Prerecorded tapes are easy to find and cheap but I have struggled to find a record deck, I think they are harder to find than just a few years ago. I've made several attempts locally and on Ebay and I haven't found one that works 100% but I do have an unusual dual-deck three-head model that has one deck that seems to be OK so long as I don't reverse direction. Prerecorded Chrome tapes sound really great on it and I got a 10-pack of deadstock tapes to record on, I might give it a try tonight.
It's disgusting though to see this thing sell for a price that could have gotten you a decent three-head deck back in the day
https://teacusa.com/products/w-1200-dual-cassette-deck
which has the same mechanism as all the other tape decks made today
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-last-cassette-pl...
which is simple and reliable but sounds awful.
Advantages: it's in a hard shell that has a 3.5"-floppy-like retracting shutter, so you have to work to damage the medium; it's essentially infinitely recordable; it's trivial to make mix discs (and to rearrange the tracks without rerecording); most of the portable recorder models had line, mic, and optical digital inputs, so you could record (in reverse order here) straight from CD (and from digital optical outputs on PC's), or from an in-person interview, or the ever-popular soundboard recording bootleg.
Disadvantages: expensive, and few people had them so you couldn't count on being able to give one to a friend. Making a fully digital copy required some tricks (SCMS defeater, pro gear, or a very specific combination of decks). A bit-perfect copy could only be made with that very specific combination of equipment (MDS-W1 + anything that could TOC-clone, or 2+ of certain pro models).
I have two MD decks and a portable recorder which is unfortunately broken because it is possible to record via USB with the portable recorder (NetMD) and have perfect metadatqaa.
Still have a couple of unopened MD-80's I bought in the UK ca. 2002. Back then every recorder you bought in the US was someone divorcing themselves from MD, so I ended up with like 30-40 used, which is plenty. It's not like most of my cassettes were all that well labeled anyway.
What are you calling "good" blank tapes? Chrome? "Metal"? If you had the right setup you could get good results from chrome and very good from "metal", but for half the price per disc MD blows them both away. Too bad the MZ-1 was such a weak device. No battery life, heavy, bad ATRAC chip for recording (and all the reviewers could tell how bad it was because they could hear how much better prerecorded MD's were that didn't have to be real-time in their encoding).
I bought Sony TC-KE300 deck a year ago for like $100! Sweet looking, latest (2000) tech like Dolby and HX-Pro. Had my fun changing the belts, adjusting head azimuth using oscilloscope and greasing gears. Now I'm hoarding sealed chrome cassettes - High Bias ones.
And snatched Sony Walkman WM-FX675 with remote for pennies, perks of not sleeping at 1am :)))) Belt and new gumstick battery was all it needed to shine!
I bought hundreds of records in my younger days, when that was the only choice. I bought good equipment (subject to a student's budget), to get good sound, and not destroy the records with a bad needle. I took good care of my records, and used record cleaning equipment to keep them clean. The sound can be quite good, at least before the record wears out. But hisses are unavoidable. Pops develop, and you get so used to them that they seem to be part of the music. You have to change the record every 20 minutes. Scratches can ruin a record permanently. They are delicate. Records just totally suck, and the only good thing about them was the album cover.
Cassettes are even worse. Bad sound, bad durability, the mechanics are horrendous, with clicking of the mechanism often being audible, no album cover. And no ability to determine where a track starts. Even worse, hunting for the start of a track increases wear on the medium.
I don't understand the hatred of CDs. A truly excellent format. Crystal clear sound, orders of magnitude better resistance to physical decay and damage, longer-playing without intervention. And it is easy to rip them without DRM getting in the way! It bypasses streaming services, so hopefully the artist does a bit better. And in any case, I buy them at my local music store, so I support them (local musicians who run a record store on the side). (And after a purchase, I rip the CD and give it back to the store.)
(1) Pre-recorded tapes are cheap and abundant. Quality really varies. My son gets any music he likes to play in his car, I collect anything prerecorded on metal or chrome for the audiophile value. (There are some recordings I listen to because I like the recording, like a tape of Tibetan chanting that sounds like instrumental Frank Zappa)
(2) Tape peaked around 1990 as CD encroached on it. The best tapes and tape equipment sound better than most people who lived through the period remember and certainly better than the mediocre mechanisms and terrible tapes (e.g. ‘type zero’) that are made today. Good chrome tapes don’t have particularly offensive hiss even without noise reduction and are somewhat affordable although metals are out of reach for most people today.
What I really wanted in the late '90s or early '00s was a DVD MP3 player. Then I could've carrier my entire music collection around with me.
