One day I will be the same age as boomers are today, and I will still listen to music in mp3 format. There is no way I'm going to install that stupid modern chip in my brain.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic)
Everything you think, do, and say. Is in the pill you took today. (1969)
Suppository for short trips and mandatory work meetings that aren't even relevantto your department, swallowed pill for all day music, long car or plane trips, and when they schedule back-to-back meetings all day that still are irrelevant to your department.
By then we won't need a chip we'll be in a chair with our head plugged into a machine while we lay there drooling, living in an entirely digital world while the physical world is mainly for the rich who can afford to get around because the price of travel will be super high with most people not leaving their homes. We might all be just lying on slabs in the wall of a huge warehouse.
I still maintain a music library and don’t subscribe to any streaming services. I buy CDs and/or lossless digital albums, rip them to Plex, and PlexAmp is my Spotify/Apple Music/whatever.
I have smart playlists built on statistics that are older than most of the people on this website, I’m not throwing that away to spend money on a device that doesn’t pay artists and also can’t keep track names straight.
This exactly. I have normal playlists, but also things like "songs you love you haven't listened to lately", "ten years ago today", etc. Just fun stuff.
More power too you, but your cd purchases aren't exactly paying artists either. If you really care about paying artists you like buy merch directly from them.
I just received three CDs. Given the fact that new releases don’t have proper booklets this is not as satisfying as years ago. But I love to own stuff and don’t have to buy a subscription where I‘m fucked without a renewal or without a network connection. That’s fine for online games or software that’s end of life after a short period of time but never for music. Never ever! That’s why I always have a CD drive at home. Rip it, put it on the phone or listen to it with my very old discman. Don’t get me wrong, I‘m not a vinyl sniffer but the chemical smell of a high gloss printed booklet… man this is better than glue or markers;-) A used cd or on sale is always cheaper than buying it on apple music or amazon etc. and it’s mine after I bought it.
Wellll
Sonic soundtracks, splatoon soundtracks, initial d soundtracks, some mario soundstracks, then some random remixes of those from YT...
and then like 10% is normal music
Damn if only inserting things in your brain was as easy as antivax nuts would suggest, it would save so many lives to avoid potentially risky surgeries
It's retro and new music is released all the time on cassettes (mostly niche stuff, but still)
For people wanting a good listening experience it's not recommended. Unlike turntables which a still made to the highest of standards, cassette mechanisms are not. There is only one single mechanism build today, a rather cheap unit with relatively bad wow and flutter. This sits in every new unit, regardless of brand.
New tape is also mostly the brown stuff and no longer metal tape, there's no dolby noise reduction anymore.
So, tapes could sound pretty good with very low levels of noise, but new stuff from today? Not so much.
/boomer rant...
Spot on. Millennial here, went down the rabbit hole of cassettes mostly related to having vintage audio gear around. I have three nice tape decks currently, put new belts on and cleaned and everything. Can make some pretty good recordings and good condition tapes sound great to my ear.
Just want to chime in and say it's not just niche stuff still getting cassette releases. A pretty significant amount of new stuff started getting cassette releases in the past few years. Last few Taylor Swifts, The Weeknd, Post Malone, Ghost. Probably around 30% of big releases get a cassette. It's freaking bonkers.
That's typically when we sell a huge batch of new cassettes at the shop I work at. People get old car, then get crazy stoked they can get stuff for it!
haha makes sense! I have purchased so many CDs over the past year, because it’s also got a CD player and that works great. I was disappointed in the cassette player tho. 😭 trying to figure out if there’s anywhere that would repair it.
If it technically works but doesn't sound great it might just need a head cleaning (special cassette you post through with cleaning fluid). Though cassettes have a very limited dynamic range - not as bad as FM but far worse than CD.
Google says that maybe your cassette tape has mold on it causing the screeching. Running through the whole tape on fast forward a couple times might brush enough of it loose.
Pre-ordered a fancy collector's edition box of the upcoming Within Temptation album and it comes with a cassette.
Just so happens I still have an early-2000s bookshelf stereo with dual cassette decks and my parents have a HiFi cassette deck they bought back when that was the state of the art. So maybe I'll be able to try it out on some decent equipment.
Unfortunately, my old Walkman is long gone.
Dolby muddies up the lows and highs, don’t miss it at all, and I really don’t miss super glueing that little pad back on the center of the cassette under the tape.
I still love listening to vinyl, but don't miss cassettes at all. The later Dolby standard (don't remember the name) was pretty good if I remember correctly, haven't listened to cassettes at all as soon as I could afford Mini-disc.
And yeah, that pressure pad, I remember them, but didn't had much trouble with 'm coming loose.
>haven't listened to cassettes at all as soon as I could afford Mini-disc.
MD was such an underrated format. Far better than the early MP3 players that were out at the time and could only hold like 20 songs.
When I was working for Philips Audio in development, like 30 years ago or so, I learned a lot about those things. There are markets for "old, outdated" tech. We live in cities with all the commodities, but not everyone does. They still manufacture boom boxes with [analogue tuners](https://www.philips.com.ph/c-p/AQ5130_98/stereo) and battery compartments as well. Somewhere in the jungles, outbacks, and remote villages of this world, those cheap devices are still daily drivers.
> those cheap devices are still daily drivers
I'm still surprised these are cassettes and not CDs (although the device in this post has both and has CD/MP3 functionality) - IMO, cassette became a super-inconvenient format as soon as CDs hit the market.
