The Cassette Comeback - should it?

seems like every day now that some retro formats getting resurrected and you can probably blame both curious millennials and wizened old geezers like me for that in equal measure i've done videos about turntables and vinyl and there are some legitimately good reasons for that format's come back but do cassettes and cassette decks have any redeeming qualities whatsoever why are bands making new cassettes why can you buy cassette players at urban outfitters why would you want to play one of these in 2022 what's the deal with cassettes let me start by saying that i want this video to be more about my own history and experience with the format than a full history or a deep dive into its tech specs there are lots of videos covering that kind of thing already out there but not a lot talking about why we bought cassettes in the first place what the experience was like in listening to the format and whether there's anything about it now that should make it interesting of course a lot of that's subjective and that's the point of this video if you want objectivity you're free to click off now and go read some service manuals instead i'm not going to hold out on you here's my own cassette collection feel free to pause now if you want to look at every single title though obviously you can see that i've lost a lot of the cases over the years so it's hard to identify all of them from this angle this collection goes back to the early 1980s through my high school years then college and even a little bit beyond you can pretty easily break it down by time period based on the band names metal was high school alternative was college classic rock and other stuff was just at random times i wasn't buying these to collect at the time i was buying them to listen to mostly in my car although i did have a home deck and some kind of off-brand walkman as well that i don't really remember some of you may think this is actually kind of a small collection for spanning 20 or 30 years but keep in mind i was buying vinyl and then cds through most of that time too and they were generally my preferred formats i bought cassettes if i thought i wanted to listen to something over and over while delivering pizzas an actual job i had or if the vinyl record or cd was just sold out at the record stores near me yes this was an issue we used to have sometimes we chose a music format not based on what was being produced but based on what the store actually had in stock can i still play these why yes i can here's my techniques rstr 355 which i bought new for my mother in 1990 or so when i worked at drucker's discount warehouse in new jersey case 1521 the drucker caper friday 10 am went to new jersey to investigate reports that trucker discount warehouses were selling audio video home electronics at suspiciously low prices found large selection all top brands when they service everything they sell surprising discover documented proof drucker guarantees lowest price of any legitimate retailer arnold drucker yes you take credit cards at drucker's our prices are so low you'll think it's a steal i bought it as a mid-priced deck with all the features i thought she'd ever need it wasn't considered a high-end deck at the time though it was decent i didn't really expect it to last forever i just wanted something reasonable for her and we'd replace it eventually if need be but when she died it was still there in her stereo rack and i took it home both as a memento and to actually use as you can see it's still in like new condition it plays perfectly and i've never even so much has replaced the belts it's a much better deck than i originally gave it credit for it can be difficult to find a decent cassette deck anymore that doesn't need some kind of work even if it's listed as working so i'm happy to have this one i've also grown fond of the way it looks over the years originally i thought it was a little unrefined compared to the sleek modern decks on sale at the time if it was a car it'd be a pontiac aztec but now just look at all those buttons dials and switches and that display it's absolutely gorgeous and it's still as bright as it ever was the deck i'd owned prior to this and the only one i ever purchased knew for myself was an onkyo ta-2200 this was a decently spec'd but pretty standard deck feature-wise with dolby bnc as well as hx pro two motors manual fine bias adjustment and manual level controls it had no auto reverse which was intentional on my part because that was known to reduce reliability i still don't use it on the techniques even though it has it my onkyo was also a single deck again intentional on my part because manufacturers at the time typically geared their single decks more for audio quality while their dual decks were geared more towards features that was reflected in the pricing it should be intuitive that if a manufacturer is making both dual decks and single decks with similar pricing up and down each line corners are being cut somewhere on the dual decks i was also just a big fan of ankio at the time there was a little less parody among electronics manufacturers back then and the upper tier mid-range brands like ankio denon and yamaha were still making all-metal high-quality components while brands like sony kenwood iowa and even techniques were introducing a lot of plastic and just generally lower quality materials into their stuff the ta2200 like almost all of ankio's stuff back then felt like a tank if it was a car it'd be a mitsubishi pajero obviously my own priorities were a little different than those i had from my mom and it wasn't that i wanted something better for myself more just that i thought she'd care more about features while i wanted