What is it with hipsters and cassettes?

Why, yes you can.

Start with the trousers, they should be stupidly short on the legs, like they’ve been shrunk in the wash.

 

I agree...they’re crap. If you want analog then vinyl, on the other hand, is a completely different matter when it comes to sound.

 

Wax cylinders are where it's at baby!

 

There are much better and easier alternatives for the car...

 

It's a combination of things.

Cassettes are cheap to pick up on eBay and elsewhere, or teens and twenty somethings are starting to find caches of old cassettes at their parents' houses and they get all these free from their parents.

Plus, teen and college age places like Urban Outfitters sell inexpensive tape players, so that makes starting your collection easy.

This combined with cassettes being cheap for indie bands to produce has resulted in a mini-revival of the format.

 

I loved listening to cassettes especially with my deck that had a Dolby B and C switch. Took away the horrible hiss just fine. Of course little did I realize back then that it sucked the highs and some of the mids into oblivion. Boy I was even dumber back then compared to now when it comes to decent recordings and playback.

 

What is it with people who give a **** what hipsters do?

 

Oh not this crap again.

I bought my first cassette in 1990. And unless my media was scratched or eaten or broken, I never threw any of it away. So yes, I have stacks in my music room, and make mixtapes for my work van. Sorry I didn't have a crystal ball in the early 90s to see that so-called "hipsters" would have an interest 30 years down the road. On MY stereo, there was never any outdated formats. Tape, records, CDs, they've all been getting play non-stop since then.

Frankly, I'm happy there's an interest in physical media. Enough with cheap, compressed mp3s from the internet.

 

I'm puzzled by it as well (heavy cassette buyer in my teenage years. So I remember the pitfalls). But I don't generalize on who's buying them, coupled with some not-so-subtle derogatory remarks about them.

But fair's fair....maybe someone can create an unflattering and derogatory term for use middle-aged, overweight and bath-deprived audiophiles who scour record stores and fairs, looking for that holy grail pressing of Aja or that second state butcher.

Sealed, of course, since we don't actually listen to those things. We just put them on a shelf and admire them.

 

I just counted them. 232 total. Which admittedly is counting double albums (like The White Album) as 2 cassettes.

 

Cassettes are like vinyl, if you take care of them they sound great. I love them still.

 

People like feeling superior to others.

 

You don't remember the early 90s? There was a zine and a documentary and everything.

 

Hopefully that day is a while off. At pennies on the dollar, this is the golden age of CD collecting right now.

 

The fun thing about cassettes is if you don't have a deck with the search function, you can test your skill at FF and Rewind and nailing the beginning of the song you want.

 

Some people lack experience with a good deck. And haven't mastered the art of cleaning decks and fixing cassettes via transplanting into new cassette shells or replacing felt pads. I do believe people who say they have had horrible experiences with cassettes.

 

But unfortunately there's no historical evidence on the internets of Ulysses S. Grant listening to a boombox.

 

So you're not really looking for an answer?

 

Some people who put down cassettes love mono. Go figure.

 

Crazy kids with their shag carpeted vans!

 

I think its great. New life for older culture and technology. Many of those old cassettes are cool with their miniature album cover depictions and such. I like hipsters; young folks appreciating old stuff. Whats not to love?

 

What is it about people who ask what is it about people who give a ****what hipsters do?

 

We should go back to the time of pre-recording when everyone in the family had to learn an instrument, then jammed on the porch. That's Junior on washboard! Shred, boy!

 

I’m a 21 year old. The amount of ignorance about the way today’s youth live and interact on this thread is so laughable I don’t know where to start. I own somewhere over 300 cassettes, and I’ve paid up to $50 for one (a copy of Nick Drakes Bryter Layter) and regularly spend $10-20 on the more difficult to find indie albums from the 90s. They’re fun, portable, and can sound very very good. I don’t do it for any social status, mostly because nobody my age cares one way or the other how I listen to music. Some of you could use getting the stick that’s so far up your ass out of it so you can actually interact with the world around you instead of getting sucked into a superiority complex when you encounter something you don’t understand

 

The young hippies used to often say, "Don't trust anyone over 30."