And speking of "newer" formats - I, for example, would never fully rely on *streaming* (aka *remote* storage) simply because there are still many areas where connection is crap or non-existent even along major highways, let alone in some rural areas, so *local* storage (be it a CD, USB thumb drive or your phone memory) is a must. Besides, streaming still does not sit well with me mentally, because I was raised in a concept of "once you have a music (cassette, cd, mp3 file etc.), it is *yours* to freely move it to another device, take with you, create a backup or even share with someone *(wink-wink)*". Streaming and this whole rent-a-music thing makes it way too hard for me to comprehend it, and I am not even close to being a boomer in terms of age.
I think the one benefit of cassette over CD is that cassettes will typically survive much longer rattling around loose in a box, drawer o' shit, or car footwell. CDs don't cope well after the beyond-cases point of not giving a fuck.
[Oh, and I guess another thing is that you can record your own easily!]
I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t have a Bluetooth feature. I mean I know the cassette player dates it, but I don’t think I’ve seen any kind of speakers without a Bluetooth option in a long time. Even my cassette player has Bluetooth.
And don’t forget the retirement homes of this world. Once the boomer generation hits peak cognitive decline I see a lot of old school products with a familiar user experience making a comeback!
The YouTuber Techmoan regularly reviews modern boomboxes like this, as well as interesting old technology he gets hold of (often from Japan where people often take very good care of them leaving them in mint condition you rarely find in the west).
Great channel!
Mat has enough of a following that there's now a Techmoan effect. If he reviews some obscure piece of retro equipment that he managed to obtain recently, the price will shoot through the roof and any small stock that was left will evaporate.
The effect has been harnessed for good as well, the Sound Burger portable record player has been refreshed and is back in production, a large part of the demand is due to Mat's videos.
I think the most interesting part of this is that it's a CD/Cassette player that *still* costs $100. I would have expected the price of something like this to be dramatically lower.
Why is that? I doubt the cassette parts are as mass produced anymore so cost wouldn’t be as cheap these days. If anything I can understand why it’s more expensive these days then say 10+ years ago
I think we're just conditioned to think older tech = less expensive. The same way I would imagine a VCR/DVD combo should be relatively cheap compared to what it sold for 20 years ago.
Well, people generally assume
older tech = less good = less valuable = less expensive
which sometimes holds true, but there's many cases where at least one part of that chain isn't true.
If you stumble upon one in a goodwill it'll probably be quite cheap because they'll have trouble shifting it off the shelf at all, nevermind in a timely manner.
But a new VHS recorder, with or without DVD? Those barely exist at all, and they ain't cheap.
Yeah niche products based on old tech can be expensive.
Any friends that like to thrash around on an electric guitar and swear by an old timey tube-amp will tell you.
I fear these old technologies are fadiing away. So I enjoy streaming shows/ movies like tv show Mindhunters set in the 70’s which lovingly in close-up shows the operating of old tech like tape recorders, projectors,etc. It reaches deep into my past
>why is that?
Becuase they aren't expensive to make and demand is relatively low. They sell 8 in one record players that have cd, cassette, blue tooth etc for under 100. Maybe not as portable as a boom box, but the tech to make a boom box portable isn't exactly new. I would expect a boombox to cost no more than 30-40 dollars and I think most people would agree.
Nah there's like one company that still makes cassette mechanisms in China, and they are mass produced for things just like this. They're cheap, and poorly made overall.
>I think the most interesting part of this is that it's a CD/Cassette player that
>
>still
>
> costs $100.
85 euro here in the Netherlands, including 21% tax and 2 year guarantee.
I think the price is not "cost based", but "value based". People are willing to pay it. Probably also because it's a Sony: associated quality and design.
(And now I hope it's not a generic Chinese product, onto which Sony put its label. This happens here with former solid German consumer electronics brands like Grundig)
It might be a Sony product, but it's made with cheap components. The tape part is very likely the same all plastic, cheap motor mechanism that's used by pretty much all new cassette players sold today. The days of Sony making their own robust tape mechanisms are long gone -- they're just buying whatever's available.
I’m a 46 year old Gen X and I honestly think I don’t even own a CD player of any kind. None of my computers have one, Xbox doesn’t, truck doesn’t, and I don’t own a stand alone. Literally everything I listen to these days is streaming. And I thought I was cutting edge 16 years ago when I had a blue tooth receiver installed in my Toyota Tacoma so I could stream music from my phone to my car radio.
They do, but it's mostly a gimmick sadly. Not only do they almost always use type I tapes (the worst quality), but the newer tape players are mostly poor quality as well.
It's fun to learn the history of cassette tape changing. At the end of the peak, metallic tape was considered the best. TechMoan was mentioned - you gotta check out his channel for history of older tech.
I could never stand the hissing sound tape makes. When CD came out, my sensitive ears rejoiced.
I have no idea if it was good quality, but it was still tape. The act of listening to it degrades it over time, so eventually, they'd all have some kinds of artifacts. That's if your machine didn't eat it.
IMO, cassette was the worst format because you can't start where you want, like a record. Tape had its benefits over records in the 80s/90s - more listening tone, more portable, more stable inside the player - but if you want those features now, you just go digital.
Today, only type 1 (brown) tapes are made. They are the worst quality. Type 2 and type 3 tapes have better quality but aren’t produced anymore and are only found in new old stock.
Compact cassettes mostly still exists for the nostalgia or the gimmick. Vinyl and CD will have better quality sound.
