Comment by sickcodebruh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sickcodebruh | Hacker News Reader

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Cassettes are coming back in a big way. They never totally died in the underground metal world, especially black metal, but they’re bigger right now that at any time in my 20-ish years of recording and releasing music. They have a few benefits: extremely cheap to make and ship. Easy to store in a small apartment, car, pocket. More durable than a CD. Imperfect and grimy in a way that feels appropriate for underground music that celebrates rawness. My new album was released at the end of September and it’s selling well across all formats but the only ones where we’re sold out: limited edition vinyl colors and — you guessed it — cassettes.

After years of fighting it, I’m finally getting a new tape player for Christmas. I’m a digital audio guy but so many albums that I want to listen to can only be found on YouTube or tape and I want to support the bands directly. I can get a modern unit complete with rechargeable battery and Bluetooth for $160. https://www.wearerewind.com/ Finally, I can use my AirPod Max headphones to listen to a $6 raw black metal cassette as the Dark Lord intended.

New tape decks are poor quality, even wearerewind which puts it in a cool package uses the only new mechanism still manufactured, same as everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WleZGWAebsY&t=33s . It may be fine for some genres though ;)

The only way to play cassettes with high fidelity is to use a vintage tape deck, some of them are amazing.

> More durable than a CD

This irks me. Not that it's not true, but that tapes come with protective packaging intrinsic to the tape itself, whilst CDs are the raw media that you actually touch with your fingers etc.

CDs, way back when, were touted as the future not only because of their increased capacity for sound quality but also, ironically, their durability.

Would CDs be actually more durable if they were also packaged with a small plastic exterior that was insertable into the player, like tapes?

(Tape as raw medium isn't very durable if treated the same way as a CD. Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable).

This actually existed; I remember, back in my youth, handling an optical disc for a Sun machine that was packaged the same way that floppies were - within a hard plastic enclosure with a little sliding mechanism that was activated by pushing the package into the slot (exactly the way 3.5" floppies worked).

Yeah, my first CD-ROM drive was like this [1], the enclosure could be opened to place the CD inside.

The drive came with one enclosure, I'm not aware that anyone (including me) ever bothered buying additional enclosures. This surely wasn't helped by the fact that Audio-CD's (with their mechanical trays) were already widespread and produced at large volume without such a cartridge-enclosure...

[1]: https://www.clous.cz/wp-content/gallery/creative-cr-521-c/Cr...

Also DVD-RAM, when in the writer, had a shell. The single sided ones could be removed from the shell easily and put in a DVD drive (I do not recall if they worked in a regular DVD player)

One of the biggest wastes of money, for me. I got way more use out of my minidisc stuff, which is another optical disc in a case. In fact I still have my net-MD recorder/player, and it works fine.

Oh, if only they hadn't jacked up MiniDisc with all the copyright-related stuff. A beautiful replacement for the convenience of cassettes (portability, battery life) with most of the benefits of CD (better sound, can't be eaten by the motors). Unfortunately expensive and never took off in the US.

CD caddies existed for a brief time. I think early drives were much more sensitive to dust and scratches.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/842/retr...

CDs seem to be pretty resilient compared to tapes, from my experience buying used media. A small percentage of CDs will be unrippable, but a fair number of tapes are torn or self-destruct, and the players can have tape-destroying failure modes, aside from being mostly collections of belts that inevitably stretch, melt, or snap. One I was fiddling with managed to wrap several metres of tape around the capstan shaft so tightly it had to be cut off with a penknife.

VHS tapes seemed to be even worse at this. We had several dozen incidents of "tape stuck in player" and we were pretty careful with them. Fast-forward to the 2020s, when my wife has been trying to rip some VHS to computer, and it requires considerable babysitting of fragile tapes and players to get it to work reliably.

Personally experince was that DVDs became unplayable way more often than VHS tapes, especially if kids had any part in the handling. It's all anecdotal but I really soured on CD/DVD media due to the apparent need for clean-room handling to keep them playable.

CDs can crack pretty easily.

What do you do to crack a CD? Play frisbee?

I grew up with CDs and never knew of one cracking. With sufficient scratching it was possibly to get them the skip, but even friends who kept CDs unboxed in piles round the CD player didn't have this problem.

Sit on them. Because it's inside a bag, or under a blanket.

Parent was talking that CDs are less tolerant of abusive handling.

OK.

There's a whole level of carelessness that never occurred to me as a teenager who grew up with CDs.

No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless. Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

> No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless.

Which is/was pretty hard to do on PRESSED CD's as they were covered with a thick coating, and sometimes quite easy to do on CD-R.

> Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

Also, I only ever experienced that on CD-R, never on pressed CDs.

And to be fair: If you store all your tapes unwinded on a large spool, they also might see some damage over time ;)

Fair point, my experience is mainly with cheap CDR's. These eventually all became unreadable.

I agree. Sure CDs don't like to be sat on, but they don't tangle up like tape either.

Both are more stable than a modern counterfeit sd card from Amazon though :P

It seemed to me the main risk was those CD cases with the little plastic fingers on the centre; they seemed to require a big force to get the CD in or out.

Agreed.

I was there for the late 80s and 90s and my personal experience is mixed!

Now if a CD fails with a horrible scratch, it fails completely sometimes.

However, CDs often got kicked around the interior of cars for months and you could pick them up, wipe them off, give them a polish and they’d still play!

Tape would degrade naturally through usage.

Tape twists and stretches. Tape players can and would destroy tapes.

We never purchased new cassette tape audio. It was purely a portable disposable medium for the original Vinyl or CD. A way to copy music and play it in the car!

That you are describing is called MiniDisc.

>Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable

Reel to reel players would like a word!

Hah! Nice call out, but they even required the 'reel' to keep them somewhat manageable.

My dad had a reel to reel player. First time I heard Hocus Pocus by Focus was on that device. Still one of my top ten favourite songs. He's probably still got it too.

Most modern CD players have cheap mechanisms. The oldest, heavy duty CD players can often read right through damage that would result in skips on a modern player.

Caveat Emptor. The "We are rewind" player is absolutely awful quality. There are any number of reviews of it around, here's one from a respected YouTuber:

https://youtu.be/WleZGWAebsY

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