Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead | Hacker News Reader

Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead

differentshelf.com

I just produced 150 cassettes of my new album and people like it to have it on cassette, even if they do not have a player. But they can hold something physical in there hands while listening on-line.

And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify. It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.

We are on our third run of tapes now (50 each). Chrome-Oxide tapes can sound surprisingly good.

Our main reason is that people want to buy music at gigs and just offering solitary paper sheets with download codes doesn't really work. A tape is tangible and (for our audience) sexier than CDs and with the download code included many buy the tape even without having a suitable playback device as you observed as well.

For musicians tapes have the advantage that you can totally DIY them much easier and with less up-front cost than vinyl. And they rake less space and weigh less.

Vinyl starts to get economic after after 150 or 200 pieces depending on the pressing plant.

Yeah, but just for the records (what a play of words), Type I (Ferric Oxide) in good quality and recorded with the correct bias settings can also sound very very good. It doesn't need to be Chrome-Oxide. All the larger studio tape reels were Type I.

The thing I like about recorded music is that the listener’s equipment is part of the performance; in a sense, it’s the actual instrument, being played remotely over time and space by an engineer who’s never seen it and musicians who made a different performance in a different room on different instruments, as well as here and now by the listener herself. Every person and piece of technology in the chain shapes the experience, and every performance is unique, even if it’s you listening to Gimme Shelter on repeat on a crappy mp3 player and cheap earbuds.

There's something about analog I can't quite put my finger on it. Take digital photography for example. No matter how sharp, how "vibrant" the photos from a really good digital camera of today, it doesn't feel the same as photos from some 50 year old Nikon or Canon. Call it nostalgia if you will, but digital for all its strenghts seems to miss something

Using older lenses can help bring some of that back. Nikon DLSRs use the F-mount, which is backwards-compatible for nearly all their old lenses. They introduce some analog beauty and quirks, like over-saturation and vignetting, getting you _some_ of the way there. Film grain is still missing and that adds a lot of character.

I would love to get deeper into large format photography. The few 4x5 negatives I've taken are breathtaking in their detail.

If the track played though a cassette is that much of an improvement, couldn't you have a mastering step that runs the track through a cassette player? Or is there a je ne sais quoi that even that would fail to capture?

There are quite some good tape simulation VST plugins outside, but as they sound good, they sound like the plugin sound, not like my very own tape deck sounds. Sure, I could master with my very own tape deck, but then it sounds like my tape deck and not like yours, if you are playing the tune.

There is something very special, if you put the cassette into _your_ tape deck and run it.

You cannot replace this with something digital/virtual.

I suppose whatever you send to Spotify will then compress more the tape compression making it sound worse? Also reminded of that recent thing about AI improving YouTube videos. I wonder if Spotify would do that about certain things - small creators, concerts, other live performances.

At any rate I don't think Master - Tape - Spotify would be likely to sound better than just Master - Spotify.

Spotify itself does not compress luckily. They just do loudness normalization, which does not affect the audio quality in itself.

But the codec used for streaming does some quality degradation that is for sure.

So yeah, it is always better to listen to CD, Tape or what not then to some streaming codec music.

Spotify does not sound as good to me as a high quality/bit rate mp3.

Makes sense, because Spotify free has a bitrate of 96-160 kbps and "hq" mp3 has 320 kbps.

I use the paid version, I still feel like my downloaded mp3s sound better than the same spotify version.

You’re right, being able to hold the music is nice. PDF liner notes aren’t the same. For your next release you might be interested in the cassette label run by a friend of mine: helloamericalit.com

A few years ago I've bought an old cassette deck, ordered a few cassettes on discogs.com (some of them 30+ years old) and even recorded a few mixtapes myself. There is a long forgotten strange feeling to hold a physical media with music. Like it gives it weight...

And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes

I grabbed a cheap one for my 5 year old with some blank tapes. I remember how much I loved recording my voice, or the TV, and eventually LOTS of radio. Tangible media has more weight than just the physical object. Especially in something as durable as a cassette.

It comes in bursts but when he's into it, he has a ton of fun, The manual nature of it is confusing for him (he's used to instant gratification), like waiting a few seconds at the beginning of the tape so he can record, but something about a cassette makes the whole process easier to explain and, I hope, to understand and visualize.

> Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes

Yea, I use Type II cassettes to record on my Tascam 246. I did an experiment where I recorded a track I made digitally to tape and then back into the DAW. I A/B'd them and struggled to differentiate. That being said, I have used some really poor quality Type II tapes, where the difference was obvious.

I occasionally buy mix tapes from op shops. There is something weirdly intimate about listening to them. Part of it is the unique sequencing or the song choices. Part of it the handwriting on the insert. It’s a unique experience and perhaps a little creepy. Fun though.

What's an op shop?

A charity shop / thrift store

I just bought a DVD burner/ reader today and a stack of 100 blanks. I'm planning some physical backups of favorite media (songs, books, movies, pictures). My rackmount setup could die to lightning, fire, theft, animals, and I don't want to be terrified whether I have a backup of any particular thing on it. I'm also planning a couple of HDDs for cold storage, but they're less reliable for LTD (long-term drawer) storage than DVDs.

I hope you bought archive grade media. Also I hope the people who make such media did their work well!

Yup, M-disc DVDs. Obviously I can't prove that they won't fail, but I don't exactly need them to last that long anyways. :P

Sorry, but cold storage HDD archiving is much more reliable in the long term then DVD. Also easier to execute. Simply copy on two different HDDs from different manufactures and you are more or less safe to go.

HDD lasting up to 1000 years? I don't think so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Why so provocative? But thanks for the hint. I did not knew about M-DISC.

But back to my argument. * M-DISC isn't a regular DVD. * It is expensive and has low capacity in comparison to HDD. * To read it, you need a reader/drive, where HDDs are already the drive in itself.

I’ve actually started getting 90s-00s era vinyl for some electronic music I used to listen to.

A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.

I grew up in the 70s and I loved cassettes. I would take my records and copy them to cassettes so I could play them on horrible and not-so-horrible boom boxes at parties. And of course making mix tapes.

But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.

An essay about how a thirty-year-old mixtape led me to think about technology, memory, and the strange persistence of things we’ve already declared obsolete.

People are real quick to declare things obsolete without thinking about Pareto frontiers.

Tapes and floppies are "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about malicious controllers embedded in flash media or hard drives.

Paper is "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about cost per square inch of displaying static information, or about running without batteries.

Thanks. Digging out my shoebox of college mix tapes right now.

You mean undead? Zombie technologies?

Pretty much..the combination to listening to a song about vampires on a cassette seemed like the perfect metaphor!

I often wonder why compact disc was the bridge technology to full digital and not DAT.

Simpler production format! No case, reels, moving parts, stretched/torn tape.

If you never saw a smashed cassette on the side of the road with a reel of magnetic ribbon tangled in the weeds and bushes then you wouldn't understand.

I've seen plenty and even tossed them as streamers as a kid. I've also seen many scratched CDs lying at the side of the road.

Surprised a 30 year old cassette is still playable without falling apart. Maybe I should try some of mine.

They are surprisingly durable. I have a tape I made in 1990, it's followed me across continents and been in cardboard boxes, basements and attics. It still plays flawlessly.

Not wanting to push my luck, I archived it. On Minidisc.

I have quite a large CD collection. Two albums from the same era are unplayable due to oxidization, same band Banco De Gaia, pressed at the same plant in the UK too.

Yep, but the tape often "overspeaks" with the next winding, so you can already hear what comes in the next 2 seconds. :-) Quite interesting effect.

There is a reason they are often used as archival medium.

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