For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com) 169
The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"
Really?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Funny)
Christmas miracle!
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Christmas miracle!
And for the rest of us:
A Festivus phenomenon!
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"I got a lot of problems with you ferric oxide folks; and you're going to hear about it!"
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Some of us still celebrate Hogswatch.
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I don't mine watching for Hogs, but I don't want to see any swatches...
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Hogs watch of course. From back in the time when a hog would be sacrificed in celebration of the solstice and everyone wanting a good bacon breakfast as well as pork pies.
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ca-se-et-te-ta-pe
12 letters :)
Re: Mozilla could learn from this example. (Score:3)
Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
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Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
Yeah, it was great until about Firefox 29...
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That's not Firefox 's roots. Firefox originated as the stand alone browser without all the other crap. In its inception, it was separate from seamonkey or the Netscape stile internet suite.
If he said back to its Netscape roots, you would be accurate. But since the entire concept of Firefox was a standalone browser , the association to seamonkey is a bit off.
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SeaMonkey can be built without mail/news and there are Firefox 3.x look alike themes. You get a lean browser with better performance then FF, all the security fixes etc and the familiar FF 3.x UI
The best (Score:5, Interesting)
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They were good tapes. Made from a good record and with Dolby C (not B!) they sounded pretty good. They were NOT as good as vinyl of course and the quality of a mass produced audio cassette is so bad it is hard to listen to. I assume that factory does not make tape as good as a Maxell XL-IIS.
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I loved buying Maxell XL-IIS blanks. That being said, I can't see buying and making tapes today. It'd be like buying an old Polaroid camera... oh wait I did that
I used to buy Maxell XL-IIS as well. I still have a couple of boxes of blanks. I haven't recorded a cassette since I got my first CD burner back in 1999.
Very few mediums die completely (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.
Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.
Re:Very few mediums die completely (Score:5, Insightful)
CDs killed vinyl just as surely as digital has killed CDs. That a few holdouts still use them does not make them any less dead as a mainstream medium. You can still ride a horse if you like, and once a year a significant number of people even watch a horse race. That does not mean that the automobile did not kill the horse.
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the automobile did not kill the horse.
Automobiles don't kill horses. People with automobiles kill horses.
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CDs killed vinyl just as surely as digital has killed CDs. That a few holdouts still use them does not make them any less dead as a mainstream medium. You can still ride a horse if you like, and once a year a significant number of people even watch a horse race. That does not mean that the automobile did not kill the horse.
There is a lot of self righteous Nerdiness that will lambast this comment. Whatever confusion this poster might have regarding Analog vs. Digital, I'm more worried about the extinction of horses, how cars have been killing them, and how riding a horse and watching a horse is a good analogy for digital to analog. If the horse has a bowel movement is that a core dump? -- and If I don't watch it, will I have a checksum error? The mind boggles.
I don't have the Geek cred of many here, but I still do learn a lot
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Downloads/streaming as opposed to physical media.
Re:Very few mediums die completely (Score:4, Interesting)
I've commented before that I'd expect this kind of annoying use of language in the mainstream press but that you'd expect better from Slashdot which is- or was- a site for genuine geeks interested in the underlying science and technology and not just the superficial "boys toys" aspects (#), but apparently not.
(#) It's my belief that despite the fact people are apparently *much* more tech-savvy than they were even 15 years ago, people's understanding of (and interest in) the underlying fundamentals- such as what "digital" actually means- isn't actually that much better when it comes down to it. Yeah, every man and his dog is obsessed with his smartphone in a way that only marginalised geeks were with technology back in the day- but while they know how to use the Android interface, do they actually understand even at a basic level how the underlying technology (e.g. the Internet and computers) work? They know how many gigabytes is a decent amount for what they want to use, but do they understand what a gigabyte- or rather a byte- actually is? I suspect most people don't. Anyway, as I said, I expect that from the mainstream media, I expect better from Slashdot contributors... except I don't any more.
Re:Very few mediums die completely (Score:5, Interesting)
They company still makes DAT tape. I still record digital audio to tape as my old sony pocket DAT recorder still kicks the crap out of any other portable recording system out there. and the DAT drive I have hanging off of a SCSI->USB reads in the digital audio to the PC just beautifully.
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I'm also starting to see "streaming" where "downloading" would be correct, as in buying music from iTunes.
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Streaming is dolling out compressed data (usually video or audio) at a rate that the connection and underlying network can consistently deliver, although congestion can cause momentary reductions. So you watch the video, without downloading everything. Downloading requires the entire file, and the data rate fluctuates but can move faster than the guaranteed average data rate that streaming uses -- and it can usually pass more data, especially with a congested connection.
iTunes can allow you to stream music
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It was a slip-up on my part. While I think the context makes it very clear, I didn't mind clarifying.
