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Cost. These "new" products are doing the bare minimum needed turning extant mechanisms into a product, than make bespoke tooling for a specific performance envelope.

Cassettes are definitely a hipster kind of thing, CDs aren't as they are pretty much the only way you can have music digitally without having it taken from you. Pretty much nobody that buys CDs actually plays them regularly, they just rip it at home and use that instead.

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I’m of the opinion that you should have a cassette deck for music that never made it to CD or if they did didn’t make it to streaming. Some bands only released on cassette. True I digitize those sometimes. Also, since cassettes are two bucks a pop, it is a very affordable way to listen to music from the 90s and 80s. There is a whole different sample of music that you see in a cassette bin than that you see in CD bin. It’s older music.

I’ve got a great cassette deck as part of my stereo so it sounds great. I definitely don’t listen to it on a Walkman though.

I’m a big fan of Sarah Harmer and her first band, the Saddletramps, only released two cassettes and they didn’t release CDs. That only happened with her next band. I think this is a common occurrence for bands of the 80s and 90s.

I grant you that this is a fringe obsession that most people wouldn’t care about.

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