Please tell me you have a better deck than that? My dad still has a Walkman Pro to go with his Linn Sondek LP12 and Naim amps as sold and installed for him by called Julian But I also bought him a second hand Nakamichi Swivelling Deck. Whilst I probably need to send my old Denon 3 head out to be serviced.
To second Mr Burns if this comes with a digital download than I will buy the cassette. And to be honest this will be sight unseen because I have not heard the album at all and whilst I know some of your other work for example with Frog Leg Studios, I haven't had the chance to listen to your album yet. To be honest, I would buy it today but I have just had to borrow 5 hundred quid off the wife to buy a weeks worth of shopping from Lidl & Occado and DJI Mavick 2s which hopefully doesn't have a motherboard issue Anna (& yes I am a Dee why [0]K eee)
I do not ascribe to "accessing" music, or any other form of media. I own my copy and no one can lawfully deprive me of it. If you subscribe to "services" the company you subscribe from may change the terms of your contract whenever and however it wants to, up to and including denying you access to things you have already payed for.
Anybody ever remember sitting next to the stereo all night, waiting for your favorite songs to play on the radio and rushing to press the record button on cassette? Then hoping the DJ doesn't cut the song short or, even worse, start talking over it???
I listened to a station in Louisiana in the early 80's that all but advertised the ability to record what they played. Whole Albums without a break! I think my Dan Fogelberg cassette is from that time.
No. I would actually, you know, buy the song, often as a single on cassette or whatever. The radio, then as now, would wallop the crap out of the songs with limiting and EQ--especially the "classic rock" stations. You could spend a couple bucks and get a decent copy. The good old days are good 'cause they're gone . . . .
Indeed. The joy of listening to an album, track by track from start to end, is something that just cannot be replicated on some streaming playlist. And having the album art and sleevenotes prompts one to sit and attentively LISTEN to the music, as it is supposed to be done. When I see the kids with tiny headphones in their ears streaming music while doing their shopping or doing whatever else, I feel just pity for them, for the true wonder of music goes them by. More advanced technology does not equate to an advanced experience.
@@dogsmusicbookstravelscience i have modern solution for you - upload on your phone albums in Flac format (better sound quality than any cd or vinyl) and listen it in your phone player as albums). Btw im sure you can listen albums on streaming too track by track. Better than cassete obviously
My 12yo daughter has a walkman, and she totally loves it. It took some time to find one, even had to repair the rubber band, learn to adjust speed... She also has a phone and spotify and listens to many different music, but there's something about it that gets her attention, the physicallity (is that a word?) of the object, the walkman design, pressing buttons, the ownership, the sound, looking for more cassettes on garage sales and thrift stores, making her own mix tapes... I'm glad she can get a grasp of these things, even it's flaws
I think they will make a comeback eventually like we had the vinyl records. I remember buying my first Walkman way back in 83/84 cost £40 that was a weeks wages back then I paid £1 a week through a catalogue company
When my father died, my sister was ‘executor’ and decided what was kept, and what was thrown away. While at her house I noticed the skip out front full of his old ‘junk’. I looked through some of it…. And in a plastic bag I found his old tape Walkman. Inside that Walkman was a mix-tape I had made him over 20 years before. One sisters ‘trash’ truly is another ‘brothers’ treasure.
Your sister was executor, that means basically the legal stuff, if you are brother and sister and on good terms that makes little sense, her “ role” means very little. are you not close? it could also be seen from the “other side” that you had left her to do all the hard work instead of helping her and being involved yourself, I obviously don’t know and it’s nobody else’s business, but I’m just saying that there’s always two sides to everything.
@@lizichell2 Tapes are nichè and have been for a long time, most people these days will think they`re worthless. Maybe not trashtalk people`s family when you know nothing about them eh? It`s not easy or fun going through your family`s belongings after they`ve passed away either. Disgraceful comment.
I still purchase CD’s, it is an investment into the band, helping the artists monetarily and spiritually. Music can disappear in the cloud, but my cd is always ready to provide a positive high fidelity musical experience
Any time I have tried to give away cds they were ignored or trashed. I think the amount of consideration required to choose cassette as your medium translates into a deep love and understanding of its contents.
same I first learn of a band from YT and or a streaming service, but I will (when I can afford it) buy the cd. Rip it to my PC and copy to a usb for use in my car. There are times when I skip the cd buying step but only while I cannot afford to buy it. During that in between time in the car, many people hear that music so it is free advertising for those artist. I'm sure many will see that as a stretch, but I will honor those bands who have whined in the courts about such practices. They don't need free ads for their stuff if that's the case.
I use streaming to discover new artists and music (new and old ones I did not know yet) and then I buy a CD of the ones I love. Via computer I put it on a digital audio player. For having also an analog medium, I bought a new cassette deck a few months ago ago and a Fiio CP13 for mobile listening. 😎 Surely vinyl is better sounding analog, but I don’t have the space and money to buy every album a second time 😂 It’s all about the love to music and not so much about the best technical specs possible.
Don’t discourage us born in the 90’s (91 myself). We used floppy disks and cassettes just as much as you 80’s babies. Not everyone bought CD’s or made the transition to MP3 that quickly. I used to record and re-record my favorite songs on tape using a radio player. True timing skill.
One of my favorite memories is spending hours at Tower Records thumbing through their records and CDs looking to find a jewel to buy. You can’t get that experience with streaming music.
Not in terms of acquiring a physical media, sure. But taking a trip to a record store, browsing, trip back home. This could be a 1-2 hour process or more. If you spent 1-2 hours searching for new music you've never heard of, you will likely find something good. It just takes effort, granted not as sexy of effort as browsing records in a big music store.
Agreed, my good man. I just spent a good part of the day off trolling through such places in and around the Annapolis/Baltimore area. I'm 63yo. I didn't find a gem on which money to spend, but I had a great walk down memory road.
Same here. I bought my first cassette on a family trip in 1984. I am still collecting albums in multiple formats today. My favourite was Sam the record man on Yonge Street in Toronto. They had a sign that said “We have it. We just have to find it.” lol.
The great thing about a Walkman is that no one can call you and interrupt while you're listening to your tape. There are no notifications from apps, no ads, no distraction.
true I keep dnd on all the time tho and notifs off for all apps but texts, and not even from everyone. When I'm listening I am dialed. can be done with whatever medium you have unless it's ad supported streaming.
I still have a functioning Walkman (an Aiwa) that I bought in 1983, and a bunch of cassette tapes from the late 70s and early 80s. I never use it or listen to them, but I could.
Nothing can compare with the thrill I got as a kid, saving up pocket money, taking the bus into town, buying an album by a band I loved and not knowing what it would sound like, reading the lyrics and studying the gatefold artwork and inserts on the bus ride home.... and then putting the fresh vinyl on the player!
Indeed. The whole experience was also different. You listened to the whole album in the exected order. Artists knew this and thus also made very coherent albums with a clear order.
@@holygooff It's still possible to do that. I often shuffle all the songs on my phone, wait until I hear one and think "I love this album" - and then go to the album and play it all in the right order. As a musician, I'm also making albums that work when played through in order, in the hope that people will listen to them that way. I haven't given up. :)
Absolutely!! I remember a record shop in Birmingham called Tempest Records. Every day with the broken 20s and 10s I spent through the day, I would go and buy 3-5 albums depending on the cost, and then go home and listen to them. And I only judged based on the artwork. My deep rooted love for Rush came from seeing the artwork for Hemispheres and Test For Echo. Rushing home to listen to them was an experience I'll never ever forget. The closest experience I have had discovering something new (to me at least) via streaming, was hearing Drukqs by Aphex Twin. But that is the power of the music, and I think because Aphex Twin is a very enigmatic person who isn't connected with people the same way, it didn't matter so much. But I felt like I knew Rush intimately by spending time with the artwork, the lyrics etc. I created my debut experimental electronic album a few weeks ago, which isn't only a homage to Aphex Twin but also to pioneers such as Olivier Messiaen and John Cage. I really want to generate some money so I can listen to it on vinyl, even if it's the only copy that ever exists. And I want to listen through proper speakers, not just my headphones, even though they are very good quality.
For those who actually would like to choose and appreciate the music they listen to and not experience it like a slurry of content slop in the name of convenience.
I had a Walkman WM-DC2 - beautiful machine, Dolby C, with a quality tape, recorded on a high-end cassette deck, it sounded utterly glorious. It was a lot of effort, and cost, to get truly hifi audio from cassettes though. Few people EVER experienced "hifi" from cassettes.
Late 70s, 1980s. The commercial cassettes were uniformly dreadful in sound quality and tended to break and wear out, and were short at only 20 or 25 minutes per side. Chrome or metal tape with Dolby c on the other hand was nearly the equal of CD. Also you could easily fit two albums on a 90 or 100 min. cassette plus a few bonus tracks. It doesn't sound like much but it doubled your capacity. I used to make copies of LPs and CDs so that I could play them in my car deck and they sounded fantastic. And at that time very few cars at CD players, it was very hard to burn your own CDs, that changed only later. But most cars had cassette.
@@StratMatt777 I get downloads now because you cant hear the difference to CD unless they were recorded in some substandard studio in the first place, like some CD albums were.
@@stephenw2992 Downloads are compressed MP3s which are of lesser quality than CDs. I have 700 CDs and have been listening to them since 1995. Downloads sound bad because MP3s are compressed. The mids are congested and the high treble lacks presence. It is a quality problem that I have noticed for many years. The MP3s that comes out of my Amazon device are of a noticeably lesser quality than my CDs of the same song. It is not subtle. The highs are lacking and the definition is not there in the mids. You will not notice it unless you have heard the CD and enjoyed the sound quality, then... when you hear the MP3 you'll notice that it sounds bad. You have to do a head to head comparison between MP3 and CD. Depending upon the song and the separation of the instruments in it, it can be very apparent.
And don’t forget to pop out the tabs at the top of the cassette to prevent someone accidentally recording over the top of your mix tape! Nice to see the love of analogue making a come back
When u say "Those trying to make a living, not a fortune." It reminds me of a Guitar Shop I frequented 5-10 years ago with cheap fixes. He said, "Man, I'm just trying to make a living, not a killing."
Me too. "Assemblage" by Japan is one of favourites, plus I have over 40 mixtapes that I made for myself. It's great to still be able to listen to them. It brings back memories of those times and of making them and choosing the song order
@@k4be. That was the theory for many years but now that we have burned CDs that are 20+ years old that has been proven mostly false. I can assure you that mine are still good.
@@bourbongeek I agree. As long as the CD surface remains scratch free, it won't likely skip or stop playing whereas old cassettes that have played hundreds of times will have hiss, sound like mud, and sometimes will have wow and flutter.
Cassettes were really versatile. When I used to make mixtapes I could record from LPs, other cassettes, or CDs, pause in the middle of a track to go into something else, overdub an ambient track with something else, throw in movie samples, record my own voice
I’ve been an avid collector for years, physical albums mean it can never be taken away, or “remastered”… never again being able to find the original with the original sound that you fell in love with.
You can also keep downloads that you purchase, either by storing it on a hard drive, saving it on a thumb drive, or by burning it to a CD. There are a few on-line locations that sell downloads that equal or exceed the sound quality of the Red Book CD. What I would never count on having is what is streamed since what's there Today can be gone Tomorrow. One of the reasons I still purchase DVDs/Blu-Rays is so that I can have a snapshot of the way a movie/TV show actually was. Consider that there are (as of 1993) at least seven versions of "Blade Runner."
As a teen in the 80s I lived on cassettes and then CDs. Now I use streaming for my daily music but still keep cassettes & CDs in my collection. I miss the feeling of buying a new one in a music store (a real music store, not a virtual one), taking it home and then playing it on the hifi system while reading the sleeve.
Minidisc was nowhere near CD quality. It had about 500% more ATRAC compression than a redbook CD. The "Hi-MD" version that came out later was still about half the quality of a CD. That was why Minidisc failed; it sounded terrible to anyone with ears.
I love physical media so much that I’ve released CDs for both of my major releases (EP and album). I’ve had minimal sales but that is still more money than what I’ve made from streaming the entire time I’ve been releasing music (2 1/2 years).
CD's are pretty damned cool. I was born in the 60's so went through the vinyl/cassette and finally CD phase, but I think CD's are my favorite because of the size (flat!) so you can store a lot of them, and the quality imo is very high. I also have piles of music on my computer but it's a PITA to bother with, so CD's are my go-to for the car. I have a friend though who's gone all the way back to cassettes and swears by them.
Proprietary format that is no longer supported and needs dodgy hacks in insecure React apps to make work? worst of every world in tech imo. If Sony had opened MD like Philips did Compact Cassette, it would have been the format to end all formats. Shame they ruined it.
It wasn't totally Sony's fault that MD faltered. I lay the most blame on the RIAA. They were so terrified that MD would become the pirate's playground, they browbeat Sony into decontenting the format. A lot of blame goes to Americans in general who basically rejected MD overall. Without the American market, no format can survive. In theory, MD should have absolutely taken over the portable music domain; smaller than a CD with similar capacity, disc in a protective case, but because of compromises forced on the format, MD was unreliable. My brother went all in on MD-he even installed a player in his car. But he was constantly frustrated by incompatibility between brands of disk with one or the other of his machines, and by the non-existence of pre-recorded titles.
Agreed - MD was an awesome format. I still have an MD walkman, an MD in my hifi, and an MD in my professional audio rack. Rarely use them, besides playing my old MiniDisc "mix tapes" and occasionally transferring MDs for clients, but it remains a very cool format. Sony's "Professional Disc" is kinda like a video version of MD - only for the professional market, but again a very cool format. It's a bit sad, really, to have "redundant" equipment lying around which almost never gets used (like my PDW-F75) which I would have absolutely KILLED for in the past! Would've been my pride & joy...now it just collects dust!