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If I'd bothered to proofread, I probably would have. Reading back, I think the context still makes it obvious. But hey, we're all clear now, right? No harm, no foul.
Re:Very few mediums die completely (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.
Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.
On the other hand, the drop in volume can be measured, and eventually the drop in volume reaches a point where the only customers left are niche customers, and sometimes there aren't enough niche customers to justify production anymore.
I have a fairly large LaserDisc collection. There were machines to record LaserDisc, but they were very limited in number. No one produces blanks for them anymore just as no one produces titles on LaserDisc anymore. There had been "Selectavision", an RCA system for movies that played on a vinyl disc. No more of those either. 8-track also appears to be completely out of production even though it had achieved fairly significant market penetration, to the point it was common in automobiles and home stereos in the seventies and touching the eighties.
This particular factory, if they play their cards right, can be the niche manufacturer for a whole bunch of media as the big players get out. They have to be careful and pick-and-choose what's worth trying to keep up with, but if they choose wisely they can continue to be the source for blanks and possibly even factory-mastered media for some time after the big players stop. If they choose poorly though, that could just knock them out.
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We don't use them very often, but we do still make stone tablets in the form of headstones and the occasional monument.
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Over like Spanish rule of the Americas.
As demonstrated by the fact that people who speak Spanish feel at home from Buenos Aires to Denver
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By that argument Queen Elizabeth rules the world.
You may not be aware of this, but every time you pay income tax in the USA the Queen gets a cut.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/... [legislation.gov.uk]
Look it up.
Only for weirdos and 4x4s (Score:2)
Only weirdos continue to make magtapes in the age of the mp3. Audio magtapes have shit quality (at least, typical audiocassette tape does) and degrade over time, and they break. The ONLY reason AT ALL that they still exist is for 4x4s. A cheap mp3 player often doesn't remember your song position. A cheap tape deck is even cheaper, if you don't cheat and just install an el cheapo amp with an mp3 player directly connected to it.
I went for mp3 in my 4x4 :p
Re: Only for weirdos and 4x4s (Score:2)
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Only weirdos continue to make magtapes in the age of the mp3. Audio magtapes have shit quality (at least, typical audiocassette tape does) and degrade over time, and they break.
Yes, why use an analog media with those qualities, when a digital media with the exact same qualities can be had?
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What I fine funny about this is that I have old 256 kbit/sec MP3s encoded by LAME
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Rednecks have 4x4s, hipsters buy audio tapes. They don't really overlap but neither are good people.
There's plenty of Rednecks and hipsters that aren't hurting anyone. If I wanted to be a hipster and have a tape habit I could do it with literally zero environmental impact because you can pick tape equipment up from thrift stores all the time. In fact, I do have one tape deck, but it's just a small portable unit with a speaker and a remote port to which I can connect my TI. I guess owning one of those is kind of hipster. I would sell it if it were worth anything.
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TI99/4a
Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s (Score:5, Funny)
Except Hipsters have a buttload more money than the rednecks... and they pay very well for someone to restore that 1965 motorcycle for them and add a beard holder.
I love hipsters, they actually pay their bills.
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Audio magtapes have shit quality
um, no?
Sorry, couldn't hear you over the hissssssssssssssssss
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Sorry, couldn't hear you over the hissssssssssssssssss
And we still have vinyl records, as some people seem to think they are the shitz. And tube amplifiers.
I'm surprised that there aren't people who try to claim the superiority of 78 RPM records, especially the old phenolic ones with the cardbard innards.
Myself, I only listen to original Edison Wax Cylinders, as they have the timeless purity of sound coupled with the enigmatic energy of original recording efforts.
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And we still have vinyl records, as some people seem to think they are the shitz. And tube amplifiers.
Well, at least vinyl still does something that even CDs can't. Of course, it also does lots of undesirable stuff that CDs don't, as you say. But it arguably has reasons to continue to exist... at least it's better in some way. Audio cassette tape just blows. Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD, but it doesn't fit in your pocket.
Re:Only for weirdos and 4x4s (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, at least vinyl still does something that even CDs can't
Make hipsters happy? It has no audio advantage, to be sure.
Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD,
Make audiophiles happy? Make your cables danceable?
The only limitation of CDs (if you include CD-Rs etc) is that they only contain enough information to match perfect human hearing, so you might want more bits for the mastering process, where some information loss is inevitable. But for consumer use, just playing the music, CDs are right.
The only example that makes sense is a tube amp, which distorts sound in a way many people find pleasing.
