What is it with hipsters and cassettes?

Making mix-tapes or using old cassettes in a car stereo, for portability, is one thing. Deliberately sitting down at home to listen to the horrible fidelity of murky, hissy, wow-and-flutter filled cassettes is another matter.

 

Cassettes sounded fine if you bought good quality blank tapes and knew how to transfer.

 

You clearly misunderstand something about the enjoyment of music on a fundamental level which cannot be fixed. Just give it up and listen to your hi-rez streams off your PC hard drive and I'll continue to listen to my cassettes/vinyl/8 track/4 track/CDs/VHS/Laserdisc/etc

 

So bizarre and cool.

 

and you should enjoy every single moment! as it's always about the music....

 

exactly! and on a 3 head deck! paramount!

 

Or not! Sometimes it's about looking at the cover art, cleaning and organizing your collection, perusing the racks at a record store, reading about the creation of your favorite album etc. Being a music lover is more than just loving the music.

 

Newish tapes played on a decent deck with clean heads sounded great. Analogue goodness. Like you say though, the used tape market?? No thanks!

 

What is about old farts and vinyl?

 

And if 300 years ago you were some poor soul picking through the city's trash bins for your next meal and you happened to hear a choir performing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from inside a church three blocks away and you stopped transfixed with the glorious sound and completely unconcerned about how much better it was as it was being delivered to the Queen sitting in the best seat of the house, then it's like listening to a cassette....

 

I never really stopped buying cassette tapes ever since I started buying them in the early 1980s. I took great advantage of the cassette purge that started in the mid to late 90s as well as blank audio tape. I still have hundreds of cassettes even though I did purge some of them when I got the CD. The cutout bins were great in dept. stores and some music stores as well starting in the early 1990s for both cassettes and CDs. Even when I first moved here I was still finding many music cassettes and blank tape but this has diminished over the last few years. I hardly ever find any cassettes anymore. But I do find blank tape from time to time. The hipster cassette movement has definitely affected the market for buying used cassettes cheap especially online on eBay and eslewhere. Now they are inflated in price so I don't bother with them anymore. I've been taking advantage of the great CD purge over the last five years or so.

 

Indeed while one is playing their album! LOL ; )

 

LOL! that's funny!

 

I'm not a young hipster, even back in the 70s I would tape my records and play the tape in order to not hurt the delicate vinyl. Cassettes, even pre-recorded ones, can sound really good, especially the HX-Pro ones. I much prefer tape hiss to clicks and pops. Pressure pads are easy to replace, too - you can buy replacements on eBay. And just recently I spent $40 on an unopened cassette Citizen Steely Dan box, which sounds great. I rate media as CDs best, cassettes second, and vinyl a distant third.

 

For us of a certain age I think the skills and commitment used for that perfect mix tape translated to the care put into mix Cd’s and even now with digital playlists (just a glorified mix tape). As far as the OP and formats or descriptors...man as long as people are enjoying music they are 100 times better off than those not enjoying music.
I trashed all of my cassettes about 4 moves ago and probably 5 years after I had a deck to listen on.....now suddenly I miss them lol.

 

Ka-thunk!

 

True. A lot of us are old fogies.

 

Just an observation---
I think those of us who grew up with cassettes, aren't necessarily disparaging or "dissing" hipsters or anyone else who is just getting into them. We just have a very different experience and perspective, and enjoy reminiscing about the downsides of this recording/playback medium. They weren't a cool retro novelty for us, they were one of just a few available options for portable listening and home-recording, and an imperfect and sometimes frustrating one at that.

 

Yeah, that’s what I wanna know. What the deal with those guys?

 

I deliberately sit down and listen to cassettes regularly, but horrible fidelity they definitely are not, not in my case anyway.

Again (never mind, I know you'll deliberately ignore what I posted due to the facts not fitting your narrative, but for people interested in a more objective take) see my post #202.

 

And my experience has been the young hipsters want to talk to us old dudes but unfortunately many of us won’t reciprocate.

 

so either we are hipster Millenials or old farts

GOT IT!!

 

ummm... this thread is still a thing?