I love the idea of physical media (and our 14 year old has recently got into vinyl, which is great), but I'm not sure I'm sold on cassettes. When I was a DJ in the 90s I used to record sets to minidisc and then get a small batch of CDs printed and burned to give away at shows. I feel like selling a CD makes more sense today. They're still very easy to print in small volumes, or you can burn them yourself at home. They are also very portable: the late-model Discman models were pretty much skip-proof. Unless you're really really fond of the sound of tape hiss, I'd opt for a CD every time! Either way though, I very much approve of the return of physical media ... I just wish our kid would listen to something other than Taylor Swift. 😬
CDs make way more sense for commercial release or whatever than tapes because yeah, nobody wants tape hiss or whine or wobble or having to demagnetize the whatchamacalit.
Going back to using physical media in current era is like switching from using mobile phones to wall rotaries... Old fart like you and me, who remember MD, CD, CC and vinyl have heavy nostalgia glasses on, but to be frank - not utilizing smartphone to play converted copies of albums (flac + good pair of wired headphones) and advertising cassettes is aggravatingly dumb. I understand playing with physical media at home, but for modern era people, there are far greater solutions than landfill plastic called "compact cassette tape".
I actually still have a CD DVD burner on one of my computers. Is far far cheaper easier faster to burn CDs these days. CD blanks are definitely cheaper than decent quality cassettes. You'd have to find and buy an old good quality cassette deck, remembering that they do tend to break down, then remember most cassette decks copy only at real time speed. Talk about slow. Also a lot of people still have old CD players lying around and in their cars, but very few have cassette decks anymore.
I don't know why but this made me cut onions. That wholesome feeling of sitting on the carpet, fumbling through a stack of cassettes to pop into the player with friends around. Nothing, NOTHING, will ever remove this nostalgia from us. Thanks!
i feel the shift ! we are all tired of not owning anything. ive been buying cds cassettes vinyls again, i miss the artwork , the anticipation. Yall remeber that you didnt know the other songs on the album besides the singles. youtube would remove the albums so fast back in the day lol streaming services pay artists shit. BUY DIRECTLY FROM YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS!
A good friend sent me digitized recordings of a band we were in way back in '82, recorded via cassette tape. The songs were original tunes that our band wrote. What a wonderful surprise! I'd forgotten that we were a really good band! I'm playing guitar and bass again and writing songs because of those recordings and his thoughtfulness. Occasionally, I play those old recordings to see if the 66 year-old version of me can keep up with the 23 year-old version.
Not too bad, I suppose. I'm way more chill these days. :) Search on RUclips and other services for The Simian Grip Collective. That's me, new songs (vocals are terrible due to a surgery I had). My daughter's boy friend, Dylan Wishon, mixed a few of the songs for me (the bad mixes were done by me). I've a bass solo on that channel that I'm pleased with and a few other songs where I play guitar and sing. I'm not trying to make money for those tunes. I write and sing for family and friends. I took a 39 year break from the bass and a 29 year break from guitar so it's not perfect--but I'm having fun! Be safe. Be well. Flow, my friend!
I found a box full of my first recordings made with my Tascam 464 (which I still have and use because I love its preamp sound!). Stuff with ex bands and solo things. Some of them are on my RUclips channel actually. It was amazing how I could replicate the sound of Brian May, or a short experiment with my Alesis GT and a couple of digital delays, and the guitar sounded something like an opera tenor, and more. Creativity flourished in those technically "restricted" times more than today (at least in my own case).
@@SidAlienTV I keep three guitars by my couch and I "noodle", as they call it these days, while watching TV. Many of the songs I write seemingly appear while I'm noodling. It's as if I tap into a creative sphere when I'm not trying to write a song. It's weird--and wonderful!
Mary, you have a fantastic speaking voice. Every word's properly enunciated with proper emphasis and no annoying quirks or vocal tics. So rare, especially on socials-thank you!
I loved the physical sounds of using the cassete. The mild rattle, clicking and clacking that comes from handling the tape, inserting and ejecting from the player the sound of pushing the mechanical player buttons. And who can forget the distinctive sound if taking the cassette for a spin around the bic pen? And finally, the rare sound of unspooling miles of tape by holding the cassette out the car window at high speed? Remember the aftemath of seeing cars pass you, now festooned with tape wrapped around their antennas, bumpers and wipers. The good old days!
Hello Mary! I'm Polish, Poland not Holland, I studied English for quite a long time, quite a long time ago, I NEVER HEARD someone who spoke as clearly, with such a beautiful English accent as you Mary. I almost understood everything. I'm very impressed, although it's not a language channel, it's about music... one doesn't interfere with the other. Thank you very much, it's pure pleasure.
Im 21 and love Vinyl. I bought my dad a record player 2 years ago, and since then its mostly been used by me. One thing i found to love is the silence between songs and having to flip it over when done with one side. Anyone that like 50-80s music, i hope you give vinyl a chance.
I have a couple boxes of cassette tapes and spent number of hours recording music from FM radio! I still have a couple decks and finished reconditioning a couple reel to reel machines… I have four fully working turntables and approximately 1,000+ LP,s ! Analog is back or better said, never left…just took a nice nap! Analog “rocks”…be safe. Cheers..
@@AlejandroGonzalez-AGS I agree analog all day every day, but when I am Lazy I can stream 192 24 and dsd so why buy CDs, just to take up space for more records. Lol
I can tell you that in the 80s I/we didn't use vinyl much. We all used cassettes 95% of the time. Whenever we did buy a vinyl album, the first thing we did was to record it onto a cassette so that the vinyl wouldn't risk getting scratched. (I was at primary school in the 80s, so pretty young).
I’m 18 and my dad just gave me a Marty Robbins cassette tape. I’ve played it once and I’m already in love with everything there is to listening and using a cassette tape. Definitely a new hobby.
It definitely sparks something for me Mary. I'm 77 years old and been through the entire cycle. From 78's to streaming. Love to hear of something real having a resurgence. Also, I love to hear you talk, and more, sing. Thank you!
Mary, thank you so much for showing my album Reset in the video. I didn't expect to see you holding my cassette tape and had to do a double take 🤣 I hope you like what you hear! And thank you for inspiring independent musicians all over the world. I implore everyone interested in creating music to subscribe to Mary's 21st Century Musician newsletter.
I recently bought a Tascam dual tape deck to digitize boxes of old cassettes. I had everything from albums, to garage band rehearsals, to audio letters my friends and I used to send back and forth. It has been enjoyable to revisit the medium and I welcome its resurgence, even if it only takes up a tiny slice of the pie.
Great episode, Mary! Here's my viewpoint: the Norelco cassette was invented for mono dictation, not stereo music. But with a medium such as the cassette, some people considered it might be possible to to go beyond that purpose. In 1973, the Advent Model 201 was one of the first hi-fi cassette decks on the market. I bought one for my first project home studio and, along with the available high-quality 2-input mic pre module, was able to make some clean live-to-2-track recordings. Cassette tapes had improved enormously by then with Maxell and TDK leading the way (normal and hi-bias tape formulations) and, of course, Dolby-B noise reduction built in to the deck. The cassette was also a major improvement over 8-Track cartridges used for aftermarket car stereos. After starting my own recording studio in LA in 1977 (still in operation today with me as producer/engineer), cassettes were the main form of reference mixes and copies from master tapes. At one point, I could make 8 cassette copies at a time, all very high quality. I also did the graphic design and typesetting for the J-card inserts and on-cassette labels. And listening to cassette mixes in my car was the final test of "how does it sound on___?" I'm glad I still have a car that has a cassette player and a 6-CD changer from the factory (2002 Gen 1 Toyota Prius). And in my studio, our master cassette deck (Aiwa F990) still works so we can transfer cassettes to other formats for clients. Oh, and I've got plenty of reel-to-reel multitrack decks, but we also have digital multitrack decks and digital audio workstations with Cubase, Samplitude, etc. Thanks for posting this curious title. Got me to watch the whole thing and I'm glad I did!
Years ago when a friend got a new LP or cassette I would go to his house and we would sit with full attention and listen and immerse ourselves in the music .So much like romance in the best sense. Magical. Communion. Mary, you have rare insight. Hope more young people pick up on what you are putting out.
I had (and still have) a long standing love affair with minidisc. I consider that the perfect physical medium of all time. The flexibility of cassettes with the sound quality of cd packaged up in a very satisfying form factor. I still have many old minidiscs with no way to play them now.
What most people don't know is that Cassettes can sound close to digital if you use good equipment and they can stay with there quality very long. The problem is, that most people only know cheap recorders like shown in the video which have permanent magnets as erase head which are only mechanical come in touch with the tape by pressing the record button. if you only play the cassettes they are still close to the tape, not in touch but close and it erases the tape a bit with every play. at first you won't notice it but the more often you play it, it will sound more muffled. If you have good equipment with a DC Erase head which is only active if you record on it, the tape can played thousand times and won't get noticeable worse, if the cassette and also the recorder don't have any mechanical issue. The high quality devices died out with the end of the 90s and now you only get crap. not only the devices, also the cassettes. The real good Cassettes were made between the late 70s and early 00s, also the labels had high quality equipment and used high quality tapes for copies. A pre recorded tape from the 80s or 90s can sound very close to the original and it gets even better, if you have a good tapedeck and make your own recordings. The technical specs of the cassette are much better, than vinyl. without Noise reduction and a good cassette you can get a dynamic range around 62-64 dB, with Dolby B you get over 70 and with Dolby C even 80 and more. If your tape deck is calibrated to the sort of tape you use you won't notice any artifacts from Dolby. if you then have a Wow and Flutter under 0.1% WRMS which was normal even on simpler mechanisms in the 80s and 90s it almost sounds perfect. Tape Hiss only is noticeable if you listen to headphones. There were also High End Walkmans which can be shaked without sounding silly, so you can run with them and the tape still sounds good. Also they can reach a frequency response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz flat and have a good channel separation, so it's enough to have a good listening experience. Of course digital is still better. Also in ghetto blasters and car stereos have been real hifi tape decks. I Wouldn't listen to a cassette if it has a bad quality. Most cassettes nowadays have because the people who record them don't know how to do it right or don't have the equipment. They think it can not sound better because they only know their cheap plastic recorders with the tiny speakers. And yeah, tape jam is no big thing. Good mechanisms and cassettes never do that, if they are not broken or something is wrong with them. I never would use cassette players or recorders like shown on the video. It's not possible to make them sound good. I have many cassettes which are older than 50 yrs, the oldest I got are from around 1968. At that time they didn't have HiFi Quality but they still sound as they used to, when they were new and work without issues. There are also tapes which loose their mechanical or magnetic specs and don't work anymore, sometimes they are not even 30 yrs old but especially the Japanese manufacturers are very durable. You can still use a 40 yrs old Maxell XL II or TDK SA and it will still reach its original specs and sound great no matter if you recorded it 40 yrs ago or made a new recording, if it's in good shape.
Yeah, but people don't want great. They want good enough. That's why poorly produced CDs eventually were a thing and that is the reason why using convenient 128kpbs mp3 files was more popular than listening to regular CDs. That's the very same reason why people just stream same junk from spotify, which has worse quality than 128kbps mp3s these days. Buuuut it is convenient. And tapes are very limited as well - good quality and durable tapes are 60 min, but people will want 240 ones. You may not seek, search, skip etc. individual songs (you can but the tech is limited, so compared to digital files - "you can't"). And so on. I've been raised on cassettes, and technologically, that's fine medium. But compared to digital files, it's wank.
I thought I was the only one to have shelves and drawers filled with tapes - pleased to meet you! I maintain my tape deck well and take good care of all my tapes, so they still fill my house with beautiful music and they still sound wonderful.
@@danaveye3977 It varies, depending on how well they’ve been cared for over the years. Plenty of them sound like they’re brand new. The whole myth that tapes are inherently fragile and deteriorate over time is nonsense. Of course tapes that were left in hot cars during the summer, thrown around, and otherwise handled carelessly are going to sound worse.
As an almost 50 year old I can relate to each and every word. Maybe I'm a romantic but I always enjoyed buying CDs, vinyls and cassettes, the smell of a new booklet, having the actual object in my hands... It's funny that you released this video these days because nowadays I'm planning to build a composing-recording-mixing little studio, and one of the first things in my to-do list is restoring and servicing an amazing and old (1978) Sony cassette deck that will live happily together with the modern gear. And regarding this video, absolutely amazing image and sound quality, it was pure joy to hear your voice so well recorded and without seeing a big microphone in front of you. Thank you!
honestly I was gonna do that but went digital. I do have a lot of analog outboard gear but the price for a full analog studio is prohibitive. I ended up buying an old tascam 4 track. honestly theres something to be said about making a commitment to bounce a track so you have an extra one to keep recording. theres a price to pay for bad decisions so you work carefully. in fact when I track songs digitally I NEVER make more than 16 tracks. I gave up buying a million plugins.. I uninstalled most of them and REALLY learned how to use the ones I have. it's all you need. good luck
My goto is physical media, CDs and LPs. Only resort to digital downloads if an artist doesn’t offer physical media. Will never subscribe to any streaming service. I love the cassette experiment Mary! Simply brilliant!
Same here. Haven't streamed for a single second of my life. But I know what the experience is like, because so many of my friends and peers have gone that route and I've also seen how it changed their approach (for the worse) to music. I have, however, saved digital versions of a few of my prized albums in the cloud as the ultimate backup, should my home burn down or get wiped out some other way. But that's as far as my relationship with current tech will go.
If I physically owned all the music i listen to, not only would my studio apartment be full up to the ceiling, it would also literally be a million dollar collection. I simply don't have the space or cash for such a collection. Nor the desire to own all that crap, just so I can listen to music. For the time being, I'll take the entire history of recorded music on my phone thanks.
A decent cassette deck in the 80s had Dolby technology which drastically reduced the amount of background hiss. Coupled with a good quality tape, I found the sound quality perfectly adequate at the time, and I was somebody who cared about details when it came to sound. I'm pretty sure it would still do for me.