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Theory vs practice. In theory vinyl if worse than CD, but in practice it is often better. Due to the loudness war CDs are often poorly mastered, being extremely distorted and overly compressed. Due to the limitations of the medium vinyl can't be that compressed or distorted, so the sound engineer is forced to master the audio properly. Thus, the vinyl release often does sound better.
Of course, DVD audio I'd even better because it must adhere to Dolby mastering standards, which don't allow much distortion or
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Of course, DVD audio I'd even better because it must adhere to Dolby mastering standards, which don't allow much distortion or compression.
Not if you just use PCM audio. Then it won't have compression artifacts, but it may well be compressed in the other sense of the word... and you're not responsible to Dolby
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The only example that makes sense is a tube amp, which distorts sound in a way many people find pleasing.
I'm not even sure if this is true any more. Digital modelling Amps can pretty much do the same thing these days.
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"Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD, but it doesn't fit in your pocket."
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-PCM... [amazon.com]
Fits in my pocket and blows CD's out of the water hard. What are you one of those skinny jeans freaks that cant even put quarters in your pockets?
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Fits in my pocket and blows CD's out of the water hard.
They're spendy and repairs are spendy and they're not making more of them.
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And we still have vinyl records, as some people seem to think they are the shitz. And tube amplifiers.
Well, at least vinyl still does something that even CDs can't. Of course, it also does lots of undesirable stuff that CDs don't, as you say. But it arguably has reasons to continue to exist... at least it's better in some way. Audio cassette tape just blows. Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD, but it doesn't fit in your pocket.
Vinyl and tubes have a certain sound quality to them. And I really can't disparge one of the other if someone likes them better. The problem of vinyl to me is the downhill they go on after they are first played. Diamond on plastic can't be eliminated over time.
Now tubes - there is something interesting. They have an inherent distortion to them that is actually pleasing to many people's ears. I also have a sort of attraction to hollow state technology myself. But its still a distortion.
Tape, especially t
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In the early 90s if you were using a $200 dedicated tape deck with Chrome or Metal tapes, Dolby-C noise reduction, and set your recording levels properly, you could produce recordings that sounded excellent and in some cases indistinguishable from CDs.
But that's an extreme corner case. Most people's equipment didn't approach that, and even with metal tapes the quality just wasn't that hot.
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Myself, I only listen to original Edison Wax Cylinders, as they have the timeless purity of sound coupled with the enigmatic energy of original recording efforts.
Bah. That is lame compared to the purity of sound in having an actual full symphony orchestra to accompany you everywhere to satisfy one's assorted musical needs.
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Bah. That is lame compared to the purity of sound in having an actual full symphony orchestra to accompany you everywhere to satisfy one's assorted musical needs.
As soon as I read that, I thought of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Family guy Stweie following fat guys with a tuba. No commentary on yourself, just true live music!
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No problem. I bring that one up a lot myself since I saw that one for the first time not too long ago.
In fact, I have said many times recently that with the way the holidays are going, next year I will most likely have someone following me around with a tuba.
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Use some rubbing alcohol and a qtip and clean the tape head. That or check for a bad capacitor and change as necessary.
Hissing is a sign of badly maintained or failing equipment. True that digital "can" carry better quality. But i doubt high fidelity is what the modern usages of cassette tapes is about.
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Use some rubbing alcohol and a qtip and clean the tape head. That or check for a bad capacitor and change as necessary.
Hissing is a sign of badly maintained or failing equipment. True that digital "can" carry better quality. But i doubt high fidelity is what the modern usages of cassette tapes is about.
We used to preset the volume level by listening for the hiss from the magnetic tape when it hits the heads after the non magnetic leader.
Most commercial tapes did not use high quality, high bias tape or Dolby NR, so every album on cassette was just a terrible hiss fest. You had to record albums yourself on good tape with NR if you wanted to avoid the hiss.
If you didn't remove hairs and lint from the capstan, clean the rollers and tape guides every 10 to 20 operating hours and demagnetize the heads every
Re: Only for weirdos and 4x4s (Score:2)
it's like a DVR for old people.
"still buys a few hundred blanks each year." (Score:5, Insightful)
That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?
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Re:"still buys a few hundred blanks each year." (Score:5, Funny)
Because in the new reality they're trying to create, you are liable for what your customers do with your product.
The RIAA/MPAA should sue the electric companies that supply the power to pirates. After all, those computers don't run on hamsters!!
Alzheimer (Score:2)
The guy buys a blank tape every day, over and over, because he forgets he already done it. Terrific repeat customer.
