Article in this morning's Wall St. Journal on the efforts of a Missouri company to end the shortage of cassette tape:
A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling - WSJ
SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.
The world is running out of cassette tape.
National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.
A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling - WSJ
SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.
The world is running out of cassette tape.
National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.
Let's see, 1/8 tape at less than 2 inches per second when pros use 1/4 inch at 15 ips. (30 ips if there worried about high freqs.) or 30 times as much tape on a machine that is recalibrated for the tape that's on it at the moment. And most recording engineers went to digital as soon as they could. Cassettes? The worst recording device on the planet, ( ok maybe the old wire recorder is worst) using crap home made tape. When you get one,record some tones, then play them back a month later. You'll stop using cassettes. And don't forget to clean the heads, that bathtub tape will probably leave all kinds of high freqs ( magnetic dust) on them.
And the factory recorded tapes sounded a lot worse then the home made tapes. I only bought one, and it ended up in the garbage. 8 tracks sounded better. When are they making a comeback?
Start up groups and indivigual musicians are doing so as they only need a few copies to sell. Also people making the more esoteric music (read 'The Wire' magazine - it's like another world of music exists). There are quite a lot of musicians releasing vinyl in relatively small numbers as well
Cassettes are also trendy at the moment as is a lot on old skool analog art forms. I never bought a single one and don't intend to start now! It's a shame r2r tapes are so expensive; now that is a satisfying medium.
Aw tape
I have to say I remember tape cassette quite fondly. Too young for real vinyl collection and 8 track cassettes but old enough to have recorded many a poor dub, and surprisingly often some good quality demos and EPS.
I actually just sold a 4 track yamaha cassette deck to a band who take the medium seriously and also want to use the gimmick factor I suppose.
Recording on metal formula tapes (TDK in metal cases) and at double speed the quality wasn't far off CD, I just had to bounce down as minimally as I could to retain the fidelity.
I never had the luck to use a r2r, and I'd still love to use one now.
Limits provoke creativity I reckon.
I have to say I remember tape cassette quite fondly. Too young for real vinyl collection and 8 track cassettes but old enough to have recorded many a poor dub, and surprisingly often some good quality demos and EPS.
I actually just sold a 4 track yamaha cassette deck to a band who take the medium seriously and also want to use the gimmick factor I suppose.
Recording on metal formula tapes (TDK in metal cases) and at double speed the quality wasn't far off CD, I just had to bounce down as minimally as I could to retain the fidelity.
I never had the luck to use a r2r, and I'd still love to use one now.
Limits provoke creativity I reckon.
Cassette Tape revival - in the Wall Street Journal
I suppose it was inevitable ....
Making Cassette Tapes Cool Again
I suppose it was inevitable ....
Making Cassette Tapes Cool Again
Have fond memories of 8 track tapes.
Spent many an hour winding them back on after a mishap.
They had a metal tape on them at the ends to switch track, my player rarely picked up on that so had to change track manually.
In those young days I wired mine into my car. For some reason I didn't fuse it and one day the wiring caught fire ! I tried to rip out the wires to stop them shorting and ended up with numerous burns across my hand where the red hot wire burned it.
Done. I got a dummy cassette which jacks to an iPod or whatever. I may even have used it. (But the other car we use an FM thingie-- works fine way out here where there's only about 3 stations across the FM band.)
Use smaller wire. I had a radio on the Jeep seat, cheap clip-leads to the lighter socket. One dark night I saw "lightning" from seat to dash. It was those thin wires gone incandescent-white from a short. Didn't last long. The drippings did almost no damage to the wood patches over my floorboard holes.
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