Why do """audiophiles""" hate cassettes so much? Is it because they're cheap?

Why do """audiophiles""" hate cassettes so much? Is it because they're cheap?

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Cause they sound like poob

yes. audiophiles love to spend money more than anything else. cheap things are bad

digital prone to decay

emperor's new clothes

>cute anime pic 0001.png

>wow and flutter
>tape hiss
>modulation noise
>degrades over time to the point of being unusable requiring you to make copies
>bulky physical medium which requires an ever bulkier piece of technology to use

>is it because they're cheap

no
it's because they're cheap for a reason

yes?

cuz they are the worst physical media

>>degrades over time to the point of being unusable requiring you to make copies
I hear this all the time but how long does that even take. My dad's cassettes from the 80s still sound fine.

Upload the entire folder somewhere

>warping
>surface noise
>skipping and groove locking
>degrades over time to the point of being unusable requiring you to make copies
>bulky physical medium which requires an even bulkier piece of technology to use
>expensive to buy

hint - this is vinyl
it really is the price

depends on how often the person listened to them. my parents favourite tapes stretched out and became useless pretty fast, hence the pencil meme

I don't know about the audiophile complaint, but I can make suggestions:

tapes, or rather cassettes, have lots of moving parts and require equipment to handle all of those moving parts. a thing to lock into that other thing, a thing to smoothly feed that other thing. I used to have a setup that could do CDs, tapes and vinyl all at once, and I remember that the tape part at the bottom was far and away the most mechanically involved part.

-a further personal anecdote: I recently attempted to replay some old VHS tapes with an old player, and inserting multiple tapes, I got consistent unwatchable static on my setup. I suspect the player but the basic point is that between a VHS player and some VHS tapes which are collectively at least fifteen years old, the stuff is unwatchable.

-the media itself, housed inside each unit, is extremely fragile, much moreso than a solid object of a CD or a vinyl record, which have no moving parts. You have this /extremely thin, fragile tape which is easily ruined by a little cut, and can be easily spooled out for ruination by a pencil, pen in the grooves, faulty machine etc. From an engineering standpoint, when you have a lot of different parts in a unit with different charactersistics, you have much greater susceptibility for failure in your thing.

-The current cassette culture resurgence which I can also notice in shops over the past few years seems to be precisely that: a nostalgia. "Hay guyz this cassette is being shelved right alongside all these CDs pls try this meme! xD" Being into old obscure dark ambient recordings gives me some sympathy for this, but objectively it's a dead meme medium.

I would make the point that the CD standard release and the Vinyl record release admit of THE SQUARE ALBUM COVER FORMAT WITH AT LEAST SOME, OR BETTER WHOLE BUNCH, of detail. Liner notes, album art, it just all goes to shit in the cassette format. You have to make room for the gear-holder things, all of it...

umm.. well my internet is pretty slow

I don't think vinyl is any better though user.

Anyone using physical music media in our day and age is doing it for the aesthetic, everyone knows that.

A better question would be why on earth would anybody still choose to buy albums in cassette format in 2017

Anyone else here actually like that warm, fuzzy tape hiss?

Ambient music sounds better on tape

It's because cassettes have a far lower ceiling of fidelity compared to other formats.
Digital can sound amazing in any good setup and vinyl can sound comparable albeit with a more expensive setup.
This is a part of the appeal of vinyl, it's a more involved way of playing music because there are so many things you can do to make the music sound better (new cartridge, turntable, tonearm, needle, cleaning method, different pressings, etc).
Cassette is passable but you can't really get it to the heights of other physical media, it degrades faster and always will have more noise than other formats due to the characteristics of tape.
That said I buy cheap cassettes from thrift stores of albums I like, they look neat.
Cassettes have always been a portable medium, not an audiophile one, ask around with older music listeners and the ones who actually researched their shit always used vinyl or reel.

audiophiles realise digital is the way to go

I used to just tape my vinyl until I realized that tape sounded better, so I started buying all my albums on tape and just dubbed them off for the walkman/car.

youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA

Cassettes are underrated.

Now I don't suggest paying equal price for them as you would for a CD or LP copy, but with good equipment and some EQ, you can get them to sound nearly as good as a CD/LP (if the tape is still in good condition).

>Only nearly as good. So why would I waste my time buying them?

Cassettes can be had for like 10 cents at thrift stores and flea markets. Not much risk.

they have no place

>digital for quality
>vinyl for romanticism

this is the way of the master race

Because they were shit and stretched

though back in the 80's if you had a mechanical player, you could hold down the play button half way and it made your music sound funny

>Anyone else here actually like that warm, fuzzy tape hiss?

all music has that warm, fuzzy, tape hiss for me these days

t. tinitus sufferer

This tape was a great quality one.
I had a good walkman (the ones that could move from song to song) and BadMotorFinger on this type of tape, oh god this was good.

It's a cheap physical collectable. I'm glad they're really making a comeback in my city because no-name local artists can do a run of 40 to 100 tapes dirt cheap. If you go to a show and enjoyed it at all, then you can buy their album for around 5 bucks. It's a win-win; they can please the nerds who want an analog copy without the cost/effort/time investment of a vinyl release, and you get a physical collectible for next to nothing.

Cuz the machine ate my tape.

some dumb girl at a brooklyn show asked me if i actually had a cassette player when i bought a couple of cassettes at the show

why do women even criticize you when attempting to make small talk?

because they suck and you're a stupid trendy hipster that can't appreciate digital editing and actual good production

Do it faggot

he's a poser and didn't listen to them

okay well. keep an eye on the sharethreads for a few days