As Cassettes Come Back, the Dilemma Is Finding a Tape Deck

(1) Pre-recorded tapes are cheap and abundant. Quality really varies. My son gets any music he likes to play in his car, I collect anything prerecorded on metal or chrome for the audiophile value. (There are some recordings I listen to because I like the recording, like a tape of Tibetan chanting that sounds like instrumental Frank Zappa)

(2) Tape peaked around 1990 as CD encroached on it. The best tapes and tape equipment sound better than most people who lived through the period remember and certainly better than the mediocre mechanisms and terrible tapes (e.g. ‘type zero’) that are made today. Good chrome tapes don’t have particularly offensive hiss even without noise reduction and are somewhat affordable although metals are out of reach for most people today.

We don't need to talk about audiophiles since they've always been insane.

8 track sucks butt for other reasons. Shit durability and not reliable at all. Cassette tape but worse in every way, there's nothing really to look at, and frankly a brief blip in the story of home media.

But reaching back even further, reel to reel is now prized and expensive. Simple, reliable, and visually stunning.

These things aren't competing with Spotify or whatever at all. They're enjoyed alongside.

I don't know who you're thinking of that hates CDs. They're maybe not catching as much interest, but hate? Not seeing it.

I like my vinyl records because I think the tech is neat and like them. That’s all you need.

CD's are much less nostalgic for me, even though the quality is good, they feel not only charmless but obsolelete, much in the way that DVD/BluRay do in the age of streaming.

Cassette tape is just a bridge too far; rapidly degrading sound quality, tape de-spooling and getting chewed up and having to yank it out of the player. It was handy in the age of Walkmans if you wanted to listen to music on the go.

I guess the point I am making is that ones level of nostalgia for these older formats is probably highly dependent on your age, memories etc.

Did the same thing with CDs until MP3 players became prevalent.

Same. 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo is quite something: the CD was released in 1982. I don't know how long it took to develop before that but we're talking 42+ years now. Nearly half a century.

I both pay for a Qobuz subscription (lossless music streaming), which allows to buy lossless songs and I ripped my very own CD collection (I kept the physical CDs though).

There's an entire generation of people raised on lossy MP3s and lossy Bluetooth willing to die on the hill that "lossless CD-quality music is unnecessary". I had mp3 files back in the Napster days. What was a HDD's size back then? 8 GB? Internet connection was some DSL variant.

So, yup, with 8 GB HDD and a slow-as-molasses Internet connection and a computer from 1999, CD-quality lossless files were a bit too heavy (and anyway back then we didn't know yet how to bit-perfectly rip an audio CD).

Don't get me wrong: I've got good memories of Napster and I even still have a few impossible-to-find low quality mp3 files from back then: obscure mix aired one on obscure radio stations etc.

But we're a quarter of a century later: my SSD is not 8 GB anymore but 2 TB. And Internet is fiber to the home.

In other words: no, losslessly streaming and storing files from a format that is nearly half a century old is not a problem.

I'm done arguing with these people who believe it's stupid to listen to lossless music files: they're probably the same people who listen to old cassettes connected to soundbars.

I prefer my lossless music (either streamed over the Internet or from one of my computers) on a pair of Dali Epicon 6 speakers I bought used (video is not mine but speakers are the same):

https://youtu.be/ZQ_A4KOPuJc

YMMV.

Oh lord. Inevitably playing Barbara Streisand's greatest hits in my grandpa's light blue Dodge Dart.

While DAT was an expensive and equivalent stepping-tone, CDs were such a vast improvement because they delivered human perceptible Nyquist bandwidth-complete reproduction (PCM 44.1 kHz @ 16-bit 2 CH stereo). And still audiophiles and other sorts of liars insist on making absurd claims without evidence or demonstration that they "can tell the difference" between CDs and higher sample rates because it's simply beyond the laws of physics and limits of human perception. 44.1 kHz @ 65536 levels of sample choices is plenty. If anything, better quality DACs and preamps/amps would be more beneficial.

I bought Sony TC-KE300 deck a year ago for like $100! Sweet looking, latest (2000) tech like Dolby and HX-Pro. Had my fun changing the belts, adjusting head azimuth using oscilloscope and greasing gears. Now I'm hoarding sealed chrome cassettes - High Bias ones.

And snatched Sony Walkman WM-FX675 with remote for pennies, perks of not sleeping at 1am :)))) Belt and new gumstick battery was all it needed to shine!

Advantages: it's in a hard shell that has a 3.5"-floppy-like retracting shutter, so you have to work to damage the medium; it's essentially infinitely recordable; it's trivial to make mix discs (and to rearrange the tracks without rerecording); most of the portable recorder models had line, mic, and optical digital inputs, so you could record (in reverse order here) straight from CD (and from digital optical outputs on PC's), or from an in-person interview, or the ever-popular soundboard recording bootleg.

Disadvantages: expensive, and few people had them so you couldn't count on being able to give one to a friend. Making a fully digital copy required some tricks (SCMS defeater, pro gear, or a very specific combination of decks). A bit-perfect copy could only be made with that very specific combination of equipment (MDS-W1 + anything that could TOC-clone, or 2+ of certain pro models).