A Short Film About Cassettes - You Need To Hear This 

I always loved cassettes. So easy and immediate....and portable!

It's cool that another generation has discovered cassettes and having fun making them like I did when I was a teenager and college student in the 80's. I still have a big collection. But they will always be a collectors niche format like VHS/Beta video tape, Reel to Reel and 8-track.

I still have my 500 cassette collection as of now 2016. Had them since the 80's. Ranging from 1981-1990. Mostly recorded blanks

Basically all I got from this was that tapes 'don't sound that great, but have a certain charm about them.' Which is obvious if you're at all experienced with, or grew up with tape. I wish this video would go deeper than the nostalgia.

With the right cassette and the right recording equipment, it will sound better than any CD.

It's not the sound that is amazing about tapes, it's the energy. I'm very glad people are coming back to this spiritual medium.

There's record labels releasing albums on 3.5" FLOPPY DISKS now, can you out hipster that??

Tapes have been my fashion since my childhood and always will be, that's why I never give up on them. I of course do have CDs too, but cassettes will never go out of fashion to me, I don't care what people say about it being outdated and CDs and MP3s being the modern era today, I'm never gonna give up on my tapes!

I'm 14 and I love cassettes! I got a used deck and receiver from an indoor flea market recently and I've been nonstop making mixtapes!

I still have all my tapes all the way from the early 90s! Theres something to be said about the tape! I love listening to cassette tape more than any other format!

Here's a plus side (No pun intended): After you finished listening to an album, you can have something look back to.

I still have much love for cassettes. I've transferred all mine to mp3 by now, just to protect the recordings, but there's a tangible, tactile thrill to tapes that I love. It's a format that forces you to be patient and listen to everything, moving between tracks was never easy. Stop, eject, lift, flip, drop, close, play. ;¬)

There is something about having a physical copy of an album that you've liked or an album that meant something to you at some point.

I loved it when my walkman was running out of batteries as a little kid - and the music and voices would slow down like they were melting or something. Was hilarious. Then you hit stop for a few minutes, then press play again, and got another 5 minutes of playtime! hahaha.

I hope cassettes do make a comeback since I collect them. Would love to see cassette decks sold at Best Buy. It beats me having to buy used ones on the internet that don't last that long.

I'm collecting tapes nowadays, it's such a fun hobby and my love for cassettes never left.

I miss tapes so much (from my childhood) that I'm hoarding them to dj with. I even picked up a direct drive Technics deck recently.

I use to love going to music stores back in the day looking at cassettes and trying to see which one to buy.

She says 'like' every other word. I think this is what I sound like. Got to put a stop to that.

Any punks with cassettes here!

I collect cassettes and have made a lot of mix tapes, it is nice that they are making a come back.

I am still not crazy on the format,I was there the first time around and people moved on for a reason, but I love bit of nostalgia and these people have passion for tapes, gotta love that.

That bit at the beginning.... SOOOO true :)

There's an inexplicable feel to cassettes that brings out a whole new side to music. Even an mp3 track you've listened to millions of times will sound different on tape. It doesn't sound great, or as clear, but there is definitely a tangible quality and charm to it that only analog technology can bring. Thing is most people today don't fully understand it. I still have all my dad's old tapes from when he was a teenager, and they work brilliantly. I absolutely love the cassette.

What a "cool", uplifting video. It...made my day watching this. And...I agree with the comment(or)right below mine; With a upper-tier cassette deck and upper-tier("Metal")tape, an exceptional sounding recording can be made. Oh, & the recording levels properly adjusted/monitored.

I just finished paying for a Technics M24 and a SU-Z4, can't wait to start this journey!

I love them and I still have hundreds of them along with 2 or 3 walkmans that work great.

The perspective of free culture in this video is amazing..!

i also used to record the radio rock sow with Mary Anne Hobbs on Tuesday nights, still have loads of em.

omg I'm going to go very crazy. this is incredible!

If you want a tape sound without having to purchase tapes and some hardware that can play them, Google or RU-vid search for "U-HE Satin" - it is a VST plugin you can run in any good audio player and it gives you THAT sound (and more).

I have tape recording of me as a kid, laughing to SNL shows, farting, and a barrage of all kinds of silliness!!

Wonderful! I love cassettes :-)

Long Live The Cassette!

I have fond memories of cassettes (born in 1980). All of my first music experience came from cassettes. Parents, then I started getting my own. I think my first few were like Dire Straits Brothers in Arms and a couple others I can't recall around '87 '88. I definitely remember buying Prince - Diamonds and Pearls the day it came out with my allowance. That said - cassettes, pre-recorded ones anyway, sound somewhere between "Okay I Guess" and "Hot Garbage Juice." However, I've found after picking up an old really good Marantz tape deck from 78 or 79, if I record at 3 3/4 IPS (double normal speed) from a good source, like a nice clean vinyl, when I play it back I can only barely, JUST BARELY pick out the difference between the tape and the source. And I listen to a lot of vinyl and the difference is typically stark between it and any other source - I've been building the collection since '95. For the kids: If you care about sound at all, forget cassettes unless you're a bit of an audio nerd. If you're just interested in 80s culture and music and format or whatever if it's simply cool again... cool. I was really into the 60's and 70's in the 90's so I get it. In any case - have fun!