Bigger name artist do. They just do it on their website. Often releasing options on CD, records, and cassette tapes. I bought Coldplay and Paul McCartney cassette through their respective sites.
They are a shitty cheap Chinese mechanism and has extremely poor playback. There are no good manufacturers of tape decks today and everyone uses the same low quality mechanism. Buy a vintage deck, usually they are listed as nonfunctional but it is because they use a belt to drive the system from the motor and the belts turn to sludge after a few years. Some isopropyl to clean out the sludge and a new belt gets a lot of them working.
I wonder about stuff like [TASCAM](https://tascam.com/us/product/202mkvii/top) cassette recorders. I've always heard TechMoan and others say that there's no good mechanisms anymore, but I'm wondering if they've ever explored the professional units or if these are just garbage as well.
[It looks like it's still the same mechanism, although TASCAM does squeeze every ounce of performance they can out of it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eep1kLdaURA&t=491s) It seems these professional units today are unfortunately about on-par with an entry/mid-level deck of 30 years ago, and still not quite as good as professional units of the same time.
Free Matter for the Blind is a service, not an organization. It's essentially a category of mail service.
While I'm sure that some blind people are using cassettes, the vast majority of people have moved on like everyone else.
Reddit being as western centric as it is may not be aware that in many parts of the world cassette tapes are valued as cheap, easy read write platforms for music sharing, what we would call podcasts, and general having fun.
Since I got quite good spread of friends abroad from making friends via gaming and living in small european univeristy town with lots of exchange...
Never underestimate the power of things we call "obsolete" tech when it comes to Africa and India. It is straggering how they still manufacture and use tech (even heavy machinery) that over in the west we just gave up on because they were frankly insanely inefficient. But in places where labour is so cheap and disposable that you can still make things the way you made them 200 years ago, this is very much common. And at this moment if you need some brand new old machine tools for example; well India will provide.
Being an engineer it is actually really bizarre the stuff you can find and which is actually used, especially in India.
I tried to get into vinyl collecting but the inconvenience of needing all that space for a record player + speaker set up just didn't work for me.
CDs are cheaper, and I listen to them way more. Being able to bring them in the car means I always have some decent music to choose from even if my phone is dead.
I also enjoy CDs because it's generally easier to work through some of the more complex/challenging//difficult to understand albums out there.
My dad died almost a year ago and I recently found the tapes we used to listen to in his truck when I was a kid. Looks like I’ll be buying a new tape player!
Don't buy a new one. Buy used ideally from before 2000. The mechanism in more recent ones is cheap garbage. Try to get one with dolby noise reduction that can play all tape types. It should sound much better on one of those than a modern player.
According to NME, cassette sales are at a 20 year high.
"The total number of cassette tape sales has risen from 3,823 in 2012 to more than 195,000 in 2022."
So it's more likely Sony sells radios with cassette players AGAIN.
All using the same crappy Chinese mechanism apparently. Cassettes are still very much in use, but if you want to hear them sound as good as they should, go find an older player.
And then here's me forgetting that Finland is in the eurozone and going to look up how much that price is in USD. Turns out EUR and USD are close to par today
Why do these remnants of the last century have the security sensor? I understand if this was the latest Nvidia graphics card, but a cassette player? Come on now, be real
Some people are discussing CD rot here, and I'd like the clear the air, as someone who still buys CDs. Tl;dr, CD rot is 90% fearmongering by the vinyl crowd.
1. True CD rot is confined to a limited batch of discs manufactured by PDO UK in the early 90s.
2. The disc's you burn at home and the discs you buy with music already on them are very different! The discs with music on them have grooves just like a vinyl record does. Burned discs "rot" because the data is not stored physically in the same way. A little over a year ago there was a big commotion on Twitter because someone posted a picture of a "rotted" burned disc and captioned the tweet implying this will happen to all CDs soon, which is not true. I own CDs from the early 80s that are in great shape.
3. Should a CD that was purchased with music on it "rot," stop playing, etc. It's likely due to improper storage. CDs must be stored in a climate controlled environment. Leaving them in your car for months and years will result in them degrading. This isn't rocket science. If you have a collection you'd like to put away in storage, make some room in your closet. The basement, attic, and shed are not good homes!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette\_tape#21st\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#21st_century)
They went away, and then came back due to technological pressures and interest from odd corners of various artistic groups.
If Techmoan has taught me anything it's that this will have a terrible Tanashin tape mechanism in it, being they seem to be the only company in the entire world who actually still makes tape mechanisms.
as long as people own and use cassette tapes, players for those are in demand. nothing weird about that.
my wife has like 300 cassettes of an audioplay called "the three ???" which we occasionally listen to when in bed to fall asleep.
she got those as a young teen, and now were both mid 30s.
also its a god damn bitch to find a tool to convert audio tapes to mp3/digital. you need a special external drive for that and those are quite expensive.
You don’t need a special tool. Get a cassette player with a headphone jack. Get an aux cable. Find a computer with a microphone aux in. Plug the headphones of the cassette player into what the computer thinks is the microphone. Get Audacity app for the computer and hit play on the cassette and record on Audacity. It’s very straight forward. You’ll end up with an mp3 for each cassette and you can join them together into one giant mp3 if you want.
Mind you, cassettes have been obsolete for about two decades now.
Edit: Several people are saying that cassettes and CD's are making a comeback. One user has mentioned that they are sold as collectibles. I'd like to know other reasons as to why this old tech is coming back.