Burying the Lede (Score:3)
Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
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Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
Oh, that's easy to answer . . . porn!
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Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
Probably backing off in the jack room?
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Backing up his computer at 1.2 Mb/tape?
Why? (Score:2)
I have a high end tape deck and a box of blank Type II and a number of blank Type IV cassettes but I haven't hooked up my tape deck to my new Elite AV receiver nor to my previous one. The last time I used it was around 2000 when I digitized a widow's late husband's demo tapes to clean up the audio and put it on CDs for her.
What's the point? (Score:2)
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Who's buying these? The same crowd that thinks LPs offer a superior listening experience to digital? Sigh...
From the sound of TFS, I'd guess that most are for making recordings, law offices, secretaries taking meeting notes, dictationists, etc. Could very well that there is some reason to keep using tape rather than digital. Besides that companies don't like to spend money to upgrade system just because, there could be legal reasons that would make digital records discoverable but not recorded tape.
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The room, the speakers and their placement completely dominate the listening experience. Most people simply can't afford the size and physicality required to listen to proper sound. Instead, they focus on trivialities.
Nothing wrong with that. I understand that many people get a kick out of owning and handling LP records, for example. There can be more to the listening experience than just sound quality. In addition, it's quite possible that some people prefer the extra analog distortions to cleaner digital recordings. It's their loss, not mine, if they're not interested in the music as it was originally played, or if they care more about the medium than the music itself.
What bugs me in such discussions when these pers
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
But you also hear things on vinyl that gets left out on digital media because the sampling rate isn't high enough.
This is not only wrong, but provably wrong. That's the nice thing about math: actual proofs. After you've listened to a record a few times, you've degraded the audio quality through wear. Perhaps you like that sound better? Many people like the distortion of tube amps better.
Also, most prominently used digital audio formats are lossy, which means some of the data gets lost as part of the compression process
True enough. Low bitrate MP3s annoy me to no end, but they're still better than cassette tape.
But there is no better listening experience than vinyl with a good turntable and high-end speakers.
You forgot directional cables. Don't hook em up backwards: you need your cables to be danceable.
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I'm with you with most of what you said except this:
True enough. Low bitrate MP3s annoy me to no end, but they're still better than cassette tape.
A good quality metal tape recorded with dolby C on a good quality tape deck is almost identical to the CD source. I'm quite sure that almost anyone could not tell the difference. I have 20 years old cassettes that I recorded myself that are still very good.
You're probably talking about those cheap pre-recorded cassettes, most of mines are now unlistenable (lots of drop-out or hissing) and most where awful sounding even when new.
Low bitrate MP3 (I'm talking
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A good quality metal tape recorded with dolby C on a good quality tape deck is almost identical to the CD source. I'm quite sure that almost anyone could not tell the difference
Maybe I misunderstand "metal tape", but I used top-end consumer cassette tapes before CDs, and the difference was stark, because tapes wear and stretch. It also seemed that a tape recorded on one deck would never sound quite right played on another (which seemed to be exaggerated by Dolby C).
CD is easy to get right. Maybe use a better DAC if you want to get fancy, but even an audiophile-quality DAC costs only ~$20 per channel for the components (likely marked up 10x-100x for that market).
I've been fairly
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http://www.hdtracks.com/ [hdtracks.com]
Hi res, no DRM. You're welcome!
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No, you don't. Just because it's analog doesn't mean that it has infinite bandwidth, or even that the bandwidth it does have beats the bandwidth of the reconstructed signal that can be created from the sample rate a CD has.
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No you are wrong.
And CDs are not a lossy format.
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Let me guess, next you are going to tell us they sound better with your gold plated monster cables?
Haven't bought any in 20 years (Score:2)
What got me wondering is that I have bought much more recently, backup drive tapes in different formats. That got me wondering if perhaps this company is doing a lot of volume in DAT, DLT or other formats, and maybe not so much in classic cassette tapes.
Blind folks still use cassette tape quite a lot. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can feel the weight balance to tell how much of the tape is on one reel versus the other. You can rewind and fastforward by gut-feeling, with no display. Every operation of the player is tactile, and there are no hidden options menus, touchscreens, or any of that crap.
Back to the 80's (Score:2)
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Nothing comes close in convenience today.
I dunno... I've never had to disassemble a CD in an attempt to make it functional again.
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Do you really remember cassette tapes then? I remember them breaking frequently, getting unspooled, or warping so that parts of the tape were slooowwer than others. They were completely lossy with subsequent copies always losing something from the original. They needed to be copied in real time, unless you had one of those fancy stereos that copied tapes quickly. Forget what that was called and it wouldn't apply to recording things off the radio. Transmitting analog radio is a quality loss all by itself!
