Back 2 Physical Media: Pt 1 - Cassettes
Hey everyone. I've been seeing a chunk of posts about folks going back to physical and offline media these days so I thought I'd write up a few helpful posts on the matter.
I'm starting with cassettes because it's the latest one I jumped back into, mostly due to affordability. As a kid our cars had tape decks, and my parents had a dual cassette/turntable hifi system in the living room. Towards the end of middle school I got my own stereo for my room. It had a dual cassette as well as a 3 CD changer. I still have it. It's right behind me on my trinket bookshelf. It still works.
Before this I had a little handheld cassette player I won at a showing of Babe at the theater. I can't remember if it was a raffle ticket or trivia thing but I wouldn't have had one otherwise. I would record songs off the radio with the stereo and listen to them on my "walkman".
You have to also realize that my experience with cassettes is the late 80's and early 90's from a child's perspective so the tapes we had in the car were things like the Little Mermaid soundtrack and 90's country. I remember getting cassette tapes in a kids meal at some place that had stories on them.
By high school tapes were lame. CD's were the cool thing to have and were futuristic magic in comparison. The phase out of tapes went quickly. Not like VHS that still lingered on the shelves long after DVD's came out. CD's were not that much more expensive and by the late 90's a car CD system was much more common. Cassettes practically vanished.
So I was stoked when I started to see tapes in the merch stores of my favorite indie bands. By 2009 I no longer had a tape player and all of our cars that came with them had new CD players put in. But you started to see them pop up alongside vinyl records around this time but not for major labels.
That started around 2015 when bigger record companies who had seen the resurgence of vinyl a few years prior began to offer tapes. Now I was starting to see tapes at Target and Walmart again. This seemed to expand during covid and has only become more popular.
I personally only got back into them because of the band Master Boot Record. They had been selling cassettes of their albums for a while and each tape came with the mp3's. So I would get the tape and keep it as a cool fan collectible then just listen to the mp3's on my computer. A modern vinyl record can cost you up to 40 bucks but a cassette tape is rarely over 20.When price is a factor, collecting the tape is the way to go.
These tapes were bought on Bandcamp, which is where the mp3's also come from. As I discovered other music and as Florence put out new albums my little cassette collection grew. I have tapes from synthwave, lofi, and chiptune artists as well as Fiona Apple and Florence's latest works.
It was actually only a couple years ago when I bothered to get a tape player for these things. That's when I ran into some fun issues. The highest quality cassette players were made in the 80's and 90's. Components for them are no longer manufactured, so modern manufacturers are having a hard time getting places to produce new players at a reasonable price.
So if you want a working cassette player to listen to music on you want to find something from the late 90's in the best condition possible. Even then, belts and rubber might have decayed since then even if it's been in the box this whole time. Expect vintage equipment to need maintenance.
If you want a working cassette player thats brand new and works well enough you can get an old stock Sony boom box. They were still making them until recently so they aren't that old and have bluetooth.
Walkmans/handhelds are a different story. The vintage stuff still has quality internals but hinges and buttons may be too broken to repair. Drive belts and gears might not be serviceable and true Walkmans in good condition are not cheap.
Modern walkmans are made as best as they can with current materials. Remember, manufacturers of some parts just don't exist anymore and even higher end audio companies can struggle to reach that old school sound. There are 20 dollar cheap ones on Amazon that work well enough for lofi or ambient music. But if you want to listen to your Florence cassette you'll need to look into something from a bigger audio company like Fiio or We Are Rewind. I own neither of these brands but you can find reviews for them everywhere.
Because cassette tapes are not exactly high fidelity, I wouldn't personally try throwing money at a device to play my tapes. My stereo from middle school still works but I also have a dual tape deck proper stereo unit by TEAC which can make high quality duplicates. It's worth 500 and I got it off FB Marketplace two years ago new in box for 180. Thanks FB Marketplace!
You do not need to spend five hundred dollars to listen to cassettes. Do not spend five hundred dollars to listen to cassettes. You will hit diminishing returns on sound quality after 200. This is assuming you have good headphones or speakers connected as well.
The foam ball on-ear headphones that came with portable tape players are far from amazing compared to the simplest earbuds today. A pair of ten dollar skull candy buds from Walmart are orders of magnitude better. BUT, and this a huge but, if you want the authentic experience of a cassette tape and understand the clarity we all discovered with CD's, you'll want to use the cheap orange foam headphones.
Luckily they are like five dollars online. You can get different colored foam for them too. I had a great pair that I got with my first refurbed Sony Walkman a while back. The Walkman died not long after but I kept using the retro foam headphones for listening to things on my Zune. (If you look at my profile picture on the homepage you can see them.) They were great for listening to music AND being able to hear if the kids needed me.
I realize I just explained how terrible they are and how bad they sound but they have major upsides. Being able to record music on them was a big deal back in the day. Mix tapes, custom playlists, personal notes, backup copies of your new stuff. We knew the tapes didn't last forever and making backups was a smart move for some people. We didn't have writeable CD's yet so this was the big way to record audio.
Then there is the durability. I can throw a cassette tape on the ground and it will probably still work just fine. A vinyl record can crack or warp. CD's would get scratched if you looked at them wrong. A cassette could be tossed into the glovebox of your truck. (Some cars had little slotted areas in the center console just to hold tapes.)
Kids toys used cassette tapes and unless we yanked the actual tape out of it, the things worked fine. (And you can wind the tape back up if it doesn't break.) I never had a Teddy Ruxpin but I did get a Talkboy for Christmas when Home Alone 2 came out. I still have it. I pulled it out once a few years ago when the kids were watching it and it blew their minds.
I don't consider the Talkboy a walkman really because it was designed to be used as a recorder and didn't come with headphones. There is a jack for them but I didn't have any for a while. It used a tiny speaker so everyone had to listen to what nonsense you were recording with it. It was more of a micro boom box that ate four batteries at a time.
The cassette tape has its place. It will be harder to find something to listen to it on. When you do get to listen to it you might be disappointed in the sound. They are safer and easier to store than other media and an affordable way to support musical artists.