We don't need to talk about audiophiles since they've always been insane.
8 track sucks butt for other reasons. Shit durability and not reliable at all. Cassette tape but worse in every way, there's nothing really to look at, and frankly a brief blip in the story of home media.
But reaching back even further, reel to reel is now prized and expensive. Simple, reliable, and visually stunning.
These things aren't competing with Spotify or whatever at all. They're enjoyed alongside.
I don't know who you're thinking of that hates CDs. They're maybe not catching as much interest, but hate? Not seeing it.
I like my vinyl records because I think the tech is neat and like them. That’s all you need.
CD's are much less nostalgic for me, even though the quality is good, they feel not only charmless but obsolelete, much in the way that DVD/BluRay do in the age of streaming.
Cassette tape is just a bridge too far; rapidly degrading sound quality, tape de-spooling and getting chewed up and having to yank it out of the player. It was handy in the age of Walkmans if you wanted to listen to music on the go.
I guess the point I am making is that ones level of nostalgia for these older formats is probably highly dependent on your age, memories etc.
Records and tapes don't hit the nostalgia button for me
Also when they do get scratched, they skip in a really awful "digital sounding" way, unlike vinyl which can be either a mild hiccup or bump, to downright comically burping their way to the end of the track or side. But you're right they were very ergonomic compared to what came before them, there's no doubt like DVD that came a little later they were a complete game changer.
Did the same thing with CDs until MP3 players became prevalent.
Same. 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo is quite something: the CD was released in 1982. I don't know how long it took to develop before that but we're talking 42+ years now. Nearly half a century.
I both pay for a Qobuz subscription (lossless music streaming), which allows to buy lossless songs and I ripped my very own CD collection (I kept the physical CDs though).
There's an entire generation of people raised on lossy MP3s and lossy Bluetooth willing to die on the hill that "lossless CD-quality music is unnecessary". I had mp3 files back in the Napster days. What was a HDD's size back then? 8 GB? Internet connection was some DSL variant.
So, yup, with 8 GB HDD and a slow-as-molasses Internet connection and a computer from 1999, CD-quality lossless files were a bit too heavy (and anyway back then we didn't know yet how to bit-perfectly rip an audio CD).
Don't get me wrong: I've got good memories of Napster and I even still have a few impossible-to-find low quality mp3 files from back then: obscure mix aired one on obscure radio stations etc.
But we're a quarter of a century later: my SSD is not 8 GB anymore but 2 TB. And Internet is fiber to the home.
In other words: no, losslessly streaming and storing files from a format that is nearly half a century old is not a problem.
I'm done arguing with these people who believe it's stupid to listen to lossless music files: they're probably the same people who listen to old cassettes connected to soundbars.
I prefer my lossless music (either streamed over the Internet or from one of my computers) on a pair of Dali Epicon 6 speakers I bought used (video is not mine but speakers are the same):
YMMV.
Oh lord. Inevitably playing Barbara Streisand's greatest hits in my grandpa's light blue Dodge Dart.
While DAT was an expensive and equivalent stepping-tone, CDs were such a vast improvement because they delivered human perceptible Nyquist bandwidth-complete reproduction (PCM 44.1 kHz @ 16-bit 2 CH stereo). And still audiophiles and other sorts of liars insist on making absurd claims without evidence or demonstration that they "can tell the difference" between CDs and higher sample rates because it's simply beyond the laws of physics and limits of human perception. 44.1 kHz @ 65536 levels of sample choices is plenty. If anything, better quality DACs and preamps/amps would be more beneficial.
I've tried buying some old cassette decks from ebay before, but had problems with it starting to chew the tapes, so would prefer to buy something new.
It looks like with the FiiO you can tweak the speed/azimuth.
Unfortunately rubber doesn't do well sitting around for decades, Jeep or Sony. Lucky for me I was able to locate a new-old-stock tape transport on ebay and swap out the mechanical bits.
Result - all the $0.50 thrift store tapes I want to play stashed in the center console where nobody wants to steal them any more. Favorites are the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, Eiffel 95 and The Doors movie soundtrack.
I was a tape guy, I couldn't afford vinyl so taping records and the radio was my thing. The shortcomings of the Compact Cassette format are not particularly bothersome in an old Jeep, but I also strapped a Bluetooth receiver on the back so I can stream audio like a not-luddite.
</old>
I honestly can't see the appeal because tapes generally sucked. I prefer records or PlexAmp/Foobar2000/Tidal. If people in their 20's today want to pretend to time travel to 1984, more power to them.