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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Cassettes might be fun for young people, but those of us old enough to remember when they were the only real option couldnt care less. They sounded bad. They required complicated mecanical trickery to use. They broke, sometimes taking the player along with them. Good riddance. CDs were better in every single way.

Also, the cassette-playing tech today is far better than it was. Listen ro them without noise reduction tech. Scan for a song without silence detection. Then come back and brag about your vintage sony walkman.

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Good riddance? Good fucking riddance, more like.

Tapes are shit. Hiss, flutter, wow, head misalignment, Dolby NR. "Ah, which Dolby NR?" - well, exactly. And we haven't even got onto Type I vs Type II vs Type IV, and your C120s that snap if you so much as look at them, and the tapes that get tangled and snagged and melted in your car stereo, because they're right next to some air ducts that blow fan-assisted hot air from a big lump of hot metal barely half a metre away.

Also, tapes are a useless size. CDs hold like 70 minutes. So you have a C60, and it's not enough, or a C90, and it's too much - even assuming you don't have any bin-packing problems.

Honest to god. Tapes. TAPES.

If you like the sound (what is wrong with people??), then for God's sake, at least record from your stupid tape deck to the PC, then FLAC it, because then at least you'll avoid that fast forward and rewind nonsense. Battery life on MP3 players is a lot better too.

I don't know what to say.

EDIT: classic quantity/quality tradeoff: exchanged intemperate language for the FLAC suggestion

EDIT 2: I think this is the first time in a long time I've seen the word "weird" used in a link and it's actually appropriate

After reading the article I came here to have exactly this rant. Thanks for doing it for me.

Also, I'm not sure where they were trying to go with the "tapes are cheaper and more convenient than vinyl! This is great for small indie bands!". Is this 1970?

The one tiny upside: total lack of DRM. It isn't much, but it is something worth saying.

> total lack of DRM

Well yeah - there's no D so you can't have DRM. Tapes have a built in mechanism to prevent rampant copying though - they degrade with each generation.

They should revive the old reel to reel machines like this: http://www.reeltoreel.de/worldwide/A700.htm. That's bad ass.

I am a young guy, but I'm old enough that when I was a kid my principle form of listening to music was cassette tapes. So I know where you are coming from here. However, I am also an audio engineer, and have mastered a lot of records for bands that have ended up releasing them as cassettes.

In my opinion, your analysis lacks one or two components that are essential to the "cassette" experience:

1. Sonic Artifacts - Some bands dig the warpy, tinny sound. I'm not personally a fan, but I'm a bit biased.

2. Tape Compression - A lot of bands simply cannot, or choose not to, control their dynamics, causing clipping to occur. On an old-school straight-to-tape recording setup, this clipping will sound far better than the harsh, horrible digital clipping found in today's digital setups.

3. Playback Setting - In my experience, the typical consumer of today's cassette tapes is not playing the album through a hi-fi system. They're probably using a portable jambox that they took out of their mom's attic or one they picked up one day at their local Goodwill/pawn shop. Fidelity is nowhere near important to this individual, and they probably wouldn't fret very much if their junky/old equipment got damaged or stopped working.

> They sounded bad.

Cassettes weren't _that_ bad. The problem is that there were essentially different grades of tapes and players that supported different noise reduction techniques, and people tend to remember the ones played back with low end gear.

Here's a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA

>> CDs were better in every single way.

Well, not exactly.

Talk about fragile. A slight scratch and its toast. Durable? Hardly. Not sure how many CD's I had to re-buy because of minor chips or the dreaded "pinhole of death" I can't count. Or what about the green marker urban legend (http://www.snopes.com/music/media/marker.asp). They were also anything but "compact" compared to cassettes. And are you old enough to remember those long CD boxes (https://images.eil.com/large_image/Queen_A+Collection+Of+Emp...) that were a total wasted of cardboard?

Or maybe finally being excited to get your favorite artists old recordings on CD, only to buy the CD, rip it open and read on the back, "WARNING: The music on this Compact Disc was originally recorded on analog equipment, prior to modern noise reduction techniques. This Compact Disc preserves, as closely as possible, the sound of the original recording, but its high resolution also reveals the limitations in the master tape, including noise and other distortions."

I agree that CD's were markedly better, but let's not forgot they still had some serious flaws themselves.

Precisely.

Look at all the 60 year old used vinyl records that have survived and are still just as playable to this day. There's tons of them floating around. On the other hand, it's much harder to find even a 30 year old used CD that still plays fully and without error.

A 30 year old tape may simply coat your playback head with iron oxide, snap, jam, or have lost its label as the glue has failed.

Well, those 60 year old vinyl records that are still playable were no doubt treated pretty reverentially by their owner over that time.

CDs that were handled as carefully as people handle vinyl have lasted at least as well (I don't have any 30 year old CDs but I do have some just getting to 20 years, and those still play fine).

The comparison is between CDs and tapes, not vinyl. Pull a 30 year old tape out of your closet and pray it doesn't leave little bits of itself all over your tape player....

A cassette will not be more resilient than a CD for that kind of "archival" use-cases.

And millennials wonder why people make fun of them. Cassettes were, and still are, terrible.

They made sense since it was possible to copy from another format, such as vinyl/radio/CD even another cassette. It was the only format you were able to copy to (technically you could with 8-tracks, but you could not easily get blanks). Nowadays, if you really wanted a copy, straight to digital.

I promise to stay off your lawn :)

> They required complicated mecanical trickery to use.

What? I haven't used a cassette in over a decade, but I still remember how they are used, and it didn't involved complicated trickery. Turn on and open the deck, slide in the cassette, close, and press play. Maybe rewind when you're done, and eject.

Streaming music is arguably more complicated, but that's not stopping it.

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