A portable Walkman cassette player battery lasted much longer than a phone battery. No interruptions from messages and spam calls while listening to books. No censorship or book banning by Amazon.
i have to disagree. if we rub the rose colored nostalgia from our eyes, 2 AAs would barely last one full school day. but you could always get cheap batteries from the crackhead on the bus or just lift em yourself from the kwikway....and quick counter example to censorship; Queen's a day at the races US version had a censored album cover. To find more examples wouldn't be difficult. and distribution channels have (attempted to) ban books since the inception of books.
@@1TyredFunGuy Not in reality, the cassette player is not a dual use item. It's the phone that has to stay on all the time. I had a Sony walkman cassette player that took a single AA battery and I could listen to many books on that one battery. It was amazing.
You wish. My walkman went through batteries like it was crack and rechargeable batteries didn't work well because their voltage was too low (1.2V instead of 1.5V). It was so expensive to buy batteries that we used a BIC pen to rewind our cassettes.
You mentioned something about today's music can suddenly go away... I just want to remind everyone that when using cassettes, your music can still go away suddenly. anyone who ever heard their beloved mix tape suddenly sound like Alvin & the Chipmunks knows what I'm talking about. :D
Takes a bigger disaster to destroy a whole cassette collection compared to a streaming service removing millions of tracks at a moment’s notice, or a hard drive crash that takes out gigabytes of files.
I recently found a mixtape I made 40 years ago. Played it and was transported. Yes, the sound isn't as dynamic as DC or digital, but simply the tactile action of fast forwarding the whole tape, tightening the cog with a biro, the sound of the motor that spins the spools, and the LED volume meters on the old Sony cassette player...it's such an event as opposed to asking Alexa to play something.
I found a cassete from 90-s, found a portable cassete recorder, stuff the former into the latter and damned thing chewed through the tape - the pinch roller's rubber has become sticky over time. The thing less likely to be happened to a streaming service.
@@ВасилийКоровин-г9э yes, tapes and their gadgets to use them on are physical and mechanical, therefore need maintenance and care. Sorry this happened, but anything physical must be used with care. with or without warning labels.
@@addhoardingprocrastinator You're right, but this is the reason for not to subject yourself to this kind of trouble, as long as it is not necessary due to technological progress.
Greetings from America! Thank you for this! Most people today have no idea about what a cassette is capable of. Years ago I could play my cassettes through my stereo system without any audible tape hiss at all. In my listening room the music group, whether Count Basie or the Moody Blues would sound as if they were performing a private concert for me. I was running a Technics dual autoreverse deck with Dolby C and the headroom extension circuitry. My speakers were Klipsch towers with horn tweeters and 10 inch bass drivers and 10 inch passive radiators. Folks who heard it were amazed. I now have a smaller system with Canadian Paradigm bookshelf speakers which are incredible for their size. I played in 2 U.S. Navy bands many years ago and over 20 years as a civilian and it is sad what has happened in the music world. If I listen to a tape on a small player I can mentally tune out the hiss so no big deal as far as some hiss is concerned. Thanks so much Mary for this. The wonderful artwork on some of the vinyl I own is wonderful to look at as well. I am thinking of the Beatles and the Moody Blues when I say this. Warmest wishes from America! 🌝🌈🎵🌼🎹🇺🇸
My physical music collection is dominated with cassette tapes. They are my go-to format when listening to music. And that physical connection you mentioned, whenever I listen to an album on cassette if it is an album or song that I have not heard in a while, that goosebump feeling you get when it feels like all your nerves activate and you have a slight ghost shiver, that feeling when I listen to a song or album on a cassette tape is 10 times (about the same for other physical formats like CD and Vinyl LP) more effective and powerful than when I listen to the same song on a streaming service. It feels more realistic having something to feel (the J-Card that you open up to read the credits out of and possible lyrics/additional artwork) rather than staring at the main cover. I will always continue to buy cassette tapes because they stand as a testament for my dedication towards an artist. If I own an album on cassette, chances that I want to see that artist live are higher than artists that I stream.
my bloody valentine for example. I want to see them live so bad!!!!!!!!! I got to see Roger Waters during his This Is Not A Drill tour, The Smashing Pumpkins during their World Is A Vampire Tour, and Primus, Puscifer, and A Perfect Circle during the Sessanta Tour. The only thing better than physical mediums of music is live music itself. I wish I had A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step and Puscifer's Existential Reckoning on cassette.
Well said. Holding a physical medium in my hand is a wonderful feeling. I still have my Nakamichi cassette player. I also have and maintain my DAT and CD players. And in am in the market for a good vinyl record player. So glad to see this vid. My family & friends still say that they so miss the days when I would send them cassettes of my original music. I would autograph and inscribe little notes and thx to them on their paper liners. It felt like more of a personal gift to them. As you say…good community building. Cheers.
Something I need to think about. I never thought we would be moving back to cassettes however I never forgot this era and bought tshirts and other items in a form of cassettes to decorate my studio because of the nostalgia vintage look. This might be fun to introduce this to my audience.
Mary, I so loved that you talked about this. Cassettes were all the rage in the 80’s. I was fortunate enough to have a ghetto blaster that had a dual set so I could borrow music from friends to get my own copy. Or they get copy from me. Lying on the floor in my room for hours, listening to the radio waiting for that song that you requested for the DJ to play so you could hit record button. It’s just the right moment. it was never perfect, but I didn’t care. My songs were at my fingertips. I wore out a cassette of U2’s Rattle and Hum. The tape broke and my girlfriend went out and bought me a second copy. Record stores! We had three separate stores in our mall. And we even had independent stores that were standalone. The record stores sold concert tickets! W’d stand in line to buy tickets. I remember when U2 released ACHTUNG BABY at Midnight at the record store. It was an event to look forward to, and it created a lot of memories. I’ll never have memories like that of downloading songs on my iPhone. I think in memory of cassettes and CDs I will download the thrill is gone by B.B. King.
Ghetto Blaster's were awesome for a lot of things. The duel decks and some with EQ was great technology for the times. What I didn't like about taping was when you had to much song and not enough tape on side A and having to flip it over mid-song to side B. The gaps were infuriating.
@@maximusindicusoblivious180 it’s worse than an n-Track Tuner will start the song for you. Where is with the cassette? You have to turn it over yourself. My mom loved to play foreigner 4 in the car and the song break it up was always interrupted from ending on track two and restarting on track three. Hall & Oates Private Eyes the same thing.
Don't forget MiniDisc. To me the point of physical media is that you have a complete artistic product, say for example, a vinyl record with 2 sides, 10 songs. Those songs have a synergy and context with each other as the artist intended. Those songs you didn't like when you first heard them, grow on you over some listening. It's also a more intentional act to choose a physical object and put it into a music player. Not to mention it provides better support to artists.
That tactility of handling physical media is the main appeal for me. The deliberate act of seeking out the media which contains the songs/album I want to listen to from storage, turning the player on, inserting the media and pressing 'Play'; then stowing it back where it came from once I'm done.
@@torocruz1192 Early on, yes, but by the MDLP era (1999 or so), ATRAC3 was as good or better than a high quality MP3, and much better than the AAC files available at the time through Apple Music.
In fact, a lot of people consider cassetes as a lo- fi experience, but always depends; real quality of the tape ( materials, frequency response, etc) Deck machine ( heads, pre amplification and signal process) and the recording itself ( original source, direct, live, cd, vynil) A very good example of excellence in professional broadcast audio is Tascam 122 mkII Thank you Mary!!
if i go to a concert and they are selling cassettes at the merch table, I usually buy one as a souvenir even if I don't love the band. I imagine myself as an old man re-living my concert-going days through these cassettes some day.
I work as live engeneer in a small venue and I had this exact conversation with a lot of artists (some of which with cassette tapes at the merch, some without): a cassette, for a cheaper price than a vinyl (!) is the easiest way for the audience to take something home. They are so small that you can buy them spontaneously and just put them in your pocket. Usually they cost only half of what a vinyl does and most even have a bandcamp download code inside them. I have a collection of something like 50 mcs of bands that I mixed and I think of that collection the same way you do.
I grew up recording and listening to cassettes. Making my own radio shows, recording song ideas, recording from the radio, making mix tapes, multi-tracking with a four-track and, of course, buying music from the record shops - I loved it all!! I still have hundreds in bags and boxes in my cupboards. I even remember unscrewing them to fix the scrumpled up tape when disaster struck!! 😁
As someone else who had a 4 track (Tascam porta 404) i would not wish for those days back at all, give me a DAW and plugins anytime over that horrible experience!
I've still got a cassette tape from 1983 featuring the UK Top 40 radio show presented by Tommy Vance which I recorded myself when I was 4 years old. Yes, that wasn't a mistake. I really was 4. Not boasting or anything, just a statement of what happened.
@@FlatDerrick HA! I feel the exact same way. Cassettes are okay if you just want to record stuff to listen to in your car, but they're useless to work with in a studio. I fought with tape all through the 80's and I had a Tascam reel to-reel (40-4 which was like an 80-8 but with 4 tracks and used 1/2" tape), but even with that, there's was slight noise etc. The DAW stuff blows the crap out of all that old crap and for maybe 5 or 10k, you could now build a studio that years ago would have cost you 300k to get that level of sound quality.
The cassette was born the year I was, I recorded my first fumbling's on guitar trying to figure out how to write my own songs (which is all I ever wanted to do.) I learned to compose and overdub on a portable 4 track which I considered an incredible luxury at the time. When listening to those cassettes, I can reflect on the space my head was in from that time. I keep buying digital multitrack recorders but cannot connect with them because the tactile, tangible feeling you get from a cassette is not there. I end up reselling them. I compiled mix tapes and hand made their 'album' covers for people I really liked. The memory of those individual's (and in turn hopefully me as well) can be recalled when seeing and listening to a cassette . I have moments caught on a huge 'boombox' of long deceased family members and friends which I still revisit. I have a great reverence for all my cassettes and listen to them in my car to great effect. I cant imagine a life lived without them. stream that!
I had a Tascam 4 track cassette studio. Made some cool recordings of original songs with entire band doing track merging to free up more tracks. Had a great time with that porta studio.
When CD's first started coming out I was hoping they would release a new version of the cassette with two little cd's spinning inside them, even having to flip it over to change sides, that would have been cool 🤩
@@droopy_eyes Minidiscs from Sony were entirely digital audio using Sony's proprietary ATRAC data compression process similar to the mp3. Perhaps you're confusing it with the LaserDisc for video.
I was born in the mid 60's. I grew up with the cassette tape. The two most disappointing aspects of them are the inevitable hiss and the fact that every time you play it, the sound quality slowly but surely deteriorates. That aside, back when it was the only option for compiling your favorite songs, it was great.
Replace "cassette tapes" with 'CDs" and all the same points still apply, except CDs are cheaper to produce, easier to copy and distribute, sound better and are physically smaller and lighter. But I do understand the nostalgic factor of cassette tapes. They look super cool.
I had the exact same thought. It's easier for me to burn a custom CD than to record a cassette, even though I technically have the hardware to do both, and the really is superior in every way and more accessible. I buy a lot of music digitally, but for my favorite artists I still buy a CD, rip it, and play the .MP3/.AAC on my devices. Though my iPod finally died at the end of last year and I'm still in mourning.
Yep. Cassette & vinyl are retromantic, nostalgic. For sure CD has more advantages. I remember, couple of years ago before going out for a road trip, i spent hours for burning CDs… copying my mp3 collection from hdd to CD so the car can play it 🥲
Back in days long-ago, the first thing that I would do after purchasing a new LP was to record it to cassette, and move the LP into storage. I would then play the cassettes rather than my LPs. It preserved the LPs as "near-mint" condition, but I would still enjoy the music via my tapes. To date, I own about 900 cassettes with one LP per side. My vintage cassette decks all work well (following annual maintenance). Thumbs up!
The (late) Steve Albini, as you know, was a total supporter of analog taping in his studio's and did very little digital processing. Beyond the sound issue, his big point was that over time, digital formats can be superseded by newer ones, and older digital recordings can literally be "lost", because their formats are no longer mainstream and will slowly "retire" into obscurity.
That's a pretty dumb take. It is FAR more likely that you'll lose the ability to play an analogue format than a digital format that can be ripped with perfect fidelity onto a computer. There are other reasons for analogue in a studio, but most analogue goes through a digital path at some point.
well, digital music is in "containers" (format), but digital is digital and their conversion rates is what makes the difference. mp3's sound terrible because of their sample rates and horrible compression. a 96k recording sounds amazing. but its still digital.
OK, I'm old. I was probably the first one in the area we lived in to go with a cassette player in the car. The tapes were smaller than the 8 Tracks everyone else had so I could get more tapes in the car. The glovebox was FULL of tapes. LOL!!! My speakers were "MindBlowers" by "Tenna". I would drive past the high school in the afternoon with either Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" or Gino Vanelli's "Appaloosa" blaring out. Thank you, young lady. You've just reminded me of my youth and I could almost feel it all over again.
Great video Mary 😊Wanting the cassette back is like getting back together with an ex after a long separation. You remember the good times but forgotten the bad times. Then you start remembering why you broke up and how those issues haven't miraculously fixed themselves in the intervening period. If i was gonna go back to analog then I'd go for vinyl at home but stick with streaming as the mobile option.
As I was cleaning out my attic, I found in my box of old cassette tapes an album by an unknown Baltimore band from the 90s called 'The Church Mice'. They never made it big and broke up too soon, but their tunes were catchy and never made it to ANY digital media service - I've searched for years. Here's to ownership of music and an interesting new/old model of distribution!