reliability and quality but i was wrong about her techniques deck anyway it's got the best of both worlds clearly while making this video i stumbled across this old photo of my stereo as it existed in my college dorm in about 1992. good god that was 30 years ago it was a bit too good for the room to be honest there's my ta-2200 below the graphic equalizer a jvc xlz-555 cd player underneath the tape deck and a sansui aux-501 integrated amp on the bottom all stacked on top of each other like they were part of a cheap mini system unfortunately i sold my entire stereo including my onkyo cassette deck sometime in the late 90s so i don't even know if it's still in operation somewhere i was going to be a modern man all surround sound dvd and cd well that didn't last long i've had a couple of other cassette decks over the years i picked up a cool looking late 90s iowa deck at a thrift store for 10 bucks a while ago that was still basically brand new but the belts had gone and it was so poorly made that a piece of the plastic mechanism snapped while i was trying to replace them it never played right after that and it couldn't really be fixed without just replacing the whole mechanism it was a cheap deck anyway so i ended up binning it i also currently have this sony tck 96r which may or may not be the first ever cassette deck with full logic controls i know it's in the ballpark and interestingly enough they detach to form a wired remote if you have the wire which i don't this is a monster of a deck with real vu meters all metal construction a silver face and just about everything people love about electronics from the 70s and i keep it around as a display piece more than anything because it doesn't work it never has well it did at some point but not since i've owned it i put a lot of work into it shortly after buying it but i've just never gotten it to the point of playability it eats tapes for one thing though that's probably the least of its problems because it also has a major audio issue in one channel which is mostly noise and not much signal i've replaced transistors and made all the adjustments i know to make and it's better but it's not listenable so it sits until i either one day decide to pay to have it diagnosed and fixed or sell it on it's at least worth trying to save one way or another such as life with analog equipment you may think with all this all these tapes all these decks that i'm a fan of the format and well i'm not really it's probably more accurate to say that i'm a fan of cassette decks specifically i do love the hardware the mechanisms the complexity the displays on some of these machines the myriad buttons and dials all the weird little things we had to worry about like dolby b c hx pro and later s dbx mpx tape types and formulations manual controls for bias and level adjustments auto stop auto reverse etc cassette decks had to account for all this stuff and more and they did so in very different and unique ways they are beautiful complicated machines the most complicated of any mainstream home audio component and many of them deserve to be preserved for me there's kind of a sweet spot in the early to mid 90s when cassette decks had both matured into sleek elegant components while also having to deal with the maximum number of features present in the format that appeals the most to me after that it was all downhill but here's the thing we bought tapes because they were convenient that's it and i'm pretty sure i speak for close to a hundred percent of the original cassette buying population on that there are different types of convenience for example i bought tapes mostly because they made it easy to listen to music on the go in its lifetime your average car audio gets punched tuned ejected and equalized thousands of times that's why you need better than your average car audio [Music] clarion reliability is one of the strongest features because after all you wouldn't want to drive without your music someone else might have bought them because they were smaller than vinyl records and you could store more of them in a small space and someone else or me again sometimes might have bought them because that's just what the store had so we bought what was there rather than trucking to another store 25 miles away for the vinyl record i don't know a single person ever who bought cassettes for their sound quality in fact the various noise reduction technologies exist specifically because cassettes sound quality pretty much sucks by default reducing hiss became the number one goal for the cassette making industry for pretty much the entire time the format existed and this wasn't some esoteric thing average people knew about this and bought cassette decks based on it we all talked about cassette hiss and we all hated it i specifically remember arguing with multiple friends and keep in mind this was in high school about whether a certain deck or whether certain cassette releases had more or less hiss and whether the noise reduction was also cutting out some of the high end of the music now by the end of the cassette's reign hiss was less of a problem but it was still there but if you were to buy your own cassette preferably a type 4 metal tape but even a good type 2 chrome tape and record a cd onto it yourself using dolby b or c then played that back on a matching cassette deck with the same settings it could sound really good without much noticeable hiss except in totally silent parts in between songs for example so this is what many of us did and this is why you see a lot of homemade tapes in my little storage rack here for the most part these are actually not tapes i bootlegged off somebody else these are cassettes i recorded at home from cds i