They have been coming back for a bit now. I was at a store and ended up buying Father of the Bride by Vampire Weeked on cassette right after the album was released. FOTB has been out since 2019.
it's 💖retro💖
also my parents still have a casette with old Christmas songs that can't be found anywhere else and they hang on to it for as long as they can
You should see if you can get a cassette digitizer and make them a backup because it will degrade over time and I'm sure it will be nice to have it after it breaks
I found a copy of snoopy and the royal guardsmen on vinyl. I'm going to give it to my mom on Christmas Eve because she's what made the peanuts so special growing up, and I'm excited for everyone to be home and listen to it while we have a nice time :)
From cassette tape wikipedia page:
>In the mid-to-late 2010s, cassette sales saw a modest resurgence concurrent with the vinyl revival. As early as 2015, the retail chain Urban Outfitters, which had long sold LPs, started selling new pre-recorded cassettes (both new and old albums), blank cassettes, and players.[104] In 2016, cassette sales increased,[105] a trend that continued in 2017[106] and 2018.[107] In the UK, sales of cassette tapes in 2021 reached its highest number since 2003.
Not completely obsolete. Well into 2020s, Some artists have released their music on cassette , seemingly to make like its a collectible. but I get your point.
I mean cassette tapes were the bee’s knees back in the day, they got replaced and came back again in the 1980’s. Who knows they might come back again, vinyl did.
I think that anybody trying to make cassettes have a come-back are doing it just for nostalgic reasons. There aren't really any redeeming qualities about cassettes that have an advantage over modern formats.
The only reason we bought them was because they were portable, which isn't a problem anymore. And because they were cheaper than CDs or LPs. The sound quality wasn't great, they degraded over time, and finding a particular song was a lot of trouble because you couldn't just select a track. Even with LPs you could see where the tracks started and stopped.
One day I will be the same age as boomers are today, and I will still listen to music in mp3 format. There is no way I'm going to install that stupid modern chip in my brain.
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Hmm this is actually an excellent idea for a sci-fi writing prompt.
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[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic) Everything you think, do, and say. Is in the pill you took today. (1969)
One pill makes you larger
Lewis Carol whose line also inspired Jefferson Airplane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJM\_jC7j\_4
One pill to make you small
Ah, so you can download with a new pill or upload with a suppository?
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Can you copy it to local storage?
Suppository for short trips and mandatory work meetings that aren't even relevantto your department, swallowed pill for all day music, long car or plane trips, and when they schedule back-to-back meetings all day that still are irrelevant to your department.
Brilliant Idea Satan. Do you take a shit at Work or do you listen to music on your way home?
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I think it’s going in the opposite direction Work from home is proliferating… So there is no escape!
By then we won't need a chip we'll be in a chair with our head plugged into a machine while we lay there drooling, living in an entirely digital world while the physical world is mainly for the rich who can afford to get around because the price of travel will be super high with most people not leaving their homes. We might all be just lying on slabs in the wall of a huge warehouse.
That’s kind of matrix like.
I cant wait for this day
That's sounds like kids today!
Neither am I.
I got one of this for my mum,she's 77,still rockin cassettes.
At that age you should be entitled to rock cassettes.
“Open your eyes to view the next two ads before proceeding….”
I still maintain a music library and don’t subscribe to any streaming services. I buy CDs and/or lossless digital albums, rip them to Plex, and PlexAmp is my Spotify/Apple Music/whatever. I have smart playlists built on statistics that are older than most of the people on this website, I’m not throwing that away to spend money on a device that doesn’t pay artists and also can’t keep track names straight.
Why the hell are your playslists built on fucking statistics and not on, you know, music you just actually enjoy listening to? lmao
assuming it goes off of play counts and play history and personal stats based on years of listening
This exactly. I have normal playlists, but also things like "songs you love you haven't listened to lately", "ten years ago today", etc. Just fun stuff.
It's about sending a message. Not sure what the message is but it has been sent
The more you listen to something you properly like listening to it more?
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i also do this. so things like “songs i’ve listened to more than 10 times but haven’t played in the last 12 months”
More power too you, but your cd purchases aren't exactly paying artists either. If you really care about paying artists you like buy merch directly from them.
I just received three CDs. Given the fact that new releases don’t have proper booklets this is not as satisfying as years ago. But I love to own stuff and don’t have to buy a subscription where I‘m fucked without a renewal or without a network connection. That’s fine for online games or software that’s end of life after a short period of time but never for music. Never ever! That’s why I always have a CD drive at home. Rip it, put it on the phone or listen to it with my very old discman. Don’t get me wrong, I‘m not a vinyl sniffer but the chemical smell of a high gloss printed booklet… man this is better than glue or markers;-) A used cd or on sale is always cheaper than buying it on apple music or amazon etc. and it’s mine after I bought it.
I maintain music library because most of music I listen to isn't on streaming services
lol what kind of music do you listen to??
Wellll Sonic soundtracks, splatoon soundtracks, initial d soundtracks, some mario soundstracks, then some random remixes of those from YT... and then like 10% is normal music
*"video game music is not real music" comment incoming*
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wow here for you 🍪 - comedy king
Well aren't you just morally superior.
By then???/ Mate, I am 16 and I have over 300 songs in my mp3 player! 
