The cassette comeback - it's fun all the way!

I burn high quality FLAC vinyl rips to CD-R... does that count?

You made a video saying the cassette comeback will never happen. Now this? Haha

like hear audio drama or cassette then on cd as keep hear track change as not smoother

cassettes only good as what you played them on or way they rec or transferred copy is

I had a kx930 Yamaha kx670 Yamaha nakamichi zx9 cr7 and 4 Sonys two pioneers and 4 technics loved them and miss them… I love seeing them in a rack spinning or turning
Nothing wrong with what you like. Each to their own. Never had a cassette jump or skip in a car like my crap cds. I always serviced them and never had a tape chew up. In fact I had over 250 hifis in 53 years and the cassette decks always stood out and complimented the system more. The displays on them looked amazing with peak level meters too. In fact when listening to music it’s nice to see the displays going or uv meters. Better than looking at a phone screen all the time swap swipe swipe swipe. With vinyl and cassettes you were forced to listen to a whole album to its full entirety not like now everyone skips music. 😮

There are some with high grade decks like myself, fanatical about tape recording and meticulous about cleaning and demagging them. If you want to get the most out, you must be willing to put out the effort. This is a hobby that can reward your effort. Dolby? I don’t think so, but that is my take on that. As far as I can tell, it dulls the sound and degrades the experience. The key is knowing what level to use with each brand and grade of tape and do not compromise on any of these. I know some will say no Dolby, he must be deaf or daff. It’s a choice and it has worked for more than decades. I don’t kick others for their choice. They will do me the same and we both will be happy. The recording level is critical, but the reward is a cleaner result and none of the residual issues of Dolby’s use. Two Revox B215s and an NAD 6300 make fabulous tapes as do Naks. To each their own. It is fun to me. So would reel to reels be, but way above my price point. Taking care of them is key to the experience. It isn’t a hobby for the lazy or the ones who only look for convenience. Physical media gives you that, but it requires a level of involvement most are not up to. The reward is worth the effort. Only you can decide if you are up to it.

it is not about fun, it is the music playback from a medium, vinyl, cassette tape, digital are 3 distinctive mediums each sounds different, quality does not measure by digit alone

I remember when music recorded to VHS was a small thing.

Screw the corrupt music industry and their monopolies. Screw the rip-off streaming platforms. Screw stuffy snobs with posh accents. Make and trade cassettes, support your local scene, that’s rock and roll baby!

IMAGINE that you don't need to have Nakamichi, or any three head player, to be able to extract maximum out or any...of every cassette. I did found a way, of course with "hardware " changes. Need your opinion about this idea, is it needed, is it worth. Even further, I also have idea how to make precise counting, for every second on tape. It took a long period of thinking to finally find usable solution. Opinions, please?

Collecting cassettes is for me not so much about listening to them as it is about owning and preserving nostelgic relics from my favourite music artists and suporting bands at live shows when vinyl is unavailable or impractical to carry. I also collect CDs and vinyl for similar reasons.

the post dawn of sampling and..."cassette warmth"......... some presets available 4 daws 🤔

Cassettes are absolute garbage. I grew up listening to cassettes until I was around 12-13, and I don't have a single good memory of the format. The cases were flimsy, the booklets were small and often annoying to fold, the sound was unreliable (especially after a lot of plays), the tape would often fail beyond repair, and trying to find a particular song on an album was painful. I certainly understand the appeal of vinyl (even if I'm not a collector myself), but there are literally no redeeming qualities to a cassette.

I still listen to and record music on cassette tape. I have many cassette decks including a rather nice Sony TC-K715 S, a Technics M45, Akai CS-705D and Yamaha KX-580SE. With the right deck and a good quality cassette tape, I am more than happy with the sound. I also have an old Akai 4000D reel to reel that sounds fantastic. I enjoy being able to interact with the music media, to hold it in my hands, whether it's a cassette, a CD or a reel of tape. I somehow feel more of a connection with the music but maybe that's just me🙂

Well ... I can imagine having a nail driven through finger during tooth extraction while getting a circumcision from an old man with parkinsons using a spoon be considered as fun by someone. Who am I to judge?

"Home taping is killing music"

I accidentally stumbled onto this phenomenon while listing stuff for sale on eBay... some cassettes are going for hundreds/thousands if sealed and in mint condition

Old is gold

Part of the fun was actually shopping and hunting for your LP, 12" single, import copy..... I don't spend much time shopping on Spotify. Record stores were FUN! I didn't get into pre-recorded cassettes but I loved making mix tapes for me and my friends. I still have my early-90s Denon cassette deck.