bought to listen to in my car the sound quality if you did this was generally much better than buying that same release on cassette to begin with it was well known by then that pre-recorded cassettes were trash compared to what you could do yourself pre-recorded cassettes mostly use the cheapest quality tape without noise reduction to save on both materials and licensing costs i will just add a caveat that towards the very end of the cassette format when sales were dwindling there was at least some effort made by a few record labels to improve the sound of pre-recorded cassettes techmon did a whole video just on this subject a few years back and i'll link to that below but you see here that this smithereens cassette is recorded onto cobalt tape this allowed for a greater signal signal-to-noise ratio versus the old ferric oxide while still being a type 1 tape for compatibility it also uses both dolby b and hx pro as well as xdr which is a combination of techniques to get higher dynamic range this skinny puppy cassette advertises the same as well as digilog which means this tape was recorded from a digital source and unlike earlier pre-recorded cassettes is a first generation copy cassettes like these are about as good as pre-recorded releases ever got but there weren't a whole lot of them like this and they came too late i only have two digilog tapes a few more on cobalt and only about half of my collection has any form of noise reduction modern-day pre-recorded cassettes have now regressed back to ferric oxide with no noise reduction interestingly i worked at my college radio station and the promo tapes record labels would send us were often on chrome tape while the retail release was on standard ferric oxide here are a couple of those promos obviously the labels knew something if they were sending chrome tapes to radio stations by the way just a tangent about terminology the official name of this format is compact cassette and it may have been routinely called that in some parts of the world it seems to have now caught on around youtube as well but i don't think i ever heard that term during the format's reign and you never see it in any of the advertisements from the era we just called them cassettes if we wanted to differentiate from some other format we called them regular or standard cassettes but if you pause and read any of these ads i'm showing on the screen now none of them ever use the term compact cassette i'm not saying that term is wrong or that nobody used it anywhere in the world just that it was probably a regional thing and it sounds weird to me to hear people use it now the last cassette i think i ever made was this one s2 works from the anime neon genesis evangelion basically it's full score i don't really know why i made this to be honest but you can see i still own the cd i made it from this would have been recorded on my onkyo deck you can see that it's a metal tape and these were expensive even at the time and are getting a lot more expensive now so i don't have a lot of them this was kind of peak recording for me i guess you could say here are a couple of other cassettes i made and these are the kinds of blank cassettes i would typically buy i did prefer maxell because their higher end tapes really felt higher end they have a matte finish and a heft to them that just feels expensive i doubt they actually sound any better than comparable tdk or other name brand tapes of that same formulation but the actual cassette shell is noticeably better quality you can even hear when i shake these two tapes that there's less rattling around on the maxell [Applause] another little side note but while i was looking around for images to use in this video i found a very thorough test of 88 different retail blank cassettes that audio magazine did in 1990. it turns out that tdk tapes actually performed somewhat better than maxell in general other highlights of that test are that a good normal bias tape performed as well as an average chrome high bias tape but metal tapes pretty much always performed better than anything tdk ended up making a big deal out of this test in their marketing since their max cassettes performed the best out of any of the 88 tapes in the test it is interesting though that all 88 of these different tapes were unique none of them performed exactly the same you really had to do a lot of research like this to know exactly what to expect when you bought a blank tape many people including myself would just pick one brand or tape and stay loyal to that because they liked the sound of it okay even if it wasn't objectively all that great most people just had no way of knowing that here's an unopened very late maxell xl2s100 that i've owned since at least the 90s never opened it probably never will now for most of cassette's reign 90 minutes or 45 aside was the most common tape length since most albums were under 45 minutes in length that was partly to preserve sound quality on a vinyl record where longer durations meant more packed together grooves leading to worse sound quality the alternative was to make a double album and there are plenty of those but they obviously cost more so we're mainly reserved for bands with large and devoted fan bases anyway you could still fit those on a single 90-minute tape because each individual lp still only contained about 45 minutes of music but the advent of cd meant albums became longer and longer sometimes approaching the full 74 minutes possible on a standard cd blank cassettes followed suit or tried to and pretty soon 100 and 120 minute tapes became more common the idea being that you could still fit most albums on a single side even as they got longer i never liked going over 100 minutes because