Vinyl comeback now, cassette tapes next?

Yes there were some good cassette decks made several years ago. I used to compare the better ones to my 1/2 track R.R and signal to noise and frequency response was pretty close. You could make surprisingly good recordings that exceeded commercial cassettes. I have one somewhere in the garage, might have to dust it off and see how it sounds.

Cassette's are actually quite trendy now within the uber hipster music scene. It's so much cheaper to record on a cassette then make a 7" record. Obviously the sound quality is sub par and that's why the lo-fi indie hipsters love it. It's also retro to the younger generation who only know digital formats so it makes it cooler. Legendary indie rocker Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth, wrote the book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.

Back when cassettes were still popular, I found the biggest sonic problem to be the poor quality of most prerecorded tapes. I considered that to result from the high-speed duplicating necessary for mass-production. With care and good quality raw tape I felt I could make decent tapes of my own.

So imagine my surprise when I visited a friend recently and he played a couple of prerecorded jazz cassettes he just picked up from a thrift and they sounded very good. They were from labels I was not familiar with. If they were from smaller companies they could have been produced with greater care and possibly not from high-speed duplication. My friend is more of a music lover than audiophile but still has a well chosen system. It was revealing enough to cause my surprise.

Winyl never left....