Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
You had to step very lightly when using it as it was just itching to skip.
It would also eat through batteries like no one’s business.
No it doesn't. As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
The real issue was the skipping when you tried to use a portable CD player.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
https://cartoonstockart.com/featured/the-two-things-that-rea...
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do...
https://youtu.be/_dgJ4hRHBiw?si=IpjzdgAHJ4Q9yvb5
Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.
Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!
https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA?si=db7QjRt37ENiLMFX
I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).
Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
I can understand that, and I like it, too. But, personally, I dont want to fill my home with random artefacts if it's not strictly required, and I don't know of anything "in my hands" that doesn't come with this issue.
To your compressed Spotify point, I do recognize this as a general issue for modern music distribution, which had already started with CDs (and to which cassettes aren't technically immune either).
So, as a musician, do you know of places selling digital media mastered as the artists intended? I've had good luck with Bandcamp, but they don't have most of the music I'm into.
Minidisc tried to play in that space since minidisc players are very small.
Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).
It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
It's not like metal, dungeon synth and PE/noise artists have just now started publishing on cassette. They've done it for years and years, and you'll find a lot of them on Bandcamp, e.g. https://duckpropaganda.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-chokehold .
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
Those were the days and gone they have.
It always amused me how we were told the difference between lossless and lossy compression was undetectable to the human ear up until the big streaming services started providing lossless and even high res, at which point it was suddenly the best thing since sliced bread. However you feel about the audio, one way or another it's gaslighting.
Personally, on most music I can't tell decent quality lossy from lossless, but I listen to a lot of choral polyphony and also perform it so I have a good ear for it. When you're listening to 16 or in some cases up to 40 voices and can follow individual lines (single voices recognisable as particular people) you can hear it, and I disliked minidisc and mp3 players for that reason. High res, though, makes no difference at all as far as I can tell.
They were also very affordable!
A banged up old cassette player from Sony will produce higher quality sound than a brand new mechanism.
https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s55
The design was amazing, Apple designs of that time. Extremely slim and I can still recollect the tactile feeling of closing the lid.
I felt like a king owning one.
It made me appreciate how these devices are like pieces of beautiful clockwork!
I only had to replace the belt so it wasn't a complicated repair. But, in comparison to the level of documentation manufacturers of any modern electronics offer today, looking at that service manual was a reminder of what we've lost.
I had one of these in black - https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s30
Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.
There was also (IIRC) built-in DRM, so you could record digitally from a CD or read-only minidisc to a writeable minidisc, but not then from writeable minidisc->minidisc. Even recording from analogue to minidisc resulted in something that would be restricted.
But this is all just rehashing things that have been talked about many times over the intervening years. They were great, but they never quite made it and then mp3 ate its lunch.
Same for vinyls and CDs btw. Maybe music is more than just a fancy animation of album arts.
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
There's definitely space for tape to persist as a medium, even if quality and longevity is lower -- not everything has to be audiophile level, and the listening experience is far more than just sound quality.
Isn't that something you can do with streaming services as well?
I understand that many people choose to go with playlists, but it's not like the choice of listening to full albums has been taken away (yet).
Sure, the implementation is lackluster, with gaps between tracks when there shouldn't be one (really annoying on ambient/atmospheric/drone tracks), but still better than nothing.
There's a number of differences.
- While yes you can play albums, streamers have decided for us that giving us an album-oriented playlist is out of the question. Try it: make a playlist of 12 favorite albums, maybe with some double albums in there -- now quickly, play the Miles Davis album in the middle. Compare this to leaving 12 albums in the front of your drawer because it's what you're into now: no way to recreate this on streamers, and even if there was, they could change their mind and take that feature away anytime.
- As for picking something out of the blue, browsing a 120-album collection is easy IRL, a modest collection. On a screen it's annoying at best. It's like trying to page through a book on kindle, IRL books are vastly superior because of the combination of visual and sensory/touch.
- Finally there's the commitment of having to fire up the medium and the pleasure of considering the jacket art etc. With streaming there is no "dropping a needle" pleasure, no resistance to abandon the stream once that one not-amazing song comes up, and the album art experience is garbage.
Streaming is good for discovery of single songs, and a good radio experience (but only if there's a human behind the playlist, or the AI isn't total garbage which it usually is). It's also unbeatable for quickly assembling a party-length playlist. But for an enjoyable, artist-focused listening session, it's kind of crap.
I wonder how things are going to be in 25 or 50 years, what will today's kids look back with the same kind of devotion and nostalgia.
A lot of things are intangible/immaterial now (for non-geeks/non-hoarders, their inbox, online playlist and photos will likely be gone, they won't have any paper letters or plastic-framed holiday slide photographs or anything like that).
https://www.theverge.com/24295971/we-are-rewind-fiio-cassett...
A review of one unit said that it didn’t honor the cutout tab so if you accidentally pressed record with any tape you would dub over your music
I shopped for a while and came to the conclusion that these are mostly kitsch.
I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
I can't imagine choosing a cassette walkman over an mp3 player just based on how much music fits on the device.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
corpus => corpora
thesaurus => thesauri
Emacs => Emacsen
Unix => Unices
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/sony_tokyo/fm_walkm...
(i wasn't against cassette walkmans, but i was against carrying enough tapes to mimic the variety of music that they played on the radio)
Probably of interest to people here is this article from the dawn of the Walkman: https://time.com/archive/6697378/living-a-great-way-to-snub-...
Are they talking about cassette tapes? Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don't remember that being a thing back in the day.
TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools.
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
I don't have the video saved sorry.
Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
Also, it's difficult to top the school bus yellow Walkman Sports photo from Playboy that pretty much crystalized the zeitgeist.
(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).