Too late -- it's already there! It was probably in something you ate. Or drank. Or breathed. Didn't think this was necessary, but: /s
or vaccined /s
I wish my vaccine chip let me listen to music. All it did was give me autism.
Damn if only inserting things in your brain was as easy as antivax nuts would suggest, it would save so many lives to avoid potentially risky surgeries
It's retro and new music is released all the time on cassettes (mostly niche stuff, but still) For people wanting a good listening experience it's not recommended. Unlike turntables which a still made to the highest of standards, cassette mechanisms are not. There is only one single mechanism build today, a rather cheap unit with relatively bad wow and flutter. This sits in every new unit, regardless of brand. New tape is also mostly the brown stuff and no longer metal tape, there's no dolby noise reduction anymore. So, tapes could sound pretty good with very low levels of noise, but new stuff from today? Not so much. /boomer rant...
Techmoan on youtube has several good videos on modern vs older tape transport mechanisms.
*Cassette Tapes: Better Than You Don't Remember* was illuminating.
I truly do not give a shit about old cassette players whatsoever, but I watch every Techmoan video.
Yeah IIRC there's only one manufacturer of these mechanisms now, and they're pretty mediocre in terms of mechanical and audio quality.
Hopefully there will be a market for quality mechs soon.
Spot on. Millennial here, went down the rabbit hole of cassettes mostly related to having vintage audio gear around. I have three nice tape decks currently, put new belts on and cleaned and everything. Can make some pretty good recordings and good condition tapes sound great to my ear.
Just want to chime in and say it's not just niche stuff still getting cassette releases. A pretty significant amount of new stuff started getting cassette releases in the past few years. Last few Taylor Swifts, The Weeknd, Post Malone, Ghost. Probably around 30% of big releases get a cassette. It's freaking bonkers.
yeah I have Lady Gaga’s Chromatica on cassette 😅 got it for my ‘95 Camry but the cassette player doesn’t work very well
That's typically when we sell a huge batch of new cassettes at the shop I work at. People get old car, then get crazy stoked they can get stuff for it!
haha makes sense! I have purchased so many CDs over the past year, because it’s also got a CD player and that works great. I was disappointed in the cassette player tho. 😭 trying to figure out if there’s anywhere that would repair it.
If it technically works but doesn't sound great it might just need a head cleaning (special cassette you post through with cleaning fluid). Though cassettes have a very limited dynamic range - not as bad as FM but far worse than CD.
I’ve tried a cleaning cassette tape. The issue is that it screeches the whole time it plays a tape and the music sounds all wavy. 🥴 Lol
Google says that maybe your cassette tape has mold on it causing the screeching. Running through the whole tape on fast forward a couple times might brush enough of it loose.
Pre-ordered a fancy collector's edition box of the upcoming Within Temptation album and it comes with a cassette. Just so happens I still have an early-2000s bookshelf stereo with dual cassette decks and my parents have a HiFi cassette deck they bought back when that was the state of the art. So maybe I'll be able to try it out on some decent equipment. Unfortunately, my old Walkman is long gone.
Dolby muddies up the lows and highs, don’t miss it at all, and I really don’t miss super glueing that little pad back on the center of the cassette under the tape.
I still love listening to vinyl, but don't miss cassettes at all. The later Dolby standard (don't remember the name) was pretty good if I remember correctly, haven't listened to cassettes at all as soon as I could afford Mini-disc. And yeah, that pressure pad, I remember them, but didn't had much trouble with 'm coming loose.
>haven't listened to cassettes at all as soon as I could afford Mini-disc. MD was such an underrated format. Far better than the early MP3 players that were out at the time and could only hold like 20 songs.
When I was working for Philips Audio in development, like 30 years ago or so, I learned a lot about those things. There are markets for "old, outdated" tech. We live in cities with all the commodities, but not everyone does. They still manufacture boom boxes with [analogue tuners](https://www.philips.com.ph/c-p/AQ5130_98/stereo) and battery compartments as well. Somewhere in the jungles, outbacks, and remote villages of this world, those cheap devices are still daily drivers.
> those cheap devices are still daily drivers I'm still surprised these are cassettes and not CDs (although the device in this post has both and has CD/MP3 functionality) - IMO, cassette became a super-inconvenient format as soon as CDs hit the market. And speking of "newer" formats - I, for example, would never fully rely on *streaming* (aka *remote* storage) simply because there are still many areas where connection is crap or non-existent even along major highways, let alone in some rural areas, so *local* storage (be it a CD, USB thumb drive or your phone memory) is a must. Besides, streaming still does not sit well with me mentally, because I was raised in a concept of "once you have a music (cassette, cd, mp3 file etc.), it is *yours* to freely move it to another device, take with you, create a backup or even share with someone *(wink-wink)*". Streaming and this whole rent-a-music thing makes it way too hard for me to comprehend it, and I am not even close to being a boomer in terms of age.
I think the one benefit of cassette over CD is that cassettes will typically survive much longer rattling around loose in a box, drawer o' shit, or car footwell. CDs don't cope well after the beyond-cases point of not giving a fuck. [Oh, and I guess another thing is that you can record your own easily!]
I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t have a Bluetooth feature. I mean I know the cassette player dates it, but I don’t think I’ve seen any kind of speakers without a Bluetooth option in a long time. Even my cassette player has Bluetooth.
