[to3m]

Totally. Maybe the hiss is what they mean about the technology still making noise? :)

I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo switches sides, and the music goes off. It's 2015, and cassette tape technology is still causing me problems. I can hardly believe it.

Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it.

We've already had people wanting CRTs back. I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?

[byuu]

> Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it.

Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P

> I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?

CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies so much warmer!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

[qzxvwt]

Are the highest-possible technical specs necessarily the best choice for every aesthetic purpose? I think this is less a trend of "hipster nonsense" and more of a sign of maturity from electronic music evolution as a whole - showing awareness of the symbiotic relationship between hardware and software, the medium and the message, a "back to its roots" part of the cycle that's definitely necessary given the current state of the art of recording sound IMO.

[ams6110]

They might be considered awful now, but back in the day they were better than any alternatives. You couldn't play records in your car or while jogging, and cassettes were more convenient than the bulky 8-track which was the other common format.

[ams6110]

I do have to say that I for one preferred video cassette tapes to DVDs. Yes the video quality is lower but VHS HiFi audio was quite good. In my experience the cassettes were much more resistant to careless handling especially by kids than DVDs were. For me that more than offset the better picture quality of DVDs (which really wasn't that noticable in the days when a 19" CRT was considered a pretty big screen.

Even if a tape did get a dirty spot it could generally play through it and you'd notice a degraded picture for a second or two. A scratch on a DVD often rendered the entire movie unplayable. Cassette audio tapes had this same advantage over CDs.

That said, I prefer streaming to either one by a huge margin. Hard to believe that we used to pay more for a single movie than a Netflix subscription costs for a month.