Comments on: Sony ceases production on cassette player/recorders

By: Dlo Burns

Dlo Burns — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:07:00 +0000

it’s in pieces that things do it; I’ve had transformers have a single leg or arm yellow, and the bottom plus cartridge slot on my SNES do it too. No rhyme or reason to it.

By: FileCheck

FileCheck — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

What Ryan Griffin said.

By: UncaScrooge

UncaScrooge — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:09:00 +0000

I purchased one of the early cassette four-track devices (a Fostex, not a Tascam) back in the early 1980s. I used it exclusively to record my music and other folks bands for many, many years. It was a fascinating little device with amazing possibilities considering its limited number of tracks and limited audio quality.

Nowadays I record in digital. The day I go back to analog is the day that I become a sad little hipster, more concerned with trendy artifice than craft. You can take my digital from my cold, dead digits.

By: Antonio Carrasco

Antonio Carrasco — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:38:00 +0000

I know a lot of law firms still use tape recorders/players, but they are microcassettes usually, for lawyers to dictate things for their secretaries to type. Also law firms still use fax machines, lol

By: B. Peasant

B. Peasant — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:58:00 +0000

Today I Learned, I learned?

It’s like a Jackson Pollock painting set to music. I can hear something similar to this at work when the plant is running, with mills, transport blowers and squeaky rotary feeders.

By: Shadow KFC

Shadow KFC — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000

TIL i learned there is a musical genre called psychedelic industrial death noise and it sounds like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6sK00qdf4U

This is actually interesting and cool, I love wired stuff

I’m actually not surprised they release this on tapes, a decent digital codec would probably eat 50% of it, just because of ‘noise’ reduction

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:23:00 +0000

But what can you hand out as a physical item?

USB sticks are a little pricey, unless you find a bunch of really old stock like 1GB or something.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:19:00 +0000

Pff: digital music players, they’re yesterday.

Been swallowed up by the smartphone, only lots of folks have still failed to notice.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:16:00 +0000

I’d say that’s not exactly random, since stuff doesn’t go all blotchy with random levels of yellowness.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:12:00 +0000

That’s so cool.

Sounds like they might be a step ahead in actually utilising the available tech; IME only a small proportion of smartphone users have them loaded with tunes.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:03:00 +0000

Nice way to put it.

Hopefully these days the resolution isn’t so much an issue; I think we’re at the point where we should all be thinking, bugger MP3s, it’s time to go FLAC.

The issue of player support has largely disappeared since people started keeping their favourite tunes on their smartphones, and if the approved iPhone software doesn’t support FLAC, there’s always jailbreaking.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Sifn’t solder up a lead to go from headphone socket to mic input FTW. That’s how I always did it…

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:53:00 +0000

I know cassettes are essentially dead media, but because of the sheer inertia of the format I would have thought players would have been produced by the big players for a while longer.

Except that, as you acknowledge, cassettes blow chunks next to any other format. That’s why

Sony will no longer make its cassette player/recorders. In other news, Sony was still making cassette player/recorders.

…was actually news to me.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:37:00 +0000

@B. Peasant

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Hear, Hear!

And as a utilitarian and a doubter of free will, they both boil down to the same thing for me anyway: bad programming – garbage in, garbage out.

By: Apel Mjausson

Apel Mjausson — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:09:00 +0000

They got eaten by evil casette players too.

By: acidrain69

acidrain69 — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:01:00 +0000

Do you really miss the media, or was it just nostalgicly tied to important memories in your life? I was primarily exposed to cassette tapes growing up. They sucked. They took up a lot of space, they ate through batteries, it was slow to get to the songs you wanted… What’s to miss?

By: B. Peasant

B. Peasant — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Ceasing production isn’t enough; we must ban cassette tapes!

By: B. Peasant

B. Peasant — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:34:00 +0000

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

By: Halloween_Jack

Halloween_Jack — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:30:00 +0000

Sony specializes in creating proprietary media that don’t get widely adopted (or not widely enough to maintain for very long): Betamax, MiniDisc, DAT, MemoryStick…

By: Dave X

Dave X — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:06:00 +0000

I carry my Sony Sport Walkman with me when I’m on campus. I like it better than playing stuff off my smartphone, cause I can just grab my tapes and go. I’m not going to waste time ripping some f’ed up old ass tapes just so I can avoid using older tech.

By: Dave X

Dave X — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:05:00 +0000

A fellow noise enthusiast. Greetings!

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:02:00 +0000

“Elcasets” actually, and they were around for years, but yes, they never really caught on, and didn’t even become trendy in a retro sense in the way 8-tracks became.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:37:00 +0000

A 2 gig usb key would be cheaper.

By: BonzoDog1

BonzoDog1 — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:34:00 +0000

Al Qaida used them a lot to get the word around.

By: AlexG55

AlexG55 — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:33:00 +0000

One of the other remaining markets for cassette players (along with police interview rooms) was people studying languages at school in the UK. The A-level listening exams involved the students each being given a cassette with recordings of people speaking the language, which they had to answer questions on.

By: rarnedsoum

rarnedsoum — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:23:00 +0000

Don’t count them out yet. They are working very hard to become irrelevant, with losses the past 8 years and overpriced, low desirability products. Korea and China has won.

By: chris jimson

chris jimson — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:19:00 +0000

You have yet to prove that I don’t exist.

By: dr

dr — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:08:00 +0000

Seems I was reading somewhere that cassettes were still popular in prison:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/07/21/cassettes-still-a-mu.html

By: royaltrux

royaltrux — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:01:00 +0000

SSHHH! MOM!! I’M RECORDING!!!!

By: tré

tré — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Growing up, being able to record and manipulate sound on my parent’s computer was amazing. The capabilities of the amateur software I used then (and the stuff I use now) is far wider than those provided by tape recording (which I am not naive to and have used before). The fun and creativity in amateur sound recording is just beginning.