I think the "lo-fi" fad has done cassettes a lot of injustice because unless they are x-generation dubs which are noisy and dull sounding, a clean new "original" tape usually sound pretty well ok and by most people's headphones audio quality perfectly adequate. Thanks for this wonderful chat :-)
I am watching the documentary now. Thanks for the recommendation. My childhood was imbued with the history of cassettes. I still remember the first time I discovered, on my own, how to record by pressing the play and "rec" buttons on my mom's Radio Shack mono tape player. Knight Rider was the hot new show on tv at the time and I tried to narrate my own made-up scene of Michael Knight having an adventure with his talking Pontiac Trans Am, KITT. Although that tape is long lost, I recall the experience of excitedly playing what I'd captured for my mom and dad, as if I had learned some magic trick and was eager to try and amaze them! Many a mixtape was made by my hands during middle and high school years. Through the mtv, head banging, and battle of the bands years, I recorded every time I played drums with my friends, when the local music store, Richmond Music Center had a clinician performing and giving a talk, and often chose to journal this way over writing down my thoughts. On the drive from homeroom at Midlothian High to Chesterfield Technical Center each weekday, I'd listen to Duke by Genesis, made for me by my buddy Dave on his hi-fi system. Even though many great memories on cassette are lost, I still have what most would consider a ton of tapes.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I had a few vinyl records but mostly cassettes during the pre-CD days. I definitely don't miss constantly forwarding and rewinding cassette tapes or having them regularly chewed up by the cassette player, not to mention the hiss. I sense that Millennials and Gen-Z have somewhat romanticized older formats (BTW, how about 8-Track and the Edison Cylinder? Mary didn't mention those...). That's all well and good, but the practical aspects will eventually catch up and become dominant. I never bought into the streaming music service model. I started my CD library when the format first came out, and that remains my format of choice. Vinyl has wonderful warmth and presence, but I prefer the portability and clarity that CD offers, either by converting to digital files or using portable players for the discs themselves. You can't listen to vinyl in your car, at work, or while traveling---only in the room where you have your turntable. Overall, CDs are still the best format in my humble opinion. At least for me. Plus I like making playlists, which one can't do with vinyl and is tiresome with tapes. One doesn't HAVE to use a streaming service, thankfully. One can create their own digital personal library of music without any influence, commercialism, tracking, data mining, sharing personal information, or interference. I rip all my CDs (mostly as lossless) and have them as my archive in a closed system. Finally, where the CD industry (and this relates to cassettes) dropped the ball isn't the CDs themselves but the packaging. I wish they had gone with cardboard sleeves (like vinyl) from the start instead of those annoying plastic jewel cases, which were poorly designed. Now we see CDs in cardboard sleeves all the time, as they should be. I suspect the plastic/chemical industry lobbied for their packaging back in the day. Bringing back cassettes means more plastic cases and the plastic cassettes themselves. Do we need more plastic the world?
Your opening was so correct and accurate. Streaming services and devalued music to the general public and squeezed all potential livelihood from musician artists. Niche music like jazz has suffered enormously.
I've used a portable cassette players daily during my teen years, not even nostalgia would make me go back. CD's are better in every way. They're phisical to, but smaller, with better sound and with more abundant player devices, and faster to burn (there was something like dubbing, but that wasnt that fast neither).
What better way to express your identity to a new coworker/ potential friend than making them a mixed tape? Saying 'Hey, here is the kind of music that speaks to me, check it out.' My favorite band of all time is Concrete Blonde. I would have never heard of them, and I don't remember encountering them on radio or MTV. But in the late 80s, my new girlfriend made me a mixed tape, and one of the songs on that tape was 'Joey'. I miss making mixed tapes, listing, shuffling, figuring out what songs are not just good, but are good next to each other in a listening experience, and finally constructing that perfect mix for the person or road trip or whatever was on the agenda.
The album art was part of the sacred experience of cradling your favorite music in your arms as you analyzed the art and read every word on the album. And it was yours. All yours. 1979. The Wall. Pink Floyd. When good music was rare and we were grateful.
Back then, we savoured music. Even if you just had something on in the background, you'd still have to get up every once in a while and select the next thing to play, with care, because that's what you'd be listening to for the next hour or so. No zapping around, no skipping past the so-so songs, and in time those songs might even grow on you. Good music wasn't rare though, the 70s and 80s were a veritable treasure trove of music. But we did treasure each of our favourite songs and albums. I miss that.
I think a CD is a better bet. The quality is so much better and plenty of bands are still releasing them, especially outside the USA and Europe. CDs are still big in Japan.
They are, but keep in mind that the quality of recordable cd's was a nightmare. They never reached the quality of purchased or commercially available cd's for that matter.
@@svenlabots1869 I can see that but the quality of CC was pretty dire too unless they were metal and recorded and played back on first quality equipment. And metal tape was really expensive. A lot of cars still have a CD player too.
Outside of the U.S., especially in former eastern block countries, physical media remains very popular including cassettes as access to streaming media is limited. Some places in Asia as well. While a niche market it remains resilient.
I have many! I got into cassette about ten years ago when it was completely dead, I used to buy good albums for 25 cents a pop! Sometimes you can get lucky and still find that.
I still have my cassettes. I only pay for music I can have and hold after "buying" online from a company that later vanished some years ago. Plus I won't use a service that I can't stop the adverts from. I still buy CD's and DVD's when artists release them, and prefer buying direct from the artist where possible. The 80's was a great time for music and devices.
I'm over 60... I had a variety of Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassette. In the early 90's I ordered most of my old records in CD form from Columbia House. Yes, 12 CD's for a "Penney." To this day, I still buy CDs because I want to OWN it.
Thank you, Mary i bought just your Cassette Release, i am an old-school rocker age 68 and deep inside me was a vision of the tape comeback. I hope there is a glimpse of the silver sky on your tape. Best wishes from Rainer
It is quicker to put choosen cassette to player and push knob amnd it plays from last moment , even 5 years ago when was stopped in comapre to digital.
Yestarday remind myself that I had account on portal and there I had songs performed by me which I put there in 2008 . Searched with google and found that portal "still existing"but couldn't sign in. Then I realised that only name and provided services are the same but previous was closed in 2017. My songs were then distroyed without of course warning. .
Fun, and the second advantage is the speed of the creative flow. Zero distractions with mouse clicking on the DAWs, no plugins, just the "heat of the moment".
I still prefer digital, but I'll grant you that the old school analog four tracks reduced the likeliness of choice fatigue, the endless tweaking, and it developed one's chops from having to rehearse the parts prior to committing to tape. There is merit to your preference that I can respect.
Nice video! But one big reason to make cassette release for consumers is if you are recorded by analogue. That also requires whether unmastered release, or fully analog mastering. If the recording is digital or digitally mastered, CD is a better candidate then. Could also natively reccord in DSD and then release the album on dual SACD to please the listener!
no doubt ha ha!! I remember learning the trick of fast forwarding tapes with my finger half pressing the "play" button so I could hear when the next song started.
"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy". What a wonderful world this would become if DCC (which would be modern sound quality on an old format) would see a renaissance!
@@siddhartacrowley8759 The W-E-F's wet dream is that in the future _everything_ will be based on rent. You know, like Spotify/Tidal etc. already is. In modern politicians heads, in the future you won't need digital copies. And, according to W-E-F, owning nothing will make you (and the climate) happy. See, owning things and thus having a sense of ownership for it is not good for the climate. According to W-E-F and "96% of scientists".
DCCs (digital compact cassettes) and DATs (digital audio cassettes) and MDs (mini-discs) all use a fallible magnetic recording medium. Recording to an SD card or micro-SD card (secure digital) or USB stick (universal serial bus) or a CD-R (compact disc recordable) is the only way to escape the guaranteed future of medium degradation/failure. Each has a lifespan much longer than yours.
📼 *SUPER SEXY CASSETTE* store.maryspender.com/products/super-sexy-heartbreak-cassette
ohh fantastic Mary , does the tape purchase also come with digital download like the CD purchase ?
Do you deliver to Denmark? Since I'll be living there soon.
Please tell me you have a better deck than that?
My dad still has a Walkman Pro to go with his Linn Sondek LP12 and Naim amps as sold and installed for him by called Julian
But I also bought him a second hand Nakamichi Swivelling Deck.
Whilst I probably need to send my old Denon 3 head out to be serviced.
To second Mr Burns if this comes with a digital download than I will buy the cassette. And to be honest this will be sight unseen because I have not heard the album at all and whilst I know some of your other work for example with Frog Leg Studios, I haven't had the chance to listen to your album yet.
To be honest, I would buy it today but I have just had to borrow 5 hundred quid off the wife to buy a weeks worth of shopping from Lidl & Occado and DJI Mavick 2s which hopefully doesn't have a motherboard issue
Anna (& yes I am a Dee why [0]K eee)
I do not ascribe to "accessing" music, or any other form of media. I own my copy and no one can lawfully deprive me of it. If you subscribe to "services" the company you subscribe from may change the terms of your contract whenever and however it wants to, up to and including denying you access to things you have already payed for.
Anybody ever remember sitting next to the stereo all night, waiting for your favorite songs to play on the radio and rushing to press the record button on cassette? Then hoping the DJ doesn't cut the song short or, even worse, start talking over it???
I listened to a station in Louisiana in the early 80's that all but advertised the ability to record what they played. Whole Albums without a break! I think my Dan Fogelberg cassette is from that time.
Use to do that all the time with my 1st cassette deck.
No. I would actually, you know, buy the song, often as a single on cassette or whatever. The radio, then as now, would wallop the crap out of the songs with limiting and EQ--especially the "classic rock" stations. You could spend a couple bucks and get a decent copy. The good old days are good 'cause they're gone . . . .
All the time!
The Cult of Personality! They ALWAYS cut out the JFK quote!
If you took the time to make a mixtape, that person was very important.
The person i gave the mixtape, didn’t know this fact😭
LOL! That's exactly what I did for a girl I was in love with in the early eighties. Now we're married... was it the cassette that did the magic? :)
@@permanenceinchange2326 If you had "In Your Eyes" then it helped.
I made a few for myself :D
(those were the times when I listened to house/trance, and I used a double deck to make my own mix tapes :D)
I made mixed cds
The best thing about physical albums and CDs is reading the sleeve notes when listening to the whole album for the first time.
On no these "physical" neanderthals again. So CD is good now? Same type of people in 80s says CD is ruining physical music cause its digital lol
The art was awesome.
Indeed. The joy of listening to an album, track by track from start to end, is something that just cannot be replicated on some streaming playlist. And having the album art and sleevenotes prompts one to sit and attentively LISTEN to the music, as it is supposed to be done. When I see the kids with tiny headphones in their ears streaming music while doing their shopping or doing whatever else, I feel just pity for them, for the true wonder of music goes them by. More advanced technology does not equate to an advanced experience.
@@dogsmusicbookstravelscience i have modern solution for you - upload on your phone albums in Flac format (better sound quality than any cd or vinyl) and listen it in your phone player as albums). Btw im sure you can listen albums on streaming too track by track. Better than cassete obviously
@@dzenacs2011 No thanks.
My 12yo daughter has a walkman, and she totally loves it. It took some time to find one, even had to repair the rubber band, learn to adjust speed...
She also has a phone and spotify and listens to many different music, but there's something about it that gets her attention, the physicallity (is that a word?) of the object, the walkman design, pressing buttons, the ownership, the sound, looking for more cassettes on garage sales and thrift stores, making her own mix tapes... I'm glad she can get a grasp of these things, even it's flaws
It's so nice to know this. Good for you sir.
I think it's easier to form a connection by the physical buttons, the effort we put in doing something.
I think they will make a comeback eventually like we had the vinyl records. I remember buying my first Walkman way back in 83/84 cost £40 that was a weeks wages back then I paid £1 a week through a catalogue company
Its a treasure she should hold on. bet your daughter appreciates old music too.
Parenting Win right there
BRO YOUR SO LUCKY! man that's nuts
When my father died, my sister was ‘executor’ and decided what was kept, and what was thrown away. While at her house I noticed the skip out front full of his old ‘junk’. I looked through some of it…. And in a plastic bag I found his old tape Walkman.
Inside that Walkman was a mix-tape I had made him over 20 years before. One sisters ‘trash’ truly is another ‘brothers’ treasure.
Glad you saved it 😊
Like a typical modern person, all she could see was the value of the house
Your sister was executor, that means basically the legal stuff, if you are brother and sister and on good terms that makes little sense, her “ role” means very little. are you not close? it could also be seen from the “other side” that you had left her to do all the hard work instead of helping her and being involved yourself, I obviously don’t know and it’s nobody else’s business, but I’m just saying that there’s always two sides to everything.
Executioner of music more like
@@lizichell2
Tapes are nichè and have been for a long time, most people these days will think they`re worthless.
Maybe not trashtalk people`s family when you know nothing about them eh?
It`s not easy or fun going through your family`s belongings after they`ve passed away either.
Disgraceful comment.
I still purchase CD’s, it is an investment into the band, helping the artists monetarily and spiritually. Music can disappear in the cloud, but my cd is always ready to provide a positive high fidelity musical experience
Any time I have tried to give away cds they were ignored or trashed. I think the amount of consideration required to choose cassette as your medium translates into a deep love and understanding of its contents.
same I first learn of a band from YT and or a streaming service, but I will (when I can afford it) buy the cd. Rip it to my PC and copy to a usb for use in my car. There are times when I skip the cd buying step but only while I cannot afford to buy it. During that in between time in the car, many people hear that music so it is free advertising for those artist. I'm sure many will see that as a stretch, but I will honor those bands who have whined in the courts about such practices. They don't need free ads for their stuff if that's the case.
The record label gets paid first. You spend $19 at FYE and the person singing gets a buck fifty.
How is exchanging money for a piece of plastic helping music artists spiritually?
I use streaming to discover new artists and music (new and old ones I did not know yet) and then I buy a CD of the ones I love. Via computer I put it on a digital audio player. For having also an analog medium, I bought a new cassette deck a few months ago ago and a Fiio CP13 for mobile listening. 😎
Surely vinyl is better sounding analog, but I don’t have the space and money to buy every album a second time 😂
It’s all about the love to music and not so much about the best technical specs possible.
Going on school trips and swapping tapes on the bus is how we discovered new music. Loved it.