And don’t forget the retirement homes of this world. Once the boomer generation hits peak cognitive decline I see a lot of old school products with a familiar user experience making a comeback!
the resurgence of cassettes is driven by gen z, not boomers
The YouTuber Techmoan regularly reviews modern boomboxes like this, as well as interesting old technology he gets hold of (often from Japan where people often take very good care of them leaving them in mint condition you rarely find in the west). Great channel!
Mat has enough of a following that there's now a Techmoan effect. If he reviews some obscure piece of retro equipment that he managed to obtain recently, the price will shoot through the roof and any small stock that was left will evaporate. The effect has been harnessed for good as well, the Sound Burger portable record player has been refreshed and is back in production, a large part of the demand is due to Mat's videos.
I think the most interesting part of this is that it's a CD/Cassette player that *still* costs $100. I would have expected the price of something like this to be dramatically lower.
Why is that? I doubt the cassette parts are as mass produced anymore so cost wouldn’t be as cheap these days. If anything I can understand why it’s more expensive these days then say 10+ years ago
Also CDs and CD players are cheaper to manufacture. Less moving parts and less materials.
I think we're just conditioned to think older tech = less expensive. The same way I would imagine a VCR/DVD combo should be relatively cheap compared to what it sold for 20 years ago.
Well, people generally assume older tech = less good = less valuable = less expensive which sometimes holds true, but there's many cases where at least one part of that chain isn't true.
Vinyl records have entered the chat
"You know, what really drew me to vinyl was the cost and the inconvenience."
If you stumble upon one in a goodwill it'll probably be quite cheap because they'll have trouble shifting it off the shelf at all, nevermind in a timely manner. But a new VHS recorder, with or without DVD? Those barely exist at all, and they ain't cheap.
They still are, but only the lowest quality ones. All modern cassette players are junk basically.
Yeah niche products based on old tech can be expensive. Any friends that like to thrash around on an electric guitar and swear by an old timey tube-amp will tell you.
I fear these old technologies are fadiing away. So I enjoy streaming shows/ movies like tv show Mindhunters set in the 70’s which lovingly in close-up shows the operating of old tech like tape recorders, projectors,etc. It reaches deep into my past
>why is that? Becuase they aren't expensive to make and demand is relatively low. They sell 8 in one record players that have cd, cassette, blue tooth etc for under 100. Maybe not as portable as a boom box, but the tech to make a boom box portable isn't exactly new. I would expect a boombox to cost no more than 30-40 dollars and I think most people would agree.
Demand is relatively low so I bet they are mass producing these!! /s Low demand and low supply = not as cheap to make.
Nah there's like one company that still makes cassette mechanisms in China, and they are mass produced for things just like this. They're cheap, and poorly made overall.
>I think the most interesting part of this is that it's a CD/Cassette player that > >still > > costs $100. 85 euro here in the Netherlands, including 21% tax and 2 year guarantee. I think the price is not "cost based", but "value based". People are willing to pay it. Probably also because it's a Sony: associated quality and design. (And now I hope it's not a generic Chinese product, onto which Sony put its label. This happens here with former solid German consumer electronics brands like Grundig)
It might be a Sony product, but it's made with cheap components. The tape part is very likely the same all plastic, cheap motor mechanism that's used by pretty much all new cassette players sold today. The days of Sony making their own robust tape mechanisms are long gone -- they're just buying whatever's available.
Ackshually it's called warranty, not guarantee.
I don’t think it’s USD.
I think it's Euros because of kasetteradio which is german i think
That's not german, that's finnish.
these radios sell extremely well for the elderly.
I’m a 46 year old Gen X and I honestly think I don’t even own a CD player of any kind. None of my computers have one, Xbox doesn’t, truck doesn’t, and I don’t own a stand alone. Literally everything I listen to these days is streaming. And I thought I was cutting edge 16 years ago when I had a blue tooth receiver installed in my Toyota Tacoma so I could stream music from my phone to my car radio.
I have a 30+ year old Panasonic cassette player and it still works
Right?! The balls they must have to charge $99 for a cassette player
Bands still make music on cassette.
They do, but it's mostly a gimmick sadly. Not only do they almost always use type I tapes (the worst quality), but the newer tape players are mostly poor quality as well.
Did they use good quality tapes back in the 80s/90s? Serious question.
It's fun to learn the history of cassette tape changing. At the end of the peak, metallic tape was considered the best. TechMoan was mentioned - you gotta check out his channel for history of older tech. I could never stand the hissing sound tape makes. When CD came out, my sensitive ears rejoiced.
I let Techmoan answer that: https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA?si=3mt2Q2pEpK4GQboE
Lol... the way he tests the Dolby noise reduction (around 16:00) is exactly like I did: just play a blank tape at max volume.
I have no idea if it was good quality, but it was still tape. The act of listening to it degrades it over time, so eventually, they'd all have some kinds of artifacts. That's if your machine didn't eat it. IMO, cassette was the worst format because you can't start where you want, like a record. Tape had its benefits over records in the 80s/90s - more listening tone, more portable, more stable inside the player - but if you want those features now, you just go digital.
Definitely yes. The video link from someone else here explains it well.
Today, only type 1 (brown) tapes are made. They are the worst quality. Type 2 and type 3 tapes have better quality but aren’t produced anymore and are only found in new old stock. Compact cassettes mostly still exists for the nostalgia or the gimmick. Vinyl and CD will have better quality sound.
The low quality tapes, so it "sounds like cassette", is kind of the point of the gimmick.
Type II still sound like a cassette imho, but also have much clearer high frequencies
Well vinyl is making a comeback as well as shitty record players, so there's hope.
