Cassette tapes are back and are all about culture and sincerity
Our relationship with music is much more complicated than mere audio enjoyment; it can’t be described in terms of emotional dynamic range
One can explain the recent boom in vinyl record sales in terms that make sense to an audiophile; a vinyl record will often sound more nuanced than music in a compressed digital format. But the growing audio cassette sales don’t lend themselves to such technical explanations: they’re about culture and psychology rather than sound.
The hissing cassette was never music lovers’ first choice. The only reason these things were popular throughout my childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and 1980s was their portability: you could play them on a boom box, in a car, on a Walkman — when these appeared 40 years ago. The CD killed them off more ruthlessly than it did vinyl records: there was simply no reason to compromise so deeply on sound quality anymore...
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