rumor had it that the tape itself was thinner to fit into a standard shell and in any case it's pretty obvious that there's more mass on the spindle when fast forwarding or rewinding we all heard stories about 120 minute tapes snapping 100 minute tapes were considered safe i have no idea if these rumors were true but we all heard them at the time and again this whole video is just about my experience you can see on the back here they say this is best for recording cds pre-recorded cassettes or digital broadcasts and best used with both car and high performance home stereos their lower end tapes would have omitted cd and high performance home stereos on this label high quality blank tapes today are getting rarer normal bias tape is still being made and you can still buy normal bias blanks but for chrome or metal tapes your only real option is to buy new old stock off ebay if you're just hell bent on revisiting this format or you've just got an old deck and you want to try hooking it up again i'd recommend going the ebay route if you really need to record we're trying to make the best of an inherently bad situation here so buy the best tapes your deck will support back to my own history at some point i bought my first car cd player i was a clarion guy at the time if you're wondering and that was pretty much that for cassettes for me i know what some of you are thinking but what about the mixtape what about that little stealth valentine that you could give to someone that simultaneously says i like you enough to spend hours making this tape but also not enough to respect your current musical taste nothing can replace that today the closest you can get is sending someone a playlist on a streaming service but yeah that kind of just seems more rude than anything i guess you could also just put some mp3s on a usb stick or something but where's the soul in that mixtapes were as much about the time it took sitting there recording stuff in real time as anything else getting a handmade physical object in the mail or handed to you in school certainly was a thing that kids these days are missing out on i admit i did it myself for certain girls i liked sometimes repeatedly and some of whom are probably watching this video i'm still friends with some of them and i've still got a couple mixtapes that were given to me like these i'm pretty sure from the same girl i'm missing the case from the first but jew if you're watching this i do still appreciate these this is probably the one true benefit of cassettes that's lost in the modern world but really is this worth reviving an entire format over and is there a business case for mixtapes maybe maybe i'm just not that imaginative so the cassette is the 1980s and 90s equivalent of the mp3 it was the most convenient and at the time most reliable and ubiquitous portable music format every car had a cassette player for a while and every home stereo had a cassette deck but none of us listened to cassettes because they sounded good one last little tangent at the very end of the cassette's original run various manufacturers tried to modernize the format essentially by just digitizing it phillips who was responsible for the original compact cassette introduced the digital compact cassette along with japan's matsusta parent company of panasonic among others in 1992. dat or digital audio tape had already failed in the market due to both cost and confusing copy protection that basically defeated the purpose many people bought home tape decks for dcc was meant to be backwards compatible with existing analog cassettes and on the new digital cassettes would record 105 minutes of audio using lossy compression that sounded similar to other compression schemes common at the time in other words it sounded ok not great unfortunately dcc used the same copy protection scheme as dat which didn't help it win over consumers after my stint at druckers i sold these for a while at jnr music world in new york and i wish i'd picked one up when we were clearing them out at 99 bucks when visiting new york come to jnr music and computer world the city's largest home-based home entertainment and computer store visitors to new york city will find that jnr music and computer world has a knowledgeable sales staff offering the greatest selection at the very best prices j r music and computer world the only retailer to win two separate retailer of the year awards jnr is located across from city hall park on park road in the historic revitalized downtown wall street area near the world trade center and twin towers jnr music and dcc didn't make much of a dent in the market it probably just came too late and was competing with both cd and minidisc by then including recordable versions of each pioneer then picked up the torch and released an entire line of standard cassette decks that would seamlessly convert any analog cassette to digital audio internally apply various enhancements including digital noise reduction to the signal then reconvert it back to analog for output the weirdest thing about these decks is that despite pioneer making a big deal out of their 20-bit analog to digital conversion even on the highest model in the line there was no way to get a digital signal out there was digital in which was something but no out i'm guessing that was at least partly to get around copy protection requests from the record labels so these decks would need no special copy protection after the failure of both dat and dcc pioneer was hell-bent on making it clear that these would give you the exact same experience as a standard cassette deck even if that meant doing a second unnecessary conversion from digital back to analog v westlife did a video on one of these a few