This was great.

I relate to what this girls going on about when it comes to tapes I was into them from about her age as well and used to record people on them etc

Cassettes themselves to me are interesting. It's actually the players that I believe are ridiculously cumbersome and frustrating. You've gotta spend A LOT of money to find a decent quality player.

that DZ tape! i never knew that EP existed, that's vintage! so cool, such a cool video

I just got (back) into vinyl. 'had a record player as a wee lad. Mom saved her favorite 20 LPs or so, and just handed them down to me. Like her, I saved about my favorite 20 cassettes. I'm kind of glad to hear they're making a resurgence, just the nostalgia part of me. But remember the quality? One had to spend some serious coin to get metal tapes and a deck that could record them to have decent sound. CDs just blow them away. They make component CD burners now, so it is not MUCH harder to make a CD than it is to make a cassette, and they have superior sound.

The only thing I hate about cassettes is the rewinding.

back on the cassette days you really listen your favorite cassette until it fall into pieces !

The compact Cassette was originally for dictation and was monaural. It was found to acceptable for music as the speed regulation was "pretty good" for moving at a very slow speed (1&7/8th inches per second) usually at this low rate the high frequencies fall off drastically. At the time 15 ips for music and 7½ ips for speech was the norm. Add to the fact the cassette used 1/8th wide tape as apposed to the normal 1/4 inch , this really compromised the area to place enough signal. Now add four tracks to a 1/8 inch wide tape (two for stereo in one direction) and this headroom for signal really gets hard to lay down enough energy to create high fidelity. Tape magnetic oxide and even the tape itself got better and thinner so more could be placed into that tiny reel. Then came the electronic magic of Dolby to further reduce the "tape hiss" The remarkable decks of that era were indeed just that. Many engineers worked to further the state of the art to the point that even some very inexpensive tape machines could deliver very good quality results. Was it as good as CD (wave file) or high bitrate Mp3's? No but it is what led to these formats we enjoy today

Long time fan of tapes. I still have some tapes of me when I was a kid.

I like tapes very much. I'm making recordings on a cassettes from maybe 4 years old. I grew up with the cassettes and I won't stop listening to them. With a high quality equipment actually the Compact Cassette sounds really great. A little bit of hiss is separating it from the CD quality and it isn't bothering me. It's the only analog medium on which you can make high quality recordings at home and at the same time it's compact enough compared even to a CD. The only problem is that nobody produces a high quality cassette players/recorders nowadays and at the same time the spare parts as belts, pinch rollers etc. for the old players are harder and harder to find. Sometimes it's a real adventure to find all the parts needed to fix a particular machine.

I don’t have a Walkman but I have a pioneer ct-f950 that has been fully serviced with 4 new belts. Sounds great with my modern Cambridge cxa60 integrated amp.

Brilliant.

I know a lot of people claim it to be hipster fodder, but I'm a metal artist and I think it's just a cool alternative to boring CDs especially when MP3s are all available online. but I mainly love the DIY aspect of it, and the added crunchiness and resonance that it would give to something like black metal or grindcore.

I'm only listning to cassette right now

I'm 33 I grew at with the cassette. I love them I wish I had a tape deck still

Excellent point!

I think cassettes, recorded well and listened on a hi fi system sound close to audio CD in quality and definitely better in feeling. I started recordings of vinyl 24 bit recordings to tapes and I like how they sound.

I am collecting vinyl records, but after seeing this video I thought wait a minute didn't I have quit a lot o cassete tapes too, let's dig them out of the loft and play them tonight ! Added this to my playlist on vinyl records as I think vinyl collectors should really start playing the old cassete tapes as well.

Cassette development was pushed by Nakamichi in the 1970s. The Nakamichi 700 was introduced and could faithfully reproduce High frequencies as high as 22,500 cycles, well beyond what a CD or DVD can reproduce. Tape hiss was only an issue with improperly recorded tapes (too low of a recording level and low quality tape). Low quality cassette players contributed to the tape hiss as well as poor frequency response. The main advantage to any player that can faithfully reproduce signals that you may not be able to hear (High frequencies such as 22,500 cycles) is that they have no problem with signals that you can hear. The other disadvantage to CDs and DVDs is that they are digitally sampled at 44,100 cycles and cannot faithfully reproduce high frequencies, so your kidding yourself if you think they sound better. You do have the advantage of no tape hiss, but with the way all digital media is presently produced, the audio has been so compressed that most listeners will suffer "listener Fatigue" and that is even worse with Broadcast FM radio. AM radio suffers the same symptoms but also suffers from the limited frequency response that the Broadcasters choose to transmit. AM and FM can sound pristine, but the industry destroyed it like they are destroying HDTV with all the compression there also. Cymbals are the real test of audio digital medium and a camera panning across a crowd at a sports event are the test for video digital media as the facial details blur. For most, mp3s are "Good Enough", since they have never been exposed to truly good audio.

