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Comment by Aldipower | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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