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- Mar 14, 2001
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This Is the Last Factory on Earth That Makes Cassette Tapes
They still make cassette tapes...?
Nice piece on that company that still makes the tapes. This is already 8 years old.
Tape isn't used for storage? It sure is.
Several of my clients are tech firms that do "digital transformation." I have to create a lot of case studies for them, and a common business problem for their customers is "We have all of our data archived on tape, so retrieving it and using it is a slow process." Just for example, one I did last year was for a company that amasses and sells data on natural gas deposits. The gas companies pay them to help figure out the most profitable places to drill for oil. Obviously the service was pretty slow, using tape. The new system has everything in the cloud.Where?
The same thing applies for the same reason. There are no Type IV tapes because there are no Type IV decks. They don’t sell buggy whips anymore because they don’t sell any buggies.
Yeah I was talking about the tapes themselves not the decks.
You don’t necessarily need type IV for quality playback.
Type II is fine for almost every scenario for dubbing or creating your own mixtape.
That being said I managed to snag a few NOS type IV cassettes and recorded some music directly to my tape deck from Soundcloud and Bandcamp. It’s gimmicky and it’s not better than the original but I like it. Sounds pretty freaking good.
Your standard every day consumer recordings were just on type I and are fine sound-wise for the medium. My Tom Petty Wildflowers cassette sounds fantastic and it didn’t have to be on a metal tape.
I have two beautiful vintage cassette decks that I bought off of an old man who really took care of his stuff he was actually very happy to sell them to me because he saw that I was into it too. I don’t think any of it sounds better than vinyl or CDs or anything like that but it’s just a fun way to play music sometimes.
Did you actually just respond to a joe9 post.Sure but that’s what a sound engineer is actually for. To mix down all the tracks in to stereo and have it all still sound coherent.
No.You don’t need Type IV, sure, but todays decks suck well beyond lacking that. A fancy head is only worth it if the rotating mech is nearly perfect, which no new thing is. Not only do you have to pay Dolby for the NR circuit you have to build a head worth upgrading in the first place.
Keep ahold of the old stuff because it ain’t coming back. As big as the vinyl boom has been there still isn’t a single decent medium quality fully automatic turntable on sale and those are WAY easier to make than the sorts of cassette decks we were seeing during the peak of the format. People are only interested in innovating semiconductors nowadays.
I only ever used Type IV for making cassettes of CDs anyways because for the first decade or so of CD it was expensive and the portables would skip if they didn’t sit perfectly still on a table. I bailed on tape for MD eventually and rode that all the way to iPod Mini in 2004 or whenever that was.
As big as the vinyl boom has been there still isn’t a single decent medium quality fully automatic turntable on sale and those are WAY easier to make than the sorts of cassette decks we were seeing during the peak of the format..
Tapes have been used for data backups forever.Where?
Yeah, that's a damn shame and it's not easy to find automatic vintage TTs. I would buy an automatic Denon if I ever came across one that wasn't crazy expensive. I really just want the auto return function. I used to have an automatic Dual.