Those were some days
Don’t discourage us born in the 90’s (91 myself). We used floppy disks and cassettes just as much as you 80’s babies.
Not everyone bought CD’s or made the transition to MP3 that quickly.
I used to record and re-record my favorite songs on tape using a radio player. True timing skill.
I dont get how it never occurred to her to put an SD card in a great package.
I used cassettes at least till 2004. I was born late 80's though but i imagine it wouldn't be that much different from begin born in the early 90's.
One of my favorite memories is spending hours at Tower Records thumbing through their records and CDs looking to find a jewel to buy. You can’t get that experience with streaming music.
Not in terms of acquiring a physical media, sure. But taking a trip to a record store, browsing, trip back home. This could be a 1-2 hour process or more. If you spent 1-2 hours searching for new music you've never heard of, you will likely find something good. It just takes effort, granted not as sexy of effort as browsing records in a big music store.
For me, it was Tower Records on Sunset Friday night after work.
@@ivers1001 This was WAY before streaming. Think internet through a modem.
Agreed, my good man. I just spent a good part of the day off trolling through such places in and around the Annapolis/Baltimore area. I'm 63yo. I didn't find a gem on which money to spend, but I had a great walk down memory road.
Same here. I bought my first cassette on a family trip in 1984. I am still collecting albums in multiple formats today. My favourite was Sam the record man on Yonge Street in Toronto. They had a sign that said “We have it. We just have to find it.” lol.
The great thing about a Walkman is that no one can call you and interrupt while you're listening to your tape. There are no notifications from apps, no ads, no distraction.
no adds .
true I keep dnd on all the time tho and notifs off for all apps but texts, and not even from everyone. When I'm listening I am dialed. can be done with whatever medium you have unless it's ad supported streaming.
I still have a functioning Walkman (an Aiwa) that I bought in 1983, and a bunch of cassette tapes from the late 70s and early 80s. I never use it or listen to them, but I could.
you can turn all those distractions off, you know. they are there because you want them. ads? just really buy your music ffs
@@bubtheloop I've got a record collection with over 1000+ titles. And I turn off the notifications. But thank you for the suggestion 👏
Nothing can compare with the thrill I got as a kid, saving up pocket money, taking the bus into town, buying an album by a band I loved and not knowing what it would sound like, reading the lyrics and studying the gatefold artwork and inserts on the bus ride home.... and then putting the fresh vinyl on the player!
I distinctly remember that experience, too! It was wonderful.
Indeed. The whole experience was also different. You listened to the whole album in the exected order. Artists knew this and thus also made very coherent albums with a clear order.
@@holygooff It's still possible to do that.
I often shuffle all the songs on my phone, wait until I hear one and think "I love this album" - and then go to the album and play it all in the right order. As a musician, I'm also making albums that work when played through in order, in the hope that people will listen to them that way. I haven't given up. :)
Absolutely!! I remember a record shop in Birmingham called Tempest Records. Every day with the broken 20s and 10s I spent through the day, I would go and buy 3-5 albums depending on the cost, and then go home and listen to them. And I only judged based on the artwork.
My deep rooted love for Rush came from seeing the artwork for Hemispheres and Test For Echo. Rushing home to listen to them was an experience I'll never ever forget.
The closest experience I have had discovering something new (to me at least) via streaming, was hearing Drukqs by Aphex Twin. But that is the power of the music, and I think because Aphex Twin is a very enigmatic person who isn't connected with people the same way, it didn't matter so much. But I felt like I knew Rush intimately by spending time with the artwork, the lyrics etc.
I created my debut experimental electronic album a few weeks ago, which isn't only a homage to Aphex Twin but also to pioneers such as Olivier Messiaen and John Cage. I really want to generate some money so I can listen to it on vinyl, even if it's the only copy that ever exists. And I want to listen through proper speakers, not just my headphones, even though they are very good quality.
Weeks of delivering newspapers in the dark of the morning to finally purchase that album I've coveted... Glorious days!
New generations don’t know the relationship between a cassette tape and a pencil 😊
I AM that old an honestly I wish I would not know.
That's for sure 😂
or rather, a Bic biro with its hexagonal shape actually, that fits the cassette tape's sprockets perfectly! 😀
😂😂😂😂 lol
well said😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂👍🏼👍🏼
Thank goodness there are RUclipsrs who can put together a brief and well argued case.
Ok?
But she's wrong from the first sentence.
@@EricBrettJones TOTALLY.
@@EricBrettJones She's 1000% correct.
For those who actually would like to choose and appreciate the music they listen to and not experience it like a slurry of content slop in the name of convenience.
We had Dolby noise reduction. We also used CrO2 (type II) and sometimes Metal (type IV) tape. That brought sound quality up!
yeah!
I had a Walkman WM-DC2 - beautiful machine, Dolby C, with a quality tape, recorded on a high-end cassette deck, it sounded utterly glorious. It was a lot of effort, and cost, to get truly hifi audio from cassettes though. Few people EVER experienced "hifi" from cassettes.
Dolby noise reduction is basically just hard EQ.
Late 70s, 1980s. The commercial cassettes were uniformly dreadful in sound quality and tended to break and wear out, and were short at only 20 or 25 minutes per side. Chrome or metal tape with Dolby c on the other hand was nearly the equal of CD. Also you could easily fit two albums on a 90 or 100 min. cassette plus a few bonus tracks. It doesn't sound like much but it doubled your capacity. I used to make copies of LPs and CDs so that I could play them in my car deck and they sounded fantastic. And at that time very few cars at CD players, it was very hard to burn your own CDs, that changed only later. But most cars had cassette.
Probably could use modern DSP to eliminate tape hiss
I still buy CD whenever I can. Ownership is so much better than streaming if you follow less popular genres.
Better sound quality too. I find it extremely noticeable.
you can own digital downloads though. you download and back them up.
@@Ralphunreal Digital Downloads are MP3s which are compressed and have messed up compressed mids and subdued highs... CDs are great quality.
@@StratMatt777 I get downloads now because you cant hear the difference to CD unless they were recorded in some substandard studio in the first place, like some CD albums were.
@@stephenw2992 Downloads are compressed MP3s which are of lesser quality than CDs. I have 700 CDs and have been listening to them since 1995. Downloads sound bad because MP3s are compressed. The mids are congested and the high treble lacks presence.
It is a quality problem that I have noticed for many years.
The MP3s that comes out of my Amazon device are of a noticeably lesser quality than my CDs of the same song.
It is not subtle. The highs are lacking and the definition is not there in the mids.
You will not notice it unless you have heard the CD and enjoyed the sound quality, then... when you hear the MP3 you'll notice that it sounds bad.
You have to do a head to head comparison between MP3 and CD. Depending upon the song and the separation of the instruments in it, it can be very apparent.
And don’t forget to pop out the tabs at the top of the cassette to prevent someone accidentally recording over the top of your mix tape!
Nice to see the love of analogue making a come back
And if you later change your mind, you can put a piece of tape over the holes and record again.
When u say "Those trying to make a living, not a fortune." It reminds me of a Guitar Shop I frequented 5-10 years ago with cheap fixes. He said, "Man, I'm just trying to make a living, not a killing."
nice people there
@@iamturok3504 For sure. The guy was a good dude. He moved out of state a few years ago, but I always thought of him as a great honest business man.
I still have tapes from 40 yrs ago that I still listen to them to this day!
You must have the first album by The Doors on tape.
Me too. "Assemblage" by Japan is one of favourites, plus I have over 40 mixtapes that I made for myself. It's great to still be able to listen to them. It brings back memories of those times and of making them and choosing the song order
@@audiophileman7047 I too noticed their Doors song reference username 🙂
@@ziff_1 my corrosion of conformity tape I bought at the mall in '93 still sounds great..
Do they still sell cassette players.? Will check .
Having lived through all the mediums, I would rather go back to burning CDs than making cassette tapes, but I like your take on this.
There's a problem: a burned CD will probably be unusable after 20 years, while cassette tapes will often easily last even longer.
@@k4be. That was the theory for many years but now that we have burned CDs that are 20+ years old that has been proven mostly false. I can assure you that mine are still good.
@@bourbongeek I agree. As long as the CD surface remains scratch free, it won't likely skip or stop playing whereas old cassettes that have played hundreds of times will have hiss, sound like mud, and sometimes will have wow and flutter.
Cassettes were really versatile. When I used to make mixtapes I could record from LPs, other cassettes, or CDs, pause in the middle of a track to go into something else, overdub an ambient track with something else, throw in movie samples, record my own voice
@@adamlounsbery6256 Oh yeah! When I was in middle school & high school I used to record songs from the radio on my Sony boombox all the time!
We used to record ourselves practising on a cassette. And when playing back, you get a jolly good idea of where you were lacking...
I’ve been an avid collector for years, physical albums mean it can never be taken away, or “remastered”… never again being able to find the original with the original sound that you fell in love with.
Careful, cassettes do degrade over time even when never played. Digitize what you have so there's a backup.
Physical is the thing that can most easily get removed from you 🤣
You can also keep downloads that you purchase, either by storing it on a hard drive, saving it on a thumb drive, or by burning it to a CD. There are a few on-line locations that sell downloads that equal or exceed the sound quality of the Red Book CD. What I would never count on having is what is streamed since what's there Today can be gone Tomorrow.
One of the reasons I still purchase DVDs/Blu-Rays is so that I can have a snapshot of the way a movie/TV show actually was. Consider that there are (as of 1993) at least seven versions of "Blade Runner."
As a teen in the 80s I lived on cassettes and then CDs. Now I use streaming for my daily music but still keep cassettes & CDs in my collection. I miss the feeling of buying a new one in a music store (a real music store, not a virtual one), taking it home and then playing it on the hifi system while reading the sleeve.
They should brink back mini discs. They were perfect. Cd quality, re recordable and properly durable.
Minidisc was nowhere near CD quality. It had about 500% more ATRAC compression than a redbook CD. The "Hi-MD" version that came out later was still about half the quality of a CD. That was why Minidisc failed; it sounded terrible to anyone with ears.
It was cool though. One more way to do things.
@@JJ-jn5lr to each their own!
...... Not to mention DAT.
@@RockandrollNegro Not only that, it was tied up in Sony's IP licensing process.
Cool video!
Quick inventory of my hardware today:
- 3 Reel-to-reel machines
- 3 Cassette decks
- 1 Porta mixer/recorder
- 3 turntables
- 1 Aria tape echo (Super 8)
- 2 CD players
- 2 recievers (with turner/radio)
- 1 mixer/PA 2x300 watt
- 1 tube guitar amp
- 3 solid state guitar amps
- 1 solid state bass amp
- 1 8 channel mixer
- 2 radios
I love physical media so much that I’ve released CDs for both of my major releases (EP and album). I’ve had minimal sales but that is still more money than what I’ve made from streaming the entire time I’ve been releasing music (2 1/2 years).
Is your stuff good? Tell me where to go check it out and buy it.
I still release cds for mine albums. If nothing else, I like having them as a wav file backup in the event my computer crashes (which it does).
CD's are pretty damned cool. I was born in the 60's so went through the vinyl/cassette and finally CD phase, but I think CD's are my favorite because of the size (flat!) so you can store a lot of them, and the quality imo is very high. I also have piles of music on my computer but it's a PITA to bother with, so CD's are my go-to for the car. I have a friend though who's gone all the way back to cassettes and swears by them.
Meh
Cassette + CD = Minidisc!
Best of both worlds
magnetic tapes best , did you heard recordings from those big reels ? sound is real as much can
Minidisc is the future ;)
Proprietary format that is no longer supported and needs dodgy hacks in insecure React apps to make work? worst of every world in tech imo.
If Sony had opened MD like Philips did Compact Cassette, it would have been the format to end all formats. Shame they ruined it.
It wasn't totally Sony's fault that MD faltered. I lay the most blame on the RIAA. They were so terrified that MD would become the pirate's playground, they browbeat Sony into decontenting the format. A lot of blame goes to Americans in general who basically rejected MD overall. Without the American market, no format can survive. In theory, MD should have absolutely taken over the portable music domain; smaller than a CD with similar capacity, disc in a protective case, but because of compromises forced on the format, MD was unreliable.
My brother went all in on MD-he even installed a player in his car. But he was constantly frustrated by incompatibility between brands of disk with one or the other of his machines, and by the non-existence of pre-recorded titles.
Agreed - MD was an awesome format. I still have an MD walkman, an MD in my hifi, and an MD in my professional audio rack. Rarely use them, besides playing my old MiniDisc "mix tapes" and occasionally transferring MDs for clients, but it remains a very cool format. Sony's "Professional Disc" is kinda like a video version of MD - only for the professional market, but again a very cool format. It's a bit sad, really, to have "redundant" equipment lying around which almost never gets used (like my PDW-F75) which I would have absolutely KILLED for in the past! Would've been my pride & joy...now it just collects dust!
I love the idea of physical media (and our 14 year old has recently got into vinyl, which is great), but I'm not sure I'm sold on cassettes.
When I was a DJ in the 90s I used to record sets to minidisc and then get a small batch of CDs printed and burned to give away at shows.
I feel like selling a CD makes more sense today. They're still very easy to print in small volumes, or you can burn them yourself at home. They are also very portable: the late-model Discman models were pretty much skip-proof.
Unless you're really really fond of the sound of tape hiss, I'd opt for a CD every time!
Either way though, I very much approve of the return of physical media ... I just wish our kid would listen to something other than Taylor Swift. 😬
I would suspect that the man who teaches us about great urban design, would have no difficulties teaching his kid about great music.
Dua Lipa is much better than that Taylor Swift !!!
CDs make way more sense for commercial release or whatever than tapes because yeah, nobody wants tape hiss or whine or wobble or having to demagnetize the whatchamacalit.
Going back to using physical media in current era is like switching from using mobile phones to wall rotaries... Old fart like you and me, who remember MD, CD, CC and vinyl have heavy nostalgia glasses on, but to be frank - not utilizing smartphone to play converted copies of albums (flac + good pair of wired headphones) and advertising cassettes is aggravatingly dumb.