"It doesn't sound great..." Well shit, I'm sold.

I vouch this statement!

This is great. Wishing I would have grown up in the 70s/80s when the cassette tapes were popular. The 90s was awesome with CDs, but the old school is always better. Nice video!

i still browse through tapes when i see them for sale

Bravo!

When I was little in the late 70's, I so loved listening to my dad's records sitting in front of the Hi-Fi. I always listened to cassettes in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's until CD's became more affordable until 8 years ago until I donated all my cassettes for mp3's. Now I collect vinyl and enjoy the sound better than cassettes.

I had a collection of tapes that I had from the late 90s to late 00s all with my voice recordings wish I’d never thrown them out

Very nice...

Pretty sure that's actually genuine interest and obsession for cassettes.

This was nice.

My older sisters gave me cassettes when I was little, they're so... endearing.

AWe some tapes from Africa!

I love recording my music onto cheap old cassettes because the recordings always come out with interesting warbles and glitches.

Cassettes were a critical step in home music recording and programming (mix tapes!) but my expensive technics deck sits gathering dust. There is a reason for this.

Can someone tell me where can I buy blank cassettes, which have album cases? Instead of the thinner cases

If anybody wants to know how to fit a playlist on each side of the tape, there's an app to do exactly that. It's called "MixTape Calculator". It's free and I think is available for both Android and IOS.

I have grimes artangels on tape and it’s so boppy and plays a bit slower than normal and I feel like that’s a vibe lmao

Cool. Tapes and cassettes are still in my collection.🎼🎵🎶🎹🕘💎

Cassettes are so cool I use them any where I go

Long live the cassette! I have about 500 of them.

Before CDs and MP3s I had only alternative to make my playlist on Cassetes... Metallica, Deff Lepard, Iron, you name it! God, that was ALL i NEEDED FOR A GOOD TIME OUT IN MY OLD CAR.

oh god the second guy was like a portlandia skit, fuck, we really are hipsters...

The one flaw is that you don't have direct access to the song. It's makes it tough finding the song if you are unfamiliar with the album and/or the track is an instrumental. That later part is proof as to why cassettes never caught on in the jazz and classical genres.

Where can i get all this new musician cassette?

I have a studio I do most of the mixing on gear not in a computer. I actually want to find a nice tascam 3 head cassette recorder to put all that beautiful sound on.

I love making mix tapes with cassettes

00s kid right here and I use cassettes. I don't really use them for playback. I just use them to record my own stuff, as its the only equipment available to me right now. I make hip hop beats and record myself or some of my friends rapping on them onto cassettes. If Im not doing that, I'll just run my instrumentals through my tape deck to give them a different sound.

hi,u r like anther 1 of me i have like 10 shelves of classic cassette tapes u rock

You got me beat. Age 5 for me on Reel to Reel. Yeah been around a long time. I love tape. Just not all the hassles that come with tape. Have had over 60 tape machines of one kind or another. But it was fun though.

I play cassettes and they sounds awesome

I make music (badly) in Reason6. But I will absolutely put it through a cassette once I'm done. I don't miss the way tapes broke or chewed but I do miss their tone.

WHAT IS THE MUSIC FROM 1.56 AND HOW CAN I GET IT!

i still own technics sr-tr355 tape deck sounds great but dont own any tapes but making me want tapes again

Making a cassette? It's not great? It is astonishing!!

Great Work :) QC

is this song available anywhere to download?

"in my apartment in Williamsburg"

I remember figuring out a way to playlist random tracks via WinAmp then record a mix set onto CrO2 blank cassette. Way easier then mixing vinyl.

I love cassettes, even though vinyl is still my first preference. In my 40s now, I grew up with tapes, used them in the 80s and 90s and also saw them disappear. I love taping CDs onto tape. I make cassettes albums of new music and design the jacket on Photoshop and print it in colour. I love TDK, Sony and Maxell from the mid to late 80s. Tapes sound great if you use a high quality blank and use a high end cassette deck. I have five decks, Yamaha, Sony, Technics, and two Pioneer. I do tests with various types and it gives hours of fun. It warms up a cold sounding CD. I have a D6C professional Sony Walkman which is the coolest thing ever. You can still buy a large selection on eBay but the Type II and Metal cassettes are getting expensive. The only cassette you may find on the high street is the Maxell UR bog standard Type I for speech and music. Sony and TDK have stopped manufacturing them. Will they ever make them again? Who knows, but I wish they did!

I like getting cassette albums because i feel special having such a limited run in my collection. however, i get salty when they're sold out

I really wanna start using cassettes ever since my uncle showed me some of his but I can’t ever find any to buy

what song is it they keep playing??

RIP Lou Ottens.

Dope

Cassettes sound great honestly..you just need chrome tapes and double coat ferrics. And a stereo deck with dolby B or C or S. Bam! Great quality.

i miss tapes wish i had my Raekwon purple tape!