What is it with hipsters and cassettes?

I think the greater point is, as Brian Lux put it in an earlier post, good times! Are uptight "audiophiles" able to have them? Do they even hear music or just sounds corresponding to a graph?

 

Well this thread has caught fire rather quickly.
Will it sustain?

 

I wonder about that sometimes.

 

Wake me up when the 8-track revival gets here.

 

That Spider-Man flexi sounded great on my plastic record player!

 

Exactly. The "go to" putdown when all else fails.

 

I threw out a bunch of 8 tracks too. Hope they aren't buying those too at the hipster cassette emporiums.

 

Of course no one loves cassettes. Industry found a way to market something. It is just more middle class consumerism. Blogs extolling cassettes are paid for, movie/TV placement is paid for, Instagram tastemakers buying cassettes are paid for - advertising works. The audience that was targeted (young, music loving adults with some disposable income) are doing what they were told to. And they do it in order to raise their social cache.

No one buying cassettes will prefer them to other media. It is a thing to take pictures with, and then put on your coffee table to start conversations. It shows you have a modicum of disposable income. It is a signifier.

These consumers will soon look at their expensive collections with regret. But we've all had buyers remorse, right?

 

What on earth is a "hipster store"?

 

This thread title sounds like a Seinfeld joke.

 

The flexi record IS making a comeback. One came with my Rolling Stones Deluxe box set of something or the other... and there's one in the new Ozzy box set.

PS- get off my lawn!

 

I estimate that I have over 150 Beatles cassettes and trust me. They sound very good. Some are excellent.

 

Forget cassettes. The hippest hipsters are playing their vintage reel tapes (craptastic stuff they find in thrift shops) on their vintage (stretched out belts, cracked pinch rollers, worn heads) Sony TC-(fill in the #) reel to reels machine they found at a thrift shop. Yes, there are levels of hipster-ness.

 

A store that sells used cassette tapes for $20 a pop.

 

I thought reel-to-reel was supposed to have good sound quality. Never heard it myself.

 

That's fun. To each his own.

 

In my day we called those places rip off joints.

 

Hey, reel to reel sounded good & didn't jam up nearly as often.

 

"Yeah? Well the Hipster Store called - and they're running out of YOU!"

 

Some prerecorded reel tapes sound excellent. Others not good at all. Depends on many factors, dubbing speed being one of the more important ones.

 

Reel-to-reel did have good sound quality, assuming the tape and player were in good shape.

I'm glad to hear hipsters are into cassettes now. I might try to unload a few on eBay that I dug out of my neighbor's trash last year.

 

People can continue liking whatever they want, and I can continue to be puzzled by their adaptation of a clearly inferior sounding format.

 

All that you said applies more to CDs than to cassettes.

 

Can I be a hipster?