I understand playing with physical media at home, but for modern era people, there are far greater solutions than landfill plastic called "compact cassette tape".
I actually still have a CD DVD burner on one of my computers. Is far far cheaper easier faster to burn CDs these days. CD blanks are definitely cheaper than decent quality cassettes. You'd have to find and buy an old good quality cassette deck, remembering that they do tend to break down, then remember most cassette decks copy only at real time speed. Talk about slow. Also a lot of people still have old CD players lying around and in their cars, but very few have cassette decks anymore.
I don't know why but this made me cut onions. That wholesome feeling of sitting on the carpet, fumbling through a stack of cassettes to pop into the player with friends around. Nothing, NOTHING, will ever remove this nostalgia from us. Thanks!
i feel the shift ! we are all tired of not owning anything. ive been buying cds cassettes vinyls again, i miss the artwork , the anticipation. Yall remeber that you didnt know the other songs on the album besides the singles. youtube would remove the albums so fast back in the day lol streaming services pay artists shit. BUY DIRECTLY FROM YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS!
A good friend sent me digitized recordings of a band we were in way back in '82, recorded via cassette tape. The songs were original tunes that our band wrote. What a wonderful surprise! I'd forgotten that we were a really good band! I'm playing guitar and bass again and writing songs because of those recordings and his thoughtfulness. Occasionally, I play those old recordings to see if the 66 year-old version of me can keep up with the 23 year-old version.
That's awesome! It's always special when you stumble upon an old recording of yourself playing. How's the 66 year old version faring? 😄
Not too bad, I suppose. I'm way more chill these days. :) Search on RUclips and other services for The Simian Grip Collective. That's me, new songs (vocals are terrible due to a surgery I had). My daughter's boy friend, Dylan Wishon, mixed a few of the songs for me (the bad mixes were done by me). I've a bass solo on that channel that I'm pleased with and a few other songs where I play guitar and sing. I'm not trying to make money for those tunes. I write and sing for family and friends. I took a 39 year break from the bass and a 29 year break from guitar so it's not perfect--but I'm having fun! Be safe. Be well. Flow, my friend!
@@simiangripcollective That's what it's all about. Having fun! Rock on!
I found a box full of my first recordings made with my Tascam 464 (which I still have and use because I love its preamp sound!). Stuff with ex bands and solo things. Some of them are on my RUclips channel actually. It was amazing how I could replicate the sound of Brian May, or a short experiment with my Alesis GT and a couple of digital delays, and the guitar sounded something like an opera tenor, and more. Creativity flourished in those technically "restricted" times more than today (at least in my own case).
@@SidAlienTV I keep three guitars by my couch and I "noodle", as they call it these days, while watching TV. Many of the songs I write seemingly appear while I'm noodling. It's as if I tap into a creative sphere when I'm not trying to write a song. It's weird--and wonderful!
Mary, you have a fantastic speaking voice. Every word's properly enunciated with proper emphasis and no annoying quirks or vocal tics. So rare, especially on socials-thank you!
I loved the physical sounds of using the cassete. The mild rattle, clicking and clacking that comes from handling the tape, inserting and ejecting from the player the sound of pushing the mechanical player buttons. And who can forget the distinctive sound if taking the cassette for a spin around the bic pen?
And finally, the rare sound of unspooling miles of tape by holding the cassette out the car window at high speed? Remember the aftemath of seeing cars pass you, now festooned with tape wrapped around their antennas, bumpers and wipers. The good old days!
Hello Mary! I'm Polish, Poland not Holland, I studied English for quite a long time, quite a long time ago, I NEVER HEARD someone who spoke as clearly, with such a beautiful English accent as you Mary. I almost understood everything. I'm very impressed, although it's not a language channel, it's about music... one doesn't interfere with the other. Thank you very much, it's pure pleasure.
I don’t know if anyone confused Poland for holland haha. Does that happen to you ?
Try the English with Lucy channel... Equally good diction!
I'm Polish, Poland not Holland?
Poland will be very important in future. Build on your success now. Grow
Yes her voice accent and diction is delightful. I’m glad that she’s highly intelligible for your English acquisition endeavours. 😊
Im 21 and love Vinyl. I bought my dad a record player 2 years ago, and since then its mostly been used by me. One thing i found to love is the silence between songs and having to flip it over when done with one side. Anyone that like 50-80s music, i hope you give vinyl a chance.
Yep! I think CDs are the ones in the biggest trouble.
Amen!!
I have a couple boxes of cassette tapes and spent number of hours recording music from FM radio! I still have a couple decks and finished reconditioning a couple reel to reel machines… I have four fully working turntables and approximately 1,000+ LP,s ! Analog is back or better said, never left…just took a nice nap! Analog “rocks”…be safe. Cheers..
@@AlejandroGonzalez-AGS I agree analog all day every day, but when I am Lazy I can stream 192 24 and dsd so why buy CDs, just to take up space for more records. Lol
I can tell you that in the 80s I/we didn't use vinyl much. We all used cassettes 95% of the time. Whenever we did buy a vinyl album, the first thing we did was to record it onto a cassette so that the vinyl wouldn't risk getting scratched. (I was at primary school in the 80s, so pretty young).
As you might guess, our band was started out of nostalgia for the cassette tape. Totally agree, they are so much fun! ❤
I’m 18 and my dad just gave me a Marty Robbins cassette tape. I’ve played it once and I’m already in love with everything there is to listening and using a cassette tape. Definitely a new hobby.
It definitely sparks something for me Mary. I'm 77 years old and been through the entire cycle. From 78's to streaming. Love to hear of something real having a resurgence. Also, I love to hear you talk, and more, sing. Thank you!
Mary, thank you so much for showing my album Reset in the video. I didn't expect to see you holding my cassette tape and had to do a double take 🤣 I hope you like what you hear! And thank you for inspiring independent musicians all over the world. I implore everyone interested in creating music to subscribe to Mary's 21st Century Musician newsletter.
From my first impression, your music is awesome!
👍🏻
@@PappaBear_yt Thank you! It means a ton!
Zahvaljujući ovom videu sam doznao za tebe. Super svirka, čestitam! 👍
@@fortissimoX Hvala puno! 🙏🏻
I recently bought a Tascam dual tape deck to digitize boxes of old cassettes. I had everything from albums, to garage band rehearsals, to audio letters my friends and I used to send back and forth. It has been enjoyable to revisit the medium and I welcome its resurgence, even if it only takes up a tiny slice of the pie.
I’ve got their CD-A580. Love it!
La cassetta in ambito audio e' una delle migliori invenzioni esistenti!
Great episode, Mary! Here's my viewpoint: the Norelco cassette was invented for mono dictation, not stereo music. But with a medium such as the cassette, some people considered it might be possible to to go beyond that purpose. In 1973, the Advent Model 201 was one of the first hi-fi cassette decks on the market. I bought one for my first project home studio and, along with the available high-quality 2-input mic pre module, was able to make some clean live-to-2-track recordings. Cassette tapes had improved enormously by then with Maxell and TDK leading the way (normal and hi-bias tape formulations) and, of course, Dolby-B noise reduction built in to the deck. The cassette was also a major improvement over 8-Track cartridges used for aftermarket car stereos. After starting my own recording studio in LA in 1977 (still in operation today with me as producer/engineer), cassettes were the main form of reference mixes and copies from master tapes. At one point, I could make 8 cassette copies at a time, all very high quality. I also did the graphic design and typesetting for the J-card inserts and on-cassette labels. And listening to cassette mixes in my car was the final test of "how does it sound on___?" I'm glad I still have a car that has a cassette player and a 6-CD changer from the factory (2002 Gen 1 Toyota Prius). And in my studio, our master cassette deck (Aiwa F990) still works so we can transfer cassettes to other formats for clients. Oh, and I've got plenty of reel-to-reel multitrack decks, but we also have digital multitrack decks and digital audio workstations with Cubase, Samplitude, etc. Thanks for posting this curious title. Got me to watch the whole thing and I'm glad I did!
I loved cassette tapes as a kid but as a teenager I much preferred CDs.
love my Sony Discman !
Cat ladies need old cassettes !
@@lucasrem My D-22 Discman is still my favourite CD player, and it still works.
You sound like a person who was not around for 8 tracks. Wow! Talk about a nightmare. LOL
That's because pre-recorded cassette tapes were garbage quality.
You can create cds too
Cassette tapes defined so much of my listening life, absolutely loved the things. BASF Chrome C90 was always my go to.
BASF ferro for me. mostly from an angle of a teenage budget.
TDK for me. I don't remember the exact model.
@@mparento Great but only the metal tapes were worth keeping for a
life time !
@@mparentoSA-90 is a fantastic go to. My favorites are from the late 80’s. Check out the MA-R models. They’re built like a battle ship…🍻
TDK, BASF, Denon, AGFA... OMG, thanks for the memories.
Ownership of physical media is a way better experience than streaming. A Reel to Reel sounds great
I still have my reel to reel and they do sound great.
Years ago when a friend got a new LP or cassette I would go to his house and we would sit with full attention and listen and immerse ourselves in the music .So much like romance in the best sense. Magical. Communion.
Mary, you have rare insight. Hope more young people pick up on what you are putting out.
Replace "cassette" with "Mini Disk", everything you said still applys with less downsides. Great ideas. Thanks.
I had (and still have) a long standing love affair with minidisc. I consider that the perfect physical medium of all time.
The flexibility of cassettes with the sound quality of cd packaged up in a very satisfying form factor. I still have many old minidiscs with no way to play them now.
But minidisks are finite. 😢
@@rafaelcatarino8372 They can re write over a million times and I have only ever had one bad disc. also Sony are still making blanks to this day.
They corrupt real easily though 🙄
Can you still get blanks?
What most people don't know is that Cassettes can sound close to digital if you use good equipment and they can stay with there quality very long. The problem is, that most people only know cheap recorders like shown in the video which have permanent magnets as erase head which are only mechanical come in touch with the tape by pressing the record button. if you only play the cassettes they are still close to the tape, not in touch but close and it erases the tape a bit with every play. at first you won't notice it but the more often you play it, it will sound more muffled. If you have good equipment with a DC Erase head which is only active if you record on it, the tape can played thousand times and won't get noticeable worse, if the cassette and also the recorder don't have any mechanical issue.
The high quality devices died out with the end of the 90s and now you only get crap. not only the devices, also the cassettes. The real good Cassettes were made between the late 70s and early 00s, also the labels had high quality equipment and used high quality tapes for copies. A pre recorded tape from the 80s or 90s can sound very close to the original and it gets even better, if you have a good tapedeck and make your own recordings. The technical specs of the cassette are much better, than vinyl. without Noise reduction and a good cassette you can get a dynamic range around 62-64 dB, with Dolby B you get over 70 and with Dolby C even 80 and more. If your tape deck is calibrated to the sort of tape you use you won't notice any artifacts from Dolby. if you then have a Wow and Flutter under 0.1% WRMS which was normal even on simpler mechanisms in the 80s and 90s it almost sounds perfect. Tape Hiss only is noticeable if you listen to headphones. There were also High End Walkmans which can be shaked without sounding silly, so you can run with them and the tape still sounds good. Also they can reach a frequency response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz flat and have a good channel separation, so it's enough to have a good listening experience. Of course digital is still better.
Also in ghetto blasters and car stereos have been real hifi tape decks. I Wouldn't listen to a cassette if it has a bad quality. Most cassettes nowadays have because the people who record them don't know how to do it right or don't have the equipment. They think it can not sound better because they only know their cheap plastic recorders with the tiny speakers.
And yeah, tape jam is no big thing. Good mechanisms and cassettes never do that, if they are not broken or something is wrong with them. I never would use cassette players or recorders like shown on the video. It's not possible to make them sound good.
I have many cassettes which are older than 50 yrs, the oldest I got are from around 1968. At that time they didn't have HiFi Quality but they still sound as they used to, when they were new and work without issues. There are also tapes which loose their mechanical or magnetic specs and don't work anymore, sometimes they are not even 30 yrs old but especially the Japanese manufacturers are very durable. You can still use a 40 yrs old Maxell XL II or TDK SA and it will still reach its original specs and sound great no matter if you recorded it 40 yrs ago or made a new recording, if it's in good shape.
Indeed so.! !! 😊
Which deck would you recommend to record cassettes?
May the oxide never fall off your mylar and your belts be replaceable.
@@geekyprojects1353 technics, Panasonic, Sony, most Japanese brand names.!
Yeah, but people don't want great. They want good enough.
That's why poorly produced CDs eventually were a thing and that is the reason why using convenient 128kpbs mp3 files was more popular than listening to regular CDs.
That's the very same reason why people just stream same junk from spotify, which has worse quality than 128kbps mp3s these days. Buuuut it is convenient.
And tapes are very limited as well - good quality and durable tapes are 60 min, but people will want 240 ones. You may not seek, search, skip etc. individual songs (you can but the tech is limited, so compared to digital files - "you can't").
And so on.
I've been raised on cassettes, and technologically, that's fine medium. But compared to digital files, it's wank.
Your speaking is crystal clear. It is the first time I fully understand an English speaking person without reading subtitles😀
You are right. She speaks very clearly.
I own in the neighborhood of 1,600 tapes and will never stop collecting them ❤
I thought I was the only one to have shelves and drawers filled with tapes - pleased to meet you! I maintain my tape deck well and take good care of all my tapes, so they still fill my house with beautiful music and they still sound wonderful.
YOU SIR Get a pass. NOW can you find the way iut of the tape room lolz
What's the sound quality like on the oldest tapes?
@@danaveye3977 It varies, depending on how well they’ve been cared for over the years. Plenty of them sound like they’re brand new. The whole myth that tapes are inherently fragile and deteriorate over time is nonsense. Of course tapes that were left in hot cars during the summer, thrown around, and otherwise handled carelessly are going to sound worse.
