Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead

id00

A few years ago I've bought an old cassette deck, ordered a few cassettes on discogs.com (some of them 30+ years old) and even recorded a few mixtapes myself. There is a long forgotten strange feeling to hold a physical media with music. Like it gives it weight...

And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes

chestervonwinch

> 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.

steveBK123

I’ve actually started getting 90s-00s era vinyl for some electronic music I used to listen to.

A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.

SoftTalker

Surprised a 30 year old cassette is still playable without falling apart. Maybe I should try some of mine.

seductivebarry

An essay about how a thirty-year-old mixtape led me to think about technology, memory, and the strange persistence of things we’ve already declared obsolete.

wrs

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

01HNNWZ0MV43FF

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.

Razengan

You mean undead? Zombie technologies?