As a recording, mixing and mastering engineer, using cassettes in 2023 makes no logical sense really. However, I still have all my cassettes going back 50 odd years. I also have a large collection of new old stock cassettes and I record on them.
But why?
Back in the 80's, LP and cassette were my primary music listening mediums and I had a fascination with trying to get a cassette recording to be as close to the source as possible. I was a teenager back then with a limited budget so I had the best decks I could afford and they were middle of the range Japanese Teac decks which I still have.
At the end of the 80's, I started an apprenticeship in electronics and had the opportunity to take home a very high end Harman Kardon cassette deck that boasted incredible performance even on type 1 tapes. HK even supplied their high end decks with individual test results and frequency response charts for each deck!
When I did my first recordings on this deck I had on loan, I was gobsmacked at the performance! It was everything I was trying to achieve with my Teac decks and I wanted one. Unfortunately, apprentice wages did not stretch that far.
Fast forward (see what I did there?) to today and along with the two Teac decks of my youth, I now have two Nakamichi decks (a 582 and a 582Z) and one of the finest decks ever made in my opinion, the Harman Kardon CD491. I have restored and calibrated these decks and am on a major nostalgia trip, doing what I always wanted to do with the cassette format. I also have two Nakamichi HiCom II noise reduction units which, in my opinion, are the finest domestic noise reduction ever made.
So, yes, I'm having a lot of fun with the humble compact cassette once again, this time with my dream decks!

Cases are simple and understandable. The user interface is good, and making the tapes is big part of the fun.

So great to see Sir McCartney giving his love to cassette tapes!

The truth is I never got rid of my cassettes or cassette player nor as an artist did I ever stop releasing my music on the format.
There always has been the odd few small artists that duplicate their music on cassette. However when it comes to actual music
production I don't miss my Tascam Porta One 4 track cassette recorder, I like the convinience of doing productions on the computer
and the pristine sound. Actually a chrome or metal cassette recorded and played on a top quality cassette deck still blows CDRs out
of the water! But I don't have time to sit down and listen to an lp cover to cover or a decent record player to play vinyls on. Another good
thing with a cassette is that you can always pick up from where you left off if you only wish to listen to a couple of tracks.

Nostalgic. Brings back memories. I remember the drive belts needed to be replaced after certain number of years, unless it is a direct drive unit. I've got to pull out my Nakamichi player and old tapes.

Minidiscs are more fun!! 😁

Now that I cannot hear above 10 KHz, I have revisited cassettes recently. I bought the best portable cassette recorders made by Sony and Marantz and tried every kind of tape and noise reduction. My late father had recorded many TDK SA C90s of a broadcaster called Barnesy (at the Beeb) and spend pleasant evenings listeninng to them. I still continue to collect, restore, use and sometimes resell tape recorders.

And let's not forget the challenge of maintaining a vintage cassette deck or two! Of course it all comes down to the music. Converting digital back to analog tells the whole story. The magic of tape hiss--I love it because at my age, I can't hear it! Let's just keep having fun.

Cassettes were fun until 1982 when I grew up and accepted CDs.

you had to go on a trip to town to buy cassettes part ofthe fun.

I love making my own cassettes. All you need is a decent cassette deck w/ record level control, hook it up to your computer's 3.5mm audio output jack & record anything you like 4 FREE!!! Mixtapes are a complete enjoyment to create & share w/ friends.Recordings sound great when played back on a decent decks or a vintage walkman on powered speakers or headphones. You can even play cassettes back in your car using the aux input & male 2 male 3.5mm cord (keep your cellphone away from the walkman as it will cause interference).

I really enjoy your videos. Cassettes are "fun" and quite amazing when you consider how hard the tech has been pushed to the envelope's edge. Ironically, it was perfected moments before it was abandoned. I've owned a number of cassette decks over my lifetime. However, the only deck I have purchased for myself in the last decade is a Pioneer CT-W606DR. Why that model? Because it uses a NON-encoding form of digital noise reduction that can play back ANY cassette with over 70 db of dynamic range. It is also Dolby capable which will get you another 10 db or so. From what I can tell - it uses a DSP programmed with a multiband noise-gate array that can tell the difference between real signal vs. noise and only open any gate to accomodate signal content - not random noise. It does breathe - but not nearly as much as dbx did. Pioneer released an entire line of decks with this feature in the 90's.