@fclefjefff4041 thanks, I was just curious. I guess the engineers solved the problem of deteriorating tape.
As an almost 50 year old I can relate to each and every word. Maybe I'm a romantic but I always enjoyed buying CDs, vinyls and cassettes, the smell of a new booklet, having the actual object in my hands...
It's funny that you released this video these days because nowadays I'm planning to build a composing-recording-mixing little studio, and one of the first things in my to-do list is restoring and servicing an amazing and old (1978) Sony cassette deck that will live happily together with the modern gear.
And regarding this video, absolutely amazing image and sound quality, it was pure joy to hear your voice so well recorded and without seeing a big microphone in front of you.
Thank you!
honestly I was gonna do that but went digital. I do have a lot of analog outboard gear but the price for a full analog studio is prohibitive. I ended up buying an old tascam 4 track. honestly theres something to be said about making a commitment to bounce a track so you have an extra one to keep recording. theres a price to pay for bad decisions so you work carefully. in fact when I track songs digitally I NEVER make more than 16 tracks. I gave up buying a million plugins.. I uninstalled most of them and REALLY learned how to use the ones I have. it's all you need. good luck
My goto is physical media, CDs and LPs. Only resort to digital downloads if an artist doesn’t offer physical media. Will never subscribe to any streaming service.
I love the cassette experiment Mary! Simply brilliant!
@Brian-L
physical media ????
Flac on HDD ? need a real dics ???????
MAD PEOPLE ONLY HERE !
Same here. Haven't streamed for a single second of my life. But I know what the experience is like, because so many of my friends and peers have gone that route and I've also seen how it changed their approach (for the worse) to music. I have, however, saved digital versions of a few of my prized albums in the cloud as the ultimate backup, should my home burn down or get wiped out some other way. But that's as far as my relationship with current tech will go.
If I physically owned all the music i listen to, not only would my studio apartment be full up to the ceiling, it would also literally be a million dollar collection. I simply don't have the space or cash for such a collection. Nor the desire to own all that crap, just so I can listen to music. For the time being, I'll take the entire history of recorded music on my phone thanks.
I love the hard format also but I can hear so much more New and amazing music that I would never hear with Spotify. You're missing out.
A decent cassette deck in the 80s had Dolby technology which drastically reduced the amount of background hiss. Coupled with a good quality tape, I found the sound quality perfectly adequate at the time, and I was somebody who cared about details when it came to sound. I'm pretty sure it would still do for me.
A portable Walkman cassette player battery lasted much longer than a phone battery. No interruptions from messages and spam calls while listening to books. No censorship or book banning by Amazon.
There's definitely a lot to be said for less technology. Except in the field of medicine 🙂
i have to disagree. if we rub the rose colored nostalgia from our eyes, 2 AAs would barely last one full school day. but you could always get cheap batteries from the crackhead on the bus or just lift em yourself from the kwikway....and quick counter example to censorship; Queen's a day at the races US version had a censored album cover. To find more examples wouldn't be difficult. and distribution channels have (attempted to) ban books since the inception of books.
@@1TyredFunGuy Not in reality, the cassette player is not a dual use item. It's the phone that has to stay on all the time. I had a Sony walkman cassette player that took a single AA battery and I could listen to many books on that one battery. It was amazing.
You wish. My walkman went through batteries like it was crack and rechargeable batteries didn't work well because their voltage was too low (1.2V instead of 1.5V). It was so expensive to buy batteries that we used a BIC pen to rewind our cassettes.
@@smoguli You had a knockoff, not a Real Sony Walkman.
You mentioned something about today's music can suddenly go away... I just want to remind everyone that when using cassettes, your music can still go away suddenly. anyone who ever heard their beloved mix tape suddenly sound like Alvin & the Chipmunks knows what I'm talking about. :D
😂😂 yea,.. that SUCKED!
@@truthimagination2997 YES YES YES Been There & Done That! Lol I am 74 Years Old .
True but that’s just malfunctioning and not a tech company controlling your music lol
@@leogolive both just a means to the same end (result)
Takes a bigger disaster to destroy a whole cassette collection compared to a streaming service removing millions of tracks at a moment’s notice, or a hard drive crash that takes out gigabytes of files.
I recently found a mixtape I made 40 years ago. Played it and was transported. Yes, the sound isn't as dynamic as DC or digital, but simply the tactile action of fast forwarding the whole tape, tightening the cog with a biro, the sound of the motor that spins the spools, and the LED volume meters on the old Sony cassette player...it's such an event as opposed to asking Alexa to play something.
The biro, also sellotape over the tabs so you could record over it again
I found a cassete from 90-s, found a portable cassete recorder, stuff the former into the latter and damned thing chewed through the tape - the pinch roller's rubber has become sticky over time. The thing less likely to be happened to a streaming service.
@@ВасилийКоровин-г9э yes, tapes and their gadgets to use them on are physical and mechanical, therefore need maintenance and care. Sorry this happened, but anything physical must be used with care. with or without warning labels.
@@addhoardingprocrastinator You're right, but this is the reason for not to subject yourself to this kind of trouble, as long as it is not necessary due to technological progress.
Problem: very few stereo systems of any type have tape loops (audio output). That makes recording difficult, if not impossible.
Greetings from America! Thank you for this! Most people today have no idea about what a cassette is capable of. Years ago I could play my cassettes through my stereo system without any audible tape hiss at all. In my listening room the music group, whether Count Basie or the Moody Blues would sound as if they were performing a private concert for me. I was running a Technics dual autoreverse deck with Dolby C and the headroom extension circuitry. My speakers were Klipsch towers with horn tweeters and 10 inch bass drivers and 10 inch passive radiators. Folks who heard it were amazed. I now have a smaller system with Canadian Paradigm bookshelf speakers which are incredible for their size. I played in 2 U.S. Navy bands many years ago and over 20 years as a civilian and it is sad what has happened in the music world. If I listen to a tape on a small player I can mentally tune out the hiss so no big deal as far as some hiss is concerned. Thanks so much Mary for this. The wonderful artwork on some of the vinyl I own is wonderful to look at as well. I am thinking of the Beatles and the Moody Blues when I say this. Warmest wishes from America! 🌝🌈🎵🌼🎹🇺🇸
My physical music collection is dominated with cassette tapes. They are my go-to format when listening to music. And that physical connection you mentioned, whenever I listen to an album on cassette if it is an album or song that I have not heard in a while, that goosebump feeling you get when it feels like all your nerves activate and you have a slight ghost shiver, that feeling when I listen to a song or album on a cassette tape is 10 times (about the same for other physical formats like CD and Vinyl LP) more effective and powerful than when I listen to the same song on a streaming service. It feels more realistic having something to feel (the J-Card that you open up to read the credits out of and possible lyrics/additional artwork) rather than staring at the main cover. I will always continue to buy cassette tapes because they stand as a testament for my dedication towards an artist. If I own an album on cassette, chances that I want to see that artist live are higher than artists that I stream.
my bloody valentine for example. I want to see them live so bad!!!!!!!!! I got to see Roger Waters during his This Is Not A Drill tour, The Smashing Pumpkins during their World Is A Vampire Tour, and Primus, Puscifer, and A Perfect Circle during the Sessanta Tour. The only thing better than physical mediums of music is live music itself. I wish I had A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step and Puscifer's Existential Reckoning on cassette.
Mary, you are a SUPERB presenter. Great script, beautiful voice and insightful commentary.
Well said. Holding a physical medium in my hand is a wonderful feeling. I still have my Nakamichi cassette player. I also have and maintain my DAT and CD players. And in am in the market for a good vinyl record player. So glad to see this vid. My family & friends still say that they so miss the days when I would send them cassettes of my original music. I would autograph and inscribe little notes and thx to them on their paper liners. It felt like more of a personal gift to them. As you say…good community building. Cheers.
Something I need to think about. I never thought we would be moving back to cassettes however I never forgot this era and bought tshirts and other items in a form of cassettes to decorate my studio because of the nostalgia vintage look. This might be fun to introduce this to my audience.
I run a record label, and I can confirm cassettes are coming back! They are selling better than CDs on my label!
What's your label?
thanks for the confirmation
Mary, I so loved that you talked about this. Cassettes were all the rage in the 80’s. I was fortunate enough to have a ghetto blaster that had a dual set so I could borrow music from friends to get my own copy. Or they get copy from me.
Lying on the floor in my room for hours, listening to the radio waiting for that song that you requested for the DJ to play so you could hit record button. It’s just the right moment. it was never perfect, but I didn’t care. My songs were at my fingertips.
I wore out a cassette of U2’s Rattle and Hum. The tape broke and my girlfriend went out and bought me a second copy.
Record stores! We had three separate stores in our mall. And we even had independent stores that were standalone.
The record stores sold concert tickets! W’d stand in line to buy tickets.
I remember when U2 released
ACHTUNG BABY at Midnight at the record store. It was an event to look forward to, and it created a lot of memories.
I’ll never have memories like that of downloading songs on my iPhone.
I think in memory of cassettes and CDs I will download the thrill is gone by B.B. King.
Some sharp scissors and scotch tape I could have fixed that cassette for you, did it many times.
Ghetto Blaster's were awesome for a lot of things. The duel decks and some with EQ was great technology for the times. What I didn't like about taping was when you had to much song and not enough tape on side A and having to flip it over mid-song to side B. The gaps were infuriating.
@@maximusindicusoblivious180 it’s worse than an n-Track Tuner will start the song for you. Where is with the cassette? You have to turn it over yourself.
My mom loved to play foreigner 4 in the car and the song break it up was always interrupted from ending on track two and restarting on track three.
Hall & Oates Private Eyes the same thing.
I really miss music stores!
@@maximusindicusoblivious180 That's when "auto-reverse" was handy, although you still lost some music on the leader tape.
Don't forget MiniDisc. To me the point of physical media is that you have a complete artistic product, say for example, a vinyl record with 2 sides, 10 songs. Those songs have a synergy and context with each other as the artist intended. Those songs you didn't like when you first heard them, grow on you over some listening. It's also a more intentional act to choose a physical object and put it into a music player. Not to mention it provides better support to artists.
And 8-track! (though really not a thing for us in the UK)
Trouble is everyone DID forget MiniDiscs, very quickly.
That tactility of handling physical media is the main appeal for me. The deliberate act of seeking out the media which contains the songs/album I want to listen to from storage, turning the player on, inserting the media and pressing 'Play'; then stowing it back where it came from once I'm done.
Mini disc quality was terrible dude ✌🏽🇩🇴
@@torocruz1192 Early on, yes, but by the MDLP era (1999 or so), ATRAC3 was as good or better than a high quality MP3, and much better than the AAC files available at the time through Apple Music.
In fact, a lot of people consider cassetes as a lo- fi experience, but always depends; real quality of the tape ( materials, frequency response, etc) Deck machine ( heads, pre amplification and signal process) and the recording itself ( original source, direct, live, cd, vynil)
A very good example of excellence in professional broadcast audio is Tascam 122 mkII
Thank you Mary!!
if i go to a concert and they are selling cassettes at the merch table, I usually buy one as a souvenir even if I don't love the band. I imagine myself as an old man re-living my concert-going days through these cassettes some day.
I work as live engeneer in a small venue and I had this exact conversation with a lot of artists (some of which with cassette tapes at the merch, some without): a cassette, for a cheaper price than a vinyl (!) is the easiest way for the audience to take something home. They are so small that you can buy them spontaneously and just put them in your pocket. Usually they cost only half of what a vinyl does and most even have a bandcamp download code inside them.
I have a collection of something like 50 mcs of bands that I mixed and I think of that collection the same way you do.
@@ithemba Lovely to hear!
I agree it's most definitely the most convenient way to bring the music home with you!
I grew up recording and listening to cassettes. Making my own radio shows, recording song ideas, recording from the radio, making mix tapes, multi-tracking with a four-track and, of course, buying music from the record shops - I loved it all!! I still have hundreds in bags and boxes in my cupboards. I even remember unscrewing them to fix the scrumpled up tape when disaster struck!! 😁
That nasty tape I made at a friends house, and his mom and dad listened to it ....
Always good to have a #2 pencil hanging around !!!
As someone else who had a 4 track (Tascam porta 404) i would not wish for those days back at all, give me a DAW and plugins anytime over that horrible experience!
I've still got a cassette tape from 1983 featuring the UK Top 40 radio show presented by Tommy Vance which I recorded myself when I was 4 years old. Yes, that wasn't a mistake. I really was 4. Not boasting or anything, just a statement of what happened.
@@FlatDerrick HA! I feel the exact same way. Cassettes are okay if you just want to record stuff to listen to in your car, but they're useless to work with in a studio. I fought with tape all through the 80's and I had a Tascam reel to-reel (40-4 which was like an 80-8 but with 4 tracks and used 1/2" tape), but even with that, there's was slight noise etc. The DAW stuff blows the crap out of all that old crap and for maybe 5 or 10k, you could now build a studio that years ago would have cost you 300k to get that level of sound quality.
Love it when she say's " They Still lurk and feel great".. As I turned around and looked at the shelves of mix cassette tapes of my personal history..
The cassette was born the year I was, I recorded my first fumbling's on guitar trying to figure out how to write my own songs (which is all I ever wanted to do.) I learned to compose and overdub on a portable 4 track which I considered an incredible luxury at the time. When listening to those cassettes, I can reflect on the space my head was in from that time. I keep buying digital multitrack recorders but cannot connect with them because the tactile, tangible feeling you get from a cassette is not there. I end up reselling them. I compiled mix tapes and hand made their 'album' covers for people I really liked. The memory of those individual's (and in turn hopefully me as well) can be recalled when seeing and listening to a cassette . I have moments caught on a huge 'boombox' of long deceased family members and friends which I still revisit. I have a great reverence for all my cassettes and listen to them in my car to great effect. I cant imagine a life lived without them.
stream that!
