maxflier

There is a VHS resurgence? Why?

dhmac

If this is due to Guardians of the Galaxy then maybe we'll also see a resurgence of the Zune

dhmac

Here's a video demo-ing the sound quality between a low-end cassette , a high-end cassette, and an MP3 file on different equipment

MarkitZero

Speaking of Maxell (my go to tape) I remember this being a must have poster back in the day...

Fielding Mellish

Forget about even buying a new cassette deck, for a second. Repairing an old one is as expensive as hell. My mid-fi Sony deck from the early '90s cost about $150 just get get some parts replaced a couple years back.

inri222

Pyle Pro PT659DU Dual Stereo Cassette Deck with USB - $119.01

http://www.fullcompass.com/prod/2457...yABEgIu7vD_BwE

GoVegan

I've got a mid-range Marantz that I picked up for a weird special project ages ago - transferring a good copy of an album by one of my favorite artists which ended up only ever getting sent out to radio stations as a cassette promo before Island Records was sold in 1997 and the project was scrapped. Maybe it's time to sell it off. It's my only cassette player, but I'm ok with that.

MBoyd

Here ya go. Brooklyn Boombox!

https://www.stuff.tv/hot-stuff/audio...ssette-revival

Ky-Fi

I am nostalgic as anyone about the music-listening of my youth in the 80's. Cassettes are the one thing I have absolutely no nostalgia for. The high-end blanks were okay, but the commercial releases on cassette generally SUCKED! I can still hear that hellish, high-pitched squeaking sound when they would start to go.

Hazel Motes

Nostalgia, collectability and the fact that a TON of stuff on VHS exists nowhere else. I've got about 200 wrestling tapes that don't exist anywhere else.

dvd-4-life

Doesn't have auto-reverse.

[email protected]

Cassettes were for creating a mixtape for a girl that you liked, but never had the courage to actually go up and talk to. 8^)

Jason

I better get all of mine on ebay soon then. Being a pack rat might just pay off for once.

milo bloom

I was in Half Price Books today and there was a guy looking through the vinyl talking to a guy who had a couple cassette tapes in his hand. I saw him walking around the store later with the tapes still so I guess he was buying them. He was maybe in his 20s and vinyl guy was in his 60s. So there’s all kinds of collectors out there.


Me, I just bought a six cd set of Ibiza house music for $2 so what do I know?

Alan Smithee

I bought a lot of cassettes in 1984 before we got our first CD player in 1985- as a critical listener, quality control on cassettes was horrible- many of them had a 'tapping' sound in either the left or right channel all the way through.

Hearing this at the beginning of every album was pretty silly too:

Mabuse

Or even better, you could make your special lady a romantic mix tape.

Mabuse

Laserdisc did have a bit of a comeback back when DVD fever was really strong and the feeling was that certain films would never come to dvd. Especially certain Criterion titles that had unique supplements. Like their James Bond discs and Magnificent Ambersons.

Alan Smithee

There's a group on Facebook called "Laserdisc Forever!" but has a lot of posers who watch them stretched on their 16x9 TVs- they even stretch letterbox transfers so they're super-wide.

Rex Fenestrarum

Doubt it. Cheap Trick released their 2009 album The Latest in 8-track, and that's the only major band I've heard of doing so in the past 30+ years.

There's a solo electronic artist who releases music under the name Waves Crashing Piano Chords who has released multiple 8-tracks since 2012, but that seems to be his "gimmick".

TheDude

Absolutely agree with this. Though I slightly understand the resurgence of vinyl (i.e. the collectability aspect of the viny packaging, etc.), I will never understand music cassettes making a come-back.

I.e., they are the music version of VHS tapes - i.e., crappy sound quality, having to rewind/move forward so you can choose what song you want to listen to (if you're not listening to the whole album), and the very real possibility/probability that the tape will get eaten up by the player - thereby ruining the tape & possibly messing up your player as well. Cassettes were a P.O.S. & sub-par format years ago, and they remain so today.

I'll also never understand anyone still liking & collecting Laser Disks. They were a crap format when they came out, and even worse these days. Even though the PQ was slightly better than VHS tapes, they were super-expensive (both the players & the disks themselves), awkward (having to turn the LD over when the film was half-over), and non-Anamorphic. In other words, utter garbage.

dhmac

TheDude, I agree with all of your complaints except the "crappy sound quality" claim. An audiocassette recorded on good home stereo equipment using metal tapes would sound about as good as the lossy MP3 audio files a lot of people use to listen to music these days. (See the video in posting #30 for a demonstration someone did to dispel the "audiocassettes sound crap" myth.)

Rex Fenestrarum

Yeah, properly done (especially on type IV tapes), cassettes can sound very, very good. Watch if you don't believe me.

But they can also sound like crap. I remember my best friend and I digging through the bargain bin at Camelot and finding the weirdest stuff, like Dead Kennedys cassettes from Italy or Joy Division cassettes from France. They almost always sounded like complete dogshit... but we always bought them anyway, 'cos they were only $2.99.

TheDude

Giving me some examples of how cassettes can sound decent doesn't change the fact that every cassette I heard back in the day sounded like dog shit.

However, even if all cassettes sounded as good as the best CD out there (that will never happen), this doesn't change my other complaints about the format, which will always hold true:

1) Having to rewind/move forward so you can choose what song you want to listen to (if you're not listening to the whole album)

2) The very real possibility/probability that the tape will get eaten up by the player - thereby ruining the tape & possibly messing up your player as well. Going along with this, the tape would sometimes get "unwound" and you would have to wind it back/tighten it back up, which didn't always work - if you couldn't get it back to the way it had been originally, the tape was ruined & only good for the trash.

And another I hadn't posted before:

3) With wear and tear/just listening to them on a regular basis, the sound quality progressively got worse as time went on.

Again, cassettes were an awful format years ago, and they remain so today. Like the resurgence of interest in the equally shitty VHS tapes/VCR's, I'll never understand why anyone would ever spend good $ on these - especially when we have far superior music & home video formats today.

Sure, I liked the '80's & have some fond memories of that time-period - but, the antiquated technology is not something I miss from that era.