years ago and i'll link to that below he seemed to like the digital noise reduction although he did mention it creating audible artifacts in between tracks still a valiant effort on pioneer's part but all of these attempts at modernization were really just band-aids meant to fix an obvious weakness in the format noise it's also worth noting that pioneer's late 90s decks by their own published specs have worse wow and flutter and distortion than most decks from prior decades so despite the digital processing pioneer's decks were not immune from an overall degradation in component quality by the late 90s that was just hastening the downfall of the format so if cassettes were a product of convenience and given that mp3 and streaming now exist for that same reason is there really any justification for the cassette comeback for most people including some of those who are buying cassettes again i'd have to say no again vinyl sure vinyl always sounded great and it's got big artwork often comes with big books etc even just as merchandise even if you've never even listened to it vinyl's still pretty cool but if you do listen to it it's gonna sound great cassettes though i don't know i bought a couple of new cassettes just out of curiosity to see what bands that are releasing them in 2021 and 22 are actually doing with them and of course there's no dolby noise reduction because it's impossible to license that anymore there's no tape formulation listed at all which makes me pretty sure they're normal bias tapes these are going to be the crappiest sounding tapes you could ever buy and there's no reason to own these as collector's items with their tiny liner notes and lack of any extras you can't play them in any modern car or in most modern home stereos you probably wouldn't want to even if you could and there's also no redeeming value even just as novelties buy the vinyl records instead if you just want something to collect to be clear i have actually played these tapes once each that's enough i'm just trying to avoid playing them here because of youtube's content id these would definitely set that off but hey whatever floats your boat right and if you like the machinery like i do then have at it if you've got an old collection of tapes you want to play sure go out and buy a cassette deck i'm not saying nobody should be listening to tapes i do it sometimes when i'm feeling nostalgic i'm just saying most people probably shouldn't be buying new ones there are better formats for literally any situation there's no reason for this format to make a comeback any more than 8 track tapes or cylinder records should if you do want to buy a deck to play your old collection my recommendation is to get an older deck that's been fully serviced like this one behind me and i'll put a link to that one in the description since i'm shamelessly lifting their photo or if you're just up for a little work yourself look for a deck that's listed as something like turns on can hear motor running but tape doesn't move if you're lucky a couple of cheap belts and an hour or two of labor and you'll have a perfectly working deck as always though buyer beware with something that's listed as non-working it may have other problems like my sony or like my iowa you may mess it up worse just doing some minor maintenance probably not if it's a decent deck to begin with though older decks have much better mechanisms than anything currently on the market and if you can get a good one you'll have a deck that sounds as good as possible given the limitations of the format will play anything and will last a long time which decks to look for specifically is a topic that's really too big for me to cover here but just look for any of the big brands and stay away from anything post 1990s or anything in the low end of the range a half decent mid-range deck from the 80s or 90s would be easily better than anything made today or even anything towards the end of the cassette's original reign there are some features i consider pretty essential for the widest compatibility dolby b and the ability to play both type 1 and 2 tapes or normal in chrome are the bare minimum features i couldn't do without you're just not going to be able to properly play a lot of later cassette releases or record on decent blanks that rules out a lot of decks from the 70s although there are still plenty that have those features i personally also highly recommend dolby c and type 4 metal tape capability which pretty much closes off the 1970s silver face era completely but if you're going 1980s or beyond you may as well then look for dolby hx pro as well again though i do feel like there's a sweet spot in there somewhere where you can get all these features plus even things like auto reverse if you want it while still getting really good build quality and displays that might be different from the analog vu meters of the 1970s but are still beautiful in their own way in any case even as someone with a youtube channel specializing in retro stuff and preserving formats that i often think are still superior to what replaced them cassette is a format whose time i think has come and gone it has no reason to exist as a going business concern it just was never very good to begin with and the one thing it did better than other formats at the time walk around with you it's just not very good at anymore so enjoy it in whatever way you want to and can but for me these are almost definitely the last two new cassettes i'll ever buy music put on a walkman and see the world in a whole new light the walkman from sony the one and only

Channel: Modern Classic

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Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022