Oh, so *NOW* they tell me...

[Blue_Tires]

Press rewind: The cassette tape returns

The humble cassette tape, a happy memory for many music fans of a certain age, has staged a comeback for one Canadian company.

The first order came in 1989: 10 cassettes. With that began Analogue Media Technologies, a company created to help bands market their music.

Musicians would bring finished master recordings and graphic design templates, and Analogue, now also called Duplication.ca, would turn those materials into slickly produced albums, complete with labels, cover art and liner notes, ready for sale or distribution.

It started with cassettes and vinyl, but then the trends shifted towards CDs, then DVDs and Blu-ray.

Now, they find themselves returning to the medium that started it all.

"We're back to cassettes as one of the main attractions," says Ms Gorman.

Analogue now says that cassette recordings make up 25% of the business. That is quite a change from five years ago, when cassette tapes seemed to be going the way of the defunct 8-track cartridge - the music format that was popular in the 1960s and 70s.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22533522

[TreasonousBastard]

1. So, they got rid of the hiss, flutter...

limited dynamic range and the cat pulling the tape out and leaving it all over the floor?

Personally, I thought the sound quality from 8 track was pretty good-- probably why it died so early. Quality seems to be low on the list of desired things in consumer goods.

[Archae]

2. I just converted 25 cassettes to CD...

Recorded to mp3 and then burned to CD.

Almost all of them were 80's tunes

[jakeXT]

3. But they also tell you

Better sound: Music’s new big business

Poor-quality MP3s are now our default sound format – but there is a huge new market for technology that can improve our listening experience. Miranda Sawyer turns up the volume and investigates.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130517-why-better-sound-is-big-business

[hunter]

4. Retro is in. Lomogrphy is making 110 cartridge film again...

http://shop.lomography.com/us/films/110-film

It's not easy faking the look of 110 film or the sound of a cassette tape. The flaws are just too random and perverse. Cassettes and 110 photography are chaotic analog systems, much more so than vinyl records or 35mm film.

I tried to write a plugin that turned electronic pictures into something that looked like 110 film, and it works for one or two pictures, but for simulating an entire roll the effect was obviously fake because it didn't have the range of perverse flaws one sees in actual 110 photographs. Other electronic "retro" effects also look repetitive to me compared to actual film.

Cassette tapes are similarly random. Tapes I copied at home sounded quite different from tapes other people made, or tapes made on the high speed duplicating machines at the Associated Student Bookstore. Yeah, yeah, these were for copying class recordings and such, but nobody said anything if we stuck a few music tapes in there too.