Tha
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Reminds me of this Youtube video with the same title https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
We used cassettes for more than audio (Score:2)
The first time I found ample access to a computer (HP 9830A desktop calculator) was at Texas A&M in '76-'77. Its hard to believe that I spent entire nights from dusk to dawn in the math building on campus, learning BASI
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We'd save off a program to cassette for storage, and it usually worked the next time you tried to load the program.
For very small values of "usually", in my experience. :(
I can't even count how many times I went to go load a program lovingly and laboriously saved on a cassette tape, only to find it was gone or just plain didn't #*$%! load.
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In 1987, the PXL-2000, a toy black-and-white camcorder was produced that used standard audio cassettes. I remember being amazed when I saw advertisements on TV for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Dice: /. reciclyng arstechnica articles ... badly (Score:5, Informative)
I read TFA last night from ARS itself...
As soon as I read the summary, I realized they got it backwards.
From TFA:
''In a September article, Bloomberg reported that NAC “has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company's sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes.” ''
70% pre-recorded; 30% blanks.
The good old days? (Score:2)
I grew up in the golden age of audio cassettes. They had lots of great audio features:
- Tape decks routinely came with specs stating the level of "wow" and "flutter" effects you could expect from the deck, caused by variations in the motor speed and gearing system.
- Left and right channel tracks routinely bled into each other.
- Tapes stretched and degraded with each use, further distorting the sound quality.
- And the hiss...the ever-present hiss! You could turn on Dolby NR, which eliminated a lot of the h
Death by stock market capitalism (Score:2)
Just because a new technology comes along, the older one does not automatically become useless. There are often corner cases which are important for hundreds of thousands of users, or an established user base for which technology works good enough.
What tapes, floppies, Polaroid or Yahoo's curated internet directory could not fulfil is manyfold growth over short term expected by stock market. We live in a crazy world where a company can make a useful product, provide a living for tens of thousands of employe
Well, if they're only wanting music ... (Score:2)
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Audio cassettes, vinyl, video cassettes, Justin Bieber, rap . . . . . . . for whatever reason, there are a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy with low quality crap. Weird but true.
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The chance of having to detangle the tape and using pencils to rewind.
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I remember, back at the dawn of the PC age, going into to my local computer software retailer and browsing the rack for games that were sold on cassettes that were packaged in plastic sandwich bags with a one page set of instructions printed with a dot matrix printer. I'd buy a few, take them home, put one into the cassette player whose audio output was connected to my Apple II+, and start the programming sequence. A few seconds later, the computer would beep and display an error message stating that it cou
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I had the tape deck for the Atari, and it was nothing but a trail of tears.
Spend 30 minutes "loading" a program and when it was done...no program.
Spend the same amount of time "saving" a program, and later find out it saved nothing. :(
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I had the tape deck for the Atari, and it was nothing but a trail of tears.
Yes. The tape interface on the Atari 400 and 800 and their descendants was particularly slow, even compared to the Spectrum and C64.
I suspect that this is because- while it was ahead of its time enough that it could compete with later competitors like the C64- it came out in the late 70s when memory sizes were much smaller. The load speed wouldn't have been an issue given the small size of programs able to fit into the 8 KB of RAM they launched with. (Quite good for the time; the 400 was originally only i
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Unfortunately, they didn't improve it on the later models, such as the 64 KB 800XL. I had an 800XL, and even programs designed to fit into 48 KB could easily take over 15 minutes to load! :-(
Oh yeah...start the tape, then wait, and wait, and wait...
Did you ever have something called the "Happy Drive", a modified floppy drive that let you copy almost any copy-protected disk? Best investment I ever made for the Atari 800 that I had (I didn't have the XL version, just the regular "clunker" version).
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'Course, by that point, the becoming-dated Spectrum was continuing to sell on the fact it had a *huge* established base of software, whereas the 800XL... didn't, so much.
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By the way, I just noticed I never finished my draft. ;-) I'll get that finished when I kick the kids out for the day.
No worries, whenever you get the time. It's been busy all over the last few days.
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Not really, because unlike today, car stereos in the 80s and especially in the 90s were a standard DIN size (or double din or what have you). ( iso 7736 in fact! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
Now-a-days stereos are built into the dash in whateevr configuration the car maker chooses but they used to be standard and easily replaceable. I had zero knowledge of cars or electricity when i was 17 but stil managed to replace my parents tape deck with a cd player in the 90s.
So its not a real reason to keep dea
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Possibly... but my '98 car has a tape deck and the only "tape" I use is the $5 tape adapter to plug in my phone.