Vinyl Outsells CDs for the First Time Since 1987

[smokey]

This Is the Last Factory on Earth That Makes Cassette Tapes

They still make cassette tapes...?

hypebeast.com

Nice piece on that company that still makes the tapes. This is already 8 years old.

 

[SignOfGoob]

Tape isn't used for storage? It sure is.

Where?

 

[Lagduf]

I'm not sure what the average use-case for this type of tape is, but that doesn't mean the product doesn't exist.

Where I have seen it used is by one of the slow-motion YouTube channels where the raw data of their super high speed, high resolution slow motion footage absolutely eats up data. They back their archival footage to the above tape.

I'm not certain what industries would need this type of data archiving. You can buy this tape on Amazon.

 

[SignOfGoob]

The problem these days usually is that tape, and even spinning HDs, are too slow to back up data as fast as it’s being made. Meaning…unless you have large breaks in your data creation (or huge tape farms) you’ll never be able to finish backing anything up.

 

[Lagduf]

In real time, I'm sure you're right. I'm certainly glad I don't have that issue. Some stupid HDDs will satisfy any data hoarding I need.

 

[fake]

Where?

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.

So, yeah, the trend is to move everything to instant access, duh. But not every company can afford that or has the knowledge on how to do it, or where to even start, especially considering how much data they have, how it needs to be processed and sorted, etc. Now just imagine the medium sized businesses that can't afford to hire a big tech firm to do this stuff for them. And that's not to even mention the price of cloud storage, when you can buy a 12TB tape for $50.

 

[roker]

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.

 

[fake]

Why fly a kite when you can pop a pill?

 

[joe8]

The best kind of tape is what they use in studios for recording albums, isn't it?
Consumer music tapes have two stereo channels on one narrow piece of tape, so the sound quality doesn't match other tape options.

 

[Lagduf]

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.

 

[SignOfGoob]

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.

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.

 

[max 330 megafartz]

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.

Did you actually just respond to a joe9 post.

 

[max 330 megafartz]

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.

No.

 

[roker]

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..

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.

 

[skate323k137]

Where?

Tapes have been used for data backups forever.

Mind you consumer cassette tapes haven't really been used for data storage in the main-stream since floppy drives became available. But I've got some good old apple computer cassette tape programs around here somewhere.

 

[NeoSneth]

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.

I only have vintage TT, and they are quite robust. Change a belt here and there, lube a rail, new cartridge... It's the same stuff you'd need to do on a modern TT.