I had a Tascam 4 track cassette studio. Made some cool recordings of original songs with entire band doing track merging to free up more tracks. Had a great time with that porta studio.
When CD's first started coming out I was hoping they would release a new version of the cassette with two little cd's spinning inside them, even having to flip it over to change sides, that would have been cool 🤩
Hmm, MiniDisk? It was even analogue audio despite being read by laser from tiny optical disk.
@@droopy_eyes a tiny optical disk inside a cartidgre. I thought of that too! God, I really loved that format!
@@droopy_eyes Minidiscs from Sony were entirely digital audio using Sony's proprietary ATRAC data compression process similar to the mp3. Perhaps you're confusing it with the LaserDisc for video.
I was born in the mid 60's. I grew up with the cassette tape. The two most disappointing aspects of them are the inevitable hiss and the fact that every time you play it, the sound quality slowly but surely deteriorates. That aside, back when it was the only option for compiling your favorite songs, it was great.
Replace "cassette tapes" with 'CDs" and all the same points still apply, except CDs are cheaper to produce, easier to copy and distribute, sound better and are physically smaller and lighter. But I do understand the nostalgic factor of cassette tapes. They look super cool.
MiniDisc is where it's at.
I had the exact same thought. It's easier for me to burn a custom CD than to record a cassette, even though I technically have the hardware to do both, and the really is superior in every way and more accessible.
I buy a lot of music digitally, but for my favorite artists I still buy a CD, rip it, and play the .MP3/.AAC on my devices. Though my iPod finally died at the end of last year and I'm still in mourning.
I prefer CDs also
Yep. Cassette & vinyl are retromantic, nostalgic. For sure CD has more advantages.
I remember, couple of years ago before going out for a road trip, i spent hours for burning CDs… copying my mp3 collection from hdd to CD so the car can play it 🥲
They are bigger and never went out of production
Back in days long-ago, the first thing that I would do after purchasing a new LP was to record it to cassette, and move the LP into storage. I would then play the cassettes rather than my LPs. It preserved the LPs as "near-mint" condition, but I would still enjoy the music via my tapes.
To date, I own about 900 cassettes with one LP per side. My vintage cassette decks all work well (following annual maintenance).
Thumbs up!
The (late) Steve Albini, as you know, was a total supporter of analog taping in his studio's and did very little digital processing. Beyond the sound issue, his big point was that over time, digital formats can be superseded by newer ones, and older digital recordings can literally be "lost", because their formats are no longer mainstream and will slowly "retire" into obscurity.
I think the industry would likely create a method to convert formats.
Rip Steve Albini. He taught me so much about analog recording
That's a pretty dumb take. It is FAR more likely that you'll lose the ability to play an analogue format than a digital format that can be ripped with perfect fidelity onto a computer. There are other reasons for analogue in a studio, but most analogue goes through a digital path at some point.
well, digital music is in "containers" (format), but digital is digital and their conversion rates is what makes the difference. mp3's sound terrible because of their sample rates and horrible compression. a 96k recording sounds amazing. but its still digital.
@@jeffh8803indeed. PCM before remains PCM today while betamax tapes remain in the drawer
OK, I'm old. I was probably the first one in the area we lived in to go with a cassette player in the car. The tapes were smaller than the 8 Tracks everyone else had so I could get more tapes in the car. The glovebox was FULL of tapes. LOL!!! My speakers were "MindBlowers" by "Tenna". I would drive past the high school in the afternoon with either Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" or Gino Vanelli's "Appaloosa" blaring out. Thank you, young lady. You've just reminded me of my youth and I could almost feel it all over again.
Memories are truly priceless!
Mary I have no desire to ever see another cassette, but I do enjoy watching you talk about them. Your videos are very well done. Thanks.
Darn !! I am blown by the Mathematics of business with Cassettes. Simply loved it.
Great video Mary 😊Wanting the cassette back is like getting back together with an ex after a long separation. You remember the good times but forgotten the bad times. Then you start remembering why you broke up and how those issues haven't miraculously fixed themselves in the intervening period. If i was gonna go back to analog then I'd go for vinyl at home but stick with streaming as the mobile option.
Great analogy! With cassettes, it's like getting back with your ex even though that hot chick from high school (CDs) is calling you.
As I was cleaning out my attic, I found in my box of old cassette tapes an album by an unknown Baltimore band from the 90s called 'The Church Mice'. They never made it big and broke up too soon, but their tunes were catchy and never made it to ANY digital media service - I've searched for years. Here's to ownership of music and an interesting new/old model of distribution!
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
This is the best explanation of why physical media is coming back. Thank you.
Hi Mary - May your words emanate as reality! Thank you and my vote is in for the resurgence of music on tape and vinyl. YES !
I think the "lo-fi" fad has done cassettes a lot of injustice because unless they are x-generation dubs which are noisy and dull sounding, a clean new "original" tape usually sound pretty well ok and by most people's headphones audio quality perfectly adequate. Thanks for this wonderful chat :-)
I am watching the documentary now. Thanks for the recommendation. My childhood was imbued with the history of cassettes. I still remember the first time I discovered, on my own, how to record by pressing the play and "rec" buttons on my mom's Radio Shack mono tape player. Knight Rider was the hot new show on tv at the time and I tried to narrate my own made-up scene of Michael Knight having an adventure with his talking Pontiac Trans Am, KITT. Although that tape is long lost, I recall the experience of excitedly playing what I'd captured for my mom and dad, as if I had learned some magic trick and was eager to try and amaze them!
Many a mixtape was made by my hands during middle and high school years. Through the mtv, head banging, and battle of the bands years, I recorded every time I played drums with my friends, when the local music store, Richmond Music Center had a clinician performing and giving a talk, and often chose to journal this way over writing down my thoughts. On the drive from homeroom at Midlothian High to Chesterfield Technical Center each weekday, I'd listen to Duke by Genesis, made for me by my buddy Dave on his hi-fi system. Even though many great memories on cassette are lost, I still have what most would consider a ton of tapes.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I had a few vinyl records but mostly cassettes during the pre-CD days. I definitely don't miss constantly forwarding and rewinding cassette tapes or having them regularly chewed up by the cassette player, not to mention the hiss. I sense that Millennials and Gen-Z have somewhat romanticized older formats (BTW, how about 8-Track and the Edison Cylinder? Mary didn't mention those...). That's all well and good, but the practical aspects will eventually catch up and become dominant.
I never bought into the streaming music service model. I started my CD library when the format first came out, and that remains my format of choice. Vinyl has wonderful warmth and presence, but I prefer the portability and clarity that CD offers, either by converting to digital files or using portable players for the discs themselves. You can't listen to vinyl in your car, at work, or while traveling---only in the room where you have your turntable.
Overall, CDs are still the best format in my humble opinion. At least for me. Plus I like making playlists, which one can't do with vinyl and is tiresome with tapes.
One doesn't HAVE to use a streaming service, thankfully. One can create their own digital personal library of music without any influence, commercialism, tracking, data mining, sharing personal information, or interference. I rip all my CDs (mostly as lossless) and have them as my archive in a closed system.
Finally, where the CD industry (and this relates to cassettes) dropped the ball isn't the CDs themselves but the packaging. I wish they had gone with cardboard sleeves (like vinyl) from the start instead of those annoying plastic jewel cases, which were poorly designed. Now we see CDs in cardboard sleeves all the time, as they should be. I suspect the plastic/chemical industry lobbied for their packaging back in the day. Bringing back cassettes means more plastic cases and the plastic cassettes themselves. Do we need more plastic the world?
Your opening was so correct and accurate. Streaming services and devalued music to the general public and squeezed all potential livelihood from musician artists. Niche music like jazz has suffered enormously.
I've used a portable cassette players daily during my teen years, not even nostalgia would make me go back.
CD's are better in every way. They're phisical to, but smaller, with better sound and with more abundant player devices, and faster to burn (there was something like dubbing, but that wasnt that fast neither).
You do realize cd’s only sample portions of a performance .?
What better way to express your identity to a new coworker/ potential friend than making them a mixed tape? Saying 'Hey, here is the kind of music that speaks to me, check it out.' My favorite band of all time is Concrete Blonde. I would have never heard of them, and I don't remember encountering them on radio or MTV. But in the late 80s, my new girlfriend made me a mixed tape, and one of the songs on that tape was 'Joey'. I miss making mixed tapes, listing, shuffling, figuring out what songs are not just good, but are good next to each other in a listening experience, and finally constructing that perfect mix for the person or road trip or whatever was on the agenda.
Everybody loves blondes.
The album art was part of the sacred experience of cradling your favorite music in your arms as you analyzed the art and read every word on the album. And it was yours. All yours. 1979. The Wall. Pink Floyd. When good music was rare and we were grateful.
Back then, we savoured music. Even if you just had something on in the background, you'd still have to get up every once in a while and select the next thing to play, with care, because that's what you'd be listening to for the next hour or so. No zapping around, no skipping past the so-so songs, and in time those songs might even grow on you.
Good music wasn't rare though, the 70s and 80s were a veritable treasure trove of music. But we did treasure each of our favourite songs and albums. I miss that.
@@kaasmeester5903 Yeah, they had me until they said good music was rare.
I think a CD is a better bet. The quality is so much better and plenty of bands are still releasing them, especially outside the USA and Europe. CDs are still big in Japan.
They are, but keep in mind that the quality of recordable cd's was a nightmare. They never reached the quality of purchased or commercially available cd's for that matter.
@@svenlabots1869 I can see that but the quality of CC was pretty dire too unless they were metal and recorded and played back on first quality equipment.
And metal tape was really expensive.
A lot of cars still have a CD player too.
Posso dimostrare a chiunque che anche la type 1 e' in grado di arrivare a 20 khz,suono impeccabile
How many people have a cassette player? (Hit Like)
this super low number of likes seems accurate to the people who have a cassette player 😂😊
Outside of the U.S., especially in former eastern block countries, physical media remains very popular including cassettes as access to streaming media is limited. Some places in Asia as well. While a niche market it remains resilient.
Crosely owners
I have many! I got into cassette about ten years ago when it was completely dead, I used to buy good albums for 25 cents a pop! Sometimes you can get lucky and still find that.
Have you heard of the Minidisc?🫣🫣😁
I still have my cassettes. I only pay for music I can have and hold after "buying" online from a company that later vanished some years ago. Plus I won't use a service that I can't stop the adverts from. I still buy CD's and DVD's when artists release them, and prefer buying direct from the artist where possible. The 80's was a great time for music and devices.
I hated Micro Cassettes, love my Discman.
DVD, on CRT screens only ! Blue ray is good enough now on new TV's
Why you need 80's cap now, museum guy ?
Spotify, Spotify, no ads.
@@216trixie I tried Spotify but it isn't for me.
I'm over 60... I had a variety of Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassette. In the early 90's I ordered most of my old records in CD form from Columbia House. Yes, 12 CD's for a "Penney." To this day, I still buy CDs because I want to OWN it.
I buy the physical and then put it into digital so I can stream it easier.
@@pshimmons Amen, Brother. I'm in the process of digitizing my CD's and Old CD's.... I'll get to my Vinyl before I die... I guess. 🙂
Thank you, Mary i bought just your Cassette Release, i am an old-school rocker age 68 and deep inside me was a vision of the tape comeback. I hope there is a glimpse of the silver sky on your tape. Best wishes from Rainer
I’ve considered getting (back) into cassettes for the reason you have said. It seems far more accessible to me than getting in to vinyl.
It is quicker to put choosen cassette to player and push knob amnd it plays from last moment , even 5 years ago when was stopped in comapre to digital.
Neither, go with CD.
The amount of tracks de-listed was wild!
Yestarday remind myself that I had account on portal and there I had songs performed by me which I put there in 2008 . Searched with google and found that portal "still existing"but couldn't sign in. Then I realised that only name and provided services are the same but previous was closed in 2017. My songs were then distroyed without of course warning. .
I’m still using my Tascam Portastudio to record works. Sure, I can do digital, but it’s fun.
Fun, and the second advantage is the speed of the creative flow. Zero distractions with mouse clicking on the DAWs, no plugins, just the "heat of the moment".
I still prefer digital, but I'll grant you that the old school analog four tracks reduced the likeliness of choice fatigue, the endless tweaking, and it developed one's chops from having to rehearse the parts prior to committing to tape. There is merit to your preference that I can respect.
Nice video! But one big reason to make cassette release for consumers is if you are recorded by analogue. That also requires whether unmastered release, or fully analog mastering. If the recording is digital or digitally mastered, CD is a better candidate then. Could also natively reccord in DSD and then release the album on dual SACD to please the listener!
i love the sound of tapes. they're also a lot more reliable than people give them credit for. i have 40 year old tapes that still work
The 80's at the beach was a fun struggle for sure, wearing "Jams" with one pocket full of cassettes, and the other pocket full of D batteries 😄
no doubt ha ha!! I remember learning the trick of fast forwarding tapes with my finger half pressing the "play" button so I could hear when the next song started.
"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy".
What a wonderful world this would become if DCC (which would be modern sound quality on an old format) would see a renaissance!
I’m additionally declining the invitation to eat bugs as well
I don't know how this quote applies to cassettes? I mean, you can also own digital copies of music nowadays.
@@siddhartacrowley8759 The W-E-F's wet dream is that in the future _everything_ will be based on rent. You know, like Spotify/Tidal etc. already is. In modern politicians heads, in the future you won't need digital copies. And, according to W-E-F, owning nothing will make you (and the climate) happy. See, owning things and thus having a sense of ownership for it is not good for the climate. According to W-E-F and "96% of scientists".
@@N0die I'm joining your club.
DCCs (digital compact cassettes) and DATs (digital audio cassettes) and MDs (mini-discs) all use a fallible magnetic recording medium. Recording to an SD card or micro-SD card (secure digital) or USB stick (universal serial bus) or a CD-R (compact disc recordable) is the only way to escape the guaranteed future of medium degradation/failure. Each has a lifespan much longer than yours.