In the 90s when I grew up, cassettes were perfect for 1) people like me who didn't have a CD player and 2) wanted portable (discmans will skip like crazy when walking). And also 3) for recording stuff off the radio. The quality? Abysmal, even by the standards of the time. No "it was all we had so it was fine" there, it was just bad.

Yes, I think they are fun... again. In the early 2000s I was only too happy to ditch them for CD-R. Finally no wow, flutter, hiss, dropouts, too dull without dolby, too crisp with it, railroading or even eaten tapes.

But music has become so convenient and abundant that it has lost its value. Spending more time to decide what to listen to than actually listening to it. And then skipping tracks halfway though because there's just so much more to listen to. Can't miss out now, can I?

Cassettes (but also vinyl, R2R, 8-tracks and 78s) are much more deliberate. You carefully choose the album, or even spend hours making that mixtape, put them on and leave them be. They have moving parts that are much more fun to look at than a progress bar. Even the sonic flaws are charming (and, let's face it, nostalgia) now that I know I CAN have perfect digital quality if I want to. Back in the day the cassette was the only quality I got so I was utterly annoyed by its flaws. But now, it just reinforces I'm listening to a cassette. It adds to the experience. And, in my opinion, adds value to the music.

So, fun, yes. But anyone who says "you need a good deck and good cassettes for it to sound good" may be correct technically, but they just wants to spend lots of money to make the cassette sound more like digital. If I want that, I'll just listen to Spotify 🙂

i love cassette ,as a musician the way you listen do something to the way i play and make music,the clean digital sound kill something in the magic,the energy of the sound in the air is better,old recording of my music with a tape deck got all what i was missing for almost 3 decades since the move to digital,tape capture and stream something that digital can not capture

I remember going to great pains to make a mixtape for the car. Tracks were queued carefully, levels were set with precision. The following day I played the tape in my car on the way to work. As soon as the first track began, the cymbals were phasing in and out with the muffled undertones (not the group) of the rest. It was a disaster. Luckily - it being summer, my car window was open so I set said cassette free into the nearest hedge 😂

The MOST fun was buying an album on vinyl, immediately recording it to a high bias cassette while listening to the whole thing for the first time (and while the record was in it's best shape), THEN listening over and over again in my car where the engine and road noise made "ultimate high fidelity" not that big of a deal. Vinyl was for home listening, cassettes for portability,

And let's not forget making our own mix tapes. Much more fun than dragging and dropping titles into a playlist.

For the TRUE experience, back in the day we could buy concert tickets for $15 a piece for stadium shows and hear true high fidelity - live.

(From David) we have several hundred (yes, 300-400) home recorded cassettes [mostly recorded directly from LP on a Technics turntable] to allow multiple listenings, & listening devices while limiting album wear. It is surprisingly "fun" to pull out a cassette from the case and listen to music "from another time"...

I must say despite having a good record player, my K7 sounded better, no scratches and so on

I bought a bluetooth transmitter and plugged it into the headphone jack of my cassette player which then links with my Bose wireless headphones, It's so nice to be able to play all my old (almost 40 year old) cassettes again as I walk around the house. Especially the Top 40 I'd recorded from the radio.. Even discovered the odd hidden track at the end which was something I had partially recorded over and wasn't on the index. Fun times 🙂

If you're into restoring old hi-fi gear, then again this can be fun with a cassette machine (assuming you can get the parts!) There are many different areas of electronic desighn and technology employed in an old good quality cassette deck! They are good devices to learn on and satisfying to get working! If you're starting out in electronics as a hobbiest then figuring out how to fix them will give you a good understanding of many elcetronic principles!

And if you have a high end deck with a good quality cassette...........the performance can be surprisingly good, (adding a little analogue warmth if you are recording a digital source!).

Yep, fun is what it's all about! Making your own musical selections in reel time and trying to squeeze some performance out of the format! The fact that it's all so tactile, and then there is the nostalgia.

cassette sucks cassette trash
cds are better cds are king!!!

cassette sucks cassette trash
cds are better cds are king!!!

cassette sucks cassette trash
cds are better cds are king!!!

The cassette revival is encouraging a pencil revival too.
Happy days.

I scored around 400 sealed TDK SAX and SA from my local church yard sale for a few years ago for only £50.. propapbly more than enough for the rest of my life... 😅😅