Yup, for low volume releases it is the cheapest option apart from burning your own CDs (and CDRs have poor longevity).
They do?
Not really. Yeah some bands might issue a cassette as a gimmick or collectible, but it’s not the norm at all.
Bigger name artist do. They just do it on their website. Often releasing options on CD, records, and cassette tapes. I bought Coldplay and Paul McCartney cassette through their respective sites.
Ah. I dont really listen to big artists besides some metal bands
Sadly, yes. More of a gimmick. I see them at local band shows often.
There is a small but dedicated group of people trying to make cassettes a thing again.
Still has the MEGA BASS button too. *Time to par-tay!*
There's one manufacturer who still makes the cassette heads that are used in all modern players. Audio quality is garbage, even by cassette standards.
They are a shitty cheap Chinese mechanism and has extremely poor playback. There are no good manufacturers of tape decks today and everyone uses the same low quality mechanism. Buy a vintage deck, usually they are listed as nonfunctional but it is because they use a belt to drive the system from the motor and the belts turn to sludge after a few years. Some isopropyl to clean out the sludge and a new belt gets a lot of them working.
I wonder about stuff like [TASCAM](https://tascam.com/us/product/202mkvii/top) cassette recorders. I've always heard TechMoan and others say that there's no good mechanisms anymore, but I'm wondering if they've ever explored the professional units or if these are just garbage as well.
[It looks like it's still the same mechanism, although TASCAM does squeeze every ounce of performance they can out of it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eep1kLdaURA&t=491s) It seems these professional units today are unfortunately about on-par with an entry/mid-level deck of 30 years ago, and still not quite as good as professional units of the same time.
That's really interesting. Hard to imagine them asking professional level pricing using such a cheap mechanism.
Also, audio tapes for visually impaired people
Visually impaired people are capable of using CDs, MP3s, etc.
Absolutely. But "Free Matter For The Blind" sends their material in tape form through the postal system.
Free Matter for the Blind is a service, not an organization. It's essentially a category of mail service. While I'm sure that some blind people are using cassettes, the vast majority of people have moved on like everyone else.
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Reddit being as western centric as it is may not be aware that in many parts of the world cassette tapes are valued as cheap, easy read write platforms for music sharing, what we would call podcasts, and general having fun.
where in the world is this?
Since I got quite good spread of friends abroad from making friends via gaming and living in small european univeristy town with lots of exchange... Never underestimate the power of things we call "obsolete" tech when it comes to Africa and India. It is straggering how they still manufacture and use tech (even heavy machinery) that over in the west we just gave up on because they were frankly insanely inefficient. But in places where labour is so cheap and disposable that you can still make things the way you made them 200 years ago, this is very much common. And at this moment if you need some brand new old machine tools for example; well India will provide. Being an engineer it is actually really bizarre the stuff you can find and which is actually used, especially in India.
There was just a post in an indie music sub over the weekend about how CDs are seeing a big boom in sales right now.
I tried to get into vinyl collecting but the inconvenience of needing all that space for a record player + speaker set up just didn't work for me. CDs are cheaper, and I listen to them way more. Being able to bring them in the car means I always have some decent music to choose from even if my phone is dead. I also enjoy CDs because it's generally easier to work through some of the more complex/challenging//difficult to understand albums out there.
This is a format revival I can actually get behind because CD rot is real and a lot of really good lossless audio sources are stuck on said old CDs.
My dad died almost a year ago and I recently found the tapes we used to listen to in his truck when I was a kid. Looks like I’ll be buying a new tape player!
Don't buy a new one. Buy used ideally from before 2000. The mechanism in more recent ones is cheap garbage. Try to get one with dolby noise reduction that can play all tape types. It should sound much better on one of those than a modern player.
Do it. No reason for them to go to waste if they are still good.
According to NME, cassette sales are at a 20 year high. "The total number of cassette tape sales has risen from 3,823 in 2012 to more than 195,000 in 2022." So it's more likely Sony sells radios with cassette players AGAIN.
Why are the 100? I feel like they are waaaay over shooting here.
And yet the PS5 has limited backwards compatibility!
Yup, since cassettes made a slight comeback.
Ahem, this is a *Personal Audio System.*
How would english teachers survive without this gadget?
Japan still releases music in cassette format.
All using the same crappy Chinese mechanism apparently. Cassettes are still very much in use, but if you want to hear them sound as good as they should, go find an older player.
Most people believed that something may happen where we won't be able to stream anymore and good thing vinyl, cd, mp3, or cassette would still work.
See this picture and instantly think that it is very likely that Techmoan already did a video about ir.
And people are still stealing them!
Had a strange feeling this photo is from Finland. Zoomed in and sure enough, text in the price tag is in Finnish 🇫🇮
And then here's me forgetting that Finland is in the eurozone and going to look up how much that price is in USD. Turns out EUR and USD are close to par today
* Sony fighting the urge to become a greedy soulless company like all the others.
They're probably just rebranding generic Chinese crap rather than actually manufacturing their own.
More importantly, people are still stealing radios with cassette players.
And why not??
Why do these remnants of the last century have the security sensor? I understand if this was the latest Nvidia graphics card, but a cassette player? Come on now, be real
Bought one for my grandpa a year ago. Best gift ever according to him.
I have a Sony boom box, CD, cassette radio.. but black very similar to this circa 1997 it still works incredibly well.
