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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Cassettes were horrible. Anyone saying otherwise is likely too young to have ever lived with them. They sounded bad and broke easily. They got stuck in machines. They were slow to use. CDs were like getting starlink broadband after decades of dialup.

We can salute them and give them pride of place in museums, but releasing them back into the wild is a big mistake.

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No, cassettes were amazing. They were mechanically imperfect, had non-flat frequently response, tended to let loose some tape and started to screech when worn.

For all that, they were recordable.

You could exchange music with your friends. You could make mixtapes. You could record radio and TV, skipping uninteresting parts. You could record your own voice, or your own guitar. You could interview your classmates. You could even store the programs you wrote for your 8-bit computer, and read them back. All using some trusty and well-worn TDK or Sony or BASF cassettes, and a portable cassette deck.

The CD felt like a big step forward in sound quality, but a big step back in agency. It felt like a piece of immutable alien rock that required an expensive device to play. It took about a decade (say, 1987 to 1997) between the times when CDs became accessible and when CD-Rs became accessible. (Soon after, mp3 and flash players took over.)

Yep. CDs sounded better, when they worked. The early players were vulnerable to skipping or going off-track. Especially the ones in cars. The discs had to be spotlessly clean and one scratch could render the whole disc unplayable. I never liked them as a medium, even though in the best case they sounded better.

The mass-produced cassettes released by the record labels weren't great. You could do much better dubbing from a vinyl record to a high quality cassette with a decent tape deck. Those sounded quite good.

> The mass-produced cassettes released by the record labels weren't great. You could do much better dubbing from a vinyl record to a high quality cassette with a decent tape deck. Those sounded quite good.

This. The mass produced prerecorded cassettes were garbage. But copying vinyl to a high quality TDK or Maxell… very nice results.

I still have quite a few mix tapes that I recorded from FM radio in the 90s. Including Future Sound of London's 'Lifeforms' that I captured in the middle of the night and that took a while to work out what it was! CDs were so expensive and felt like an investment. I had a CD burner quite early and made a few friends with local DJs who would burn downloaded songs bartered for other stuff.

I started listening to music just after CD-Rs were affordable, so CDs are great. My tapes were off this like the Thomas The Tank Engine audio book, and I remember the problems with them.

Maybe you are 5-10 years older.

5 years younger and it would be MP3s on small players.

Roadsides used to be littered with miles of unspooled tape, fluttering from the stinging nettles and hawthorn like the ragged banners of a decimated battalion.

Fun fact, a lot of tapes were recorded from either CD, vinyl, or FM radio. The audio quality objectively cannot be better than the source material and most people wouldn't have used high end recorders. In case of cassettes sold commercially, they would have been recorded from some master; usually the same as the vinyl or CD master. The cassette was the cheap mass market version of the same usually. Intended for people with a walkman or a car with a cassette radio built in, as was common in the eighties.

A lot of commercial cassettes would have had masters similar to other CDs optimized for playback on cheap consumer devices that teenagers could own. So that means lots of distortion, amplified bass, and wall of sound, etc. The pop music of the nineteen eighties used all the tricks there were to make music sound great on crappy hardware.

Using cassettes actually wasn't that bad. My first computer was a commodore 64 with a cassette deck as the only storage. Painfully slow but it worked. I taped songs from the radio to create my own mix tapes. Later I recorded full CDs as well. I never owned a record player. They were obsolete by the late eighties. I got rid of my cassettes fifteen or so years ago after realizing that I 1) did not own a cassette player anymore, 2) had not listened to any of them in ten years. I did not break a lot of them that I can recall.

This the only correct assessment

I used tapes and loved them, but they did break or like wear out. I naturally moved on to CDs and CD-R bridged the gap. But tapes were cool and almost magical in that you could just record on to them, rewind, record over it. It was really cool to make instant recording with no computer or other conversion involved, just whatever was going on in the cassette recorder.

Recordings, making mix tapes with your own voice, rapping over instrumentals was all really fun. CDs caught up with people making mix CDs too but they were never as cool. Mixtapes had background noises that added a touch of realism. It also took a while for cd-r drives to become common so there was a several year gap where everyone had CDs but no one could make mixes.

Then again, for me personally, being the first person with a CD-R drives was basically a money printing machine.

Not if you had a Philips drive which coastered every second CD-R, which were $5 each even in bulk. It was a lovely introduction to the futility of class action lawsuits.

Actually the CD-players always seemed to skip and pause whenever I walked too fast, jumped or even in the car when going over some pot-holes.

Cassette-tapes were also very easy to reuse. I also used them to save and load BASIC code.

That's why portable CD players added 30 second anti-skip or whatever, basically read a big chunk of the track into RAM so that the read head skipping around didn't affect playback. Tapes were definitely more stable.

Until the battery started to lose its charge, and the music would start playing at a slower tempo.

Cassette tapes were better than vinyl which seemed old to young people although they were cheap. I bought a John Lennon 45 when I was 12 years old all I knew of were 45 records. But yeah cassettes were whiny you got used to it due to their convenience.

I couldn't wait for CDs I got a CD player as soon as I could about four years later with my first paycheque (well several cheques). The only problem was I needed an amplifier too so I found a broken jukebox and ripped out the speaker.

And yes it was like the future amazing crystal clear audio and best of all no rewinding or waiting between songs.

It's a bit too late for that. Cassettes are picking up steam again (particularly because they're cheaper than anything else out there) even among people that don't have any nostalgia for them. People want something tangible.

Pre-recordered cassettes were generally bad. But buying the vinyl album and recording it yourself was a different experience. The blanks were higher quality. The quality of the recording also noticeably better.

I loved cassettes and a tape recorder. So incredibly tactile and mechanical. Makes me sad my kids don’t have them actually. They did have downsides of course.

Yup, and even worse: the 8-track.

https://youtu.be/XLZS0Sj9-1U

At least with 8-tracks you could skip tracks with a button.

tracks yes, not songs, though :-)

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