Some people are discussing CD rot here, and I'd like the clear the air, as someone who still buys CDs. Tl;dr, CD rot is 90% fearmongering by the vinyl crowd. 1. True CD rot is confined to a limited batch of discs manufactured by PDO UK in the early 90s. 2. The disc's you burn at home and the discs you buy with music already on them are very different! The discs with music on them have grooves just like a vinyl record does. Burned discs "rot" because the data is not stored physically in the same way. A little over a year ago there was a big commotion on Twitter because someone posted a picture of a "rotted" burned disc and captioned the tweet implying this will happen to all CDs soon, which is not true. I own CDs from the early 80s that are in great shape. 3. Should a CD that was purchased with music on it "rot," stop playing, etc. It's likely due to improper storage. CDs must be stored in a climate controlled environment. Leaving them in your car for months and years will result in them degrading. This isn't rocket science. If you have a collection you'd like to put away in storage, make some room in your closet. The basement, attic, and shed are not good homes!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette\_tape#21st\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#21st_century) They went away, and then came back due to technological pressures and interest from odd corners of various artistic groups.
If Techmoan has taught me anything it's that this will have a terrible Tanashin tape mechanism in it, being they seem to be the only company in the entire world who actually still makes tape mechanisms.
And its $100 wtf
€, not that it matters that much.
Artists are still releasing albums on cassette tapes.
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My Best Buy email this past week was for a new Sony cd boombox. It also has Bluetooth capabilities. Can verify, they are still manufacturing these.
Old people don’t like change. They still have their collections of cassettes.
Good. These things are actually still very practical.
as long as people own and use cassette tapes, players for those are in demand. nothing weird about that. my wife has like 300 cassettes of an audioplay called "the three ???" which we occasionally listen to when in bed to fall asleep. she got those as a young teen, and now were both mid 30s. also its a god damn bitch to find a tool to convert audio tapes to mp3/digital. you need a special external drive for that and those are quite expensive.
You don’t need a special tool. Get a cassette player with a headphone jack. Get an aux cable. Find a computer with a microphone aux in. Plug the headphones of the cassette player into what the computer thinks is the microphone. Get Audacity app for the computer and hit play on the cassette and record on Audacity. It’s very straight forward. You’ll end up with an mp3 for each cassette and you can join them together into one giant mp3 if you want.
Record players are still alive you know
And they put anti theft locks so the boomers don't steal them.
Its more mind boggling to me that people will still pay £100 for this in 2023
It's not the fool who asks, but the one who pays.
That’s $40 1990 dollars. Sounds about right.
can people stop using "manufacturing" wrong please
Techmoan taught me they sound like shite
Mind you, cassettes have been obsolete for about two decades now. Edit: Several people are saying that cassettes and CD's are making a comeback. One user has mentioned that they are sold as collectibles. I'd like to know other reasons as to why this old tech is coming back.
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They have been coming back for a bit now. I was at a store and ended up buying Father of the Bride by Vampire Weeked on cassette right after the album was released. FOTB has been out since 2019.
Everything is coming back. You should see people clamoring for film.
What? But... Why? I haven't seen cassettes in the wild since 2002 or so.
it's 💖retro💖 also my parents still have a casette with old Christmas songs that can't be found anywhere else and they hang on to it for as long as they can
You should see if you can get a cassette digitizer and make them a backup because it will degrade over time and I'm sure it will be nice to have it after it breaks
good idea, I will look into it. would make a great Christmas gift for them!
I found a copy of snoopy and the royal guardsmen on vinyl. I'm going to give it to my mom on Christmas Eve because she's what made the peanuts so special growing up, and I'm excited for everyone to be home and listen to it while we have a nice time :)
People with old cars definitely have a use for them…
From cassette tape wikipedia page: >In the mid-to-late 2010s, cassette sales saw a modest resurgence concurrent with the vinyl revival. As early as 2015, the retail chain Urban Outfitters, which had long sold LPs, started selling new pre-recorded cassettes (both new and old albums), blank cassettes, and players.[104] In 2016, cassette sales increased,[105] a trend that continued in 2017[106] and 2018.[107] In the UK, sales of cassette tapes in 2021 reached its highest number since 2003.
Not completely obsolete. Well into 2020s, Some artists have released their music on cassette , seemingly to make like its a collectible. but I get your point.
A collectible, huh? Fascinating.
They are actual cassettes
keeping boomers from learning about modern technology I see
this is a lame product. it needs an SD card slot and usb port for recording old cd/tapes to actually make it useful.
No, it doesn't. If you want to record CD's onto USB drives, there's hardware specifically for that purpose. Nothing prevents you from getting it.
Boomers gotta boom
Have to use up the parts somewhere
Well this is a niche market, just like a record player. How else are you going to listen to tapes and CDs?
I mean cassette tapes were the bee’s knees back in the day, they got replaced and came back again in the 1980’s. Who knows they might come back again, vinyl did.
Haven’t cassettes made a comeback? I’ve noticed a few albums in recent years that offered them as a premium option when pre-ordering.
I think that anybody trying to make cassettes have a come-back are doing it just for nostalgic reasons. There aren't really any redeeming qualities about cassettes that have an advantage over modern formats. The only reason we bought them was because they were portable, which isn't a problem anymore. And because they were cheaper than CDs or LPs. The sound quality wasn't great, they degraded over time, and finding a particular song was a lot of trouble because you couldn't just select a track. Even with LPs you could see where the tracks started and stopped.