The Last Audio Cassette Factory

my last cassette would have been either Korn's self titled album or Greed Day's Dookie.
I think.

or maybe Guns n Roses.
 
The last prerecorded audio cassette I bought was back in the late 80's. I think it was Steve Winwood or Samantha Fox. I moved to CD's back then.
 
Cool story but I don't miss pressure pads falling off, tape jams and the terrible dynamic range. They were great for making mix tapes for family and friends. :)
 
On a serious note, 5.25" floppy disks are fetching a pretty penny now I think large due to collectors. I can see that also happening to casette tape if they ever cease to make them.
 
i actually bought about 8 cassettes or so about a year ago to put in my car. It only has a tape deck because I left it all original although i did hide a 3.5m jack for a radio transmitter thing just in case.

I do use them in the car and it fills out the old 80s look.
 
I think the last cassette I ever bought was Aerosmith's Armageddon song. Unfortunately at my job I still get cases that are recorded in the last 2 years on cassette tapes. FBI and other agencies still use cassettes for a majority of wire taps, literally hundreds for a single case.
 
It's not literally the last cassette manufacturer, just the last major one. Plenty of small media manufacturers dotted across the country can also make cassettes.

I used to work at a company that kept producing cassettes (main business: CDs and DVDs), but farmed out vinyl to the closest place still making it (Mexico).

I haven't listened to a cassette this century.
 
Wait... I can understand Vinyl, because that has to do with actual audio quality. How can you get that kind of quality on a cassette? I'm honestly shocked that they are still producing - let alone producing more than ever.

Absolutely ridiculous.
 
The day this goes out of businesses is the day hipster neckbeards will flood the streets with their tears of oppression.
 
mi7chy said:
On a serious note, 5.25" floppy disks are fetching a pretty penny now I think large due to collectors. I can see that also happening to casette tape if they ever cease to make them.
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I have a whole box of them I keep forgetting to throw out. Probably some fairly esoteric ones too like Lantastic and Turbo Pascal. So who buys them?
 
Cyraxx said:
Wait... I can understand Vinyl, because that has to do with actual audio quality. How can you get that kind of quality on a cassette? I'm honestly shocked that they are still producing - let alone producing more than ever.

Absolutely ridiculous.
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Some people like the sound and experience of cassettes, it isn't about objective audio quality.
 
Probably same idea as musicians appreciating musical instruments made of different woods because they each produce a unique sound. Even the same instrument from the same wood each has a uniqueness.
 
Cyraxx said:
Wait... I can understand Vinyl, because that has to do with actual audio quality. How can you get that kind of quality on a cassette? I'm honestly shocked that they are still producing - let alone producing more than ever.

Absolutely ridiculous.
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Do you even know what a phono jack does? vinyl was the first mp3 players, they used analog compression (because how much bandwidth/dynamic range is on vinyl?) and then they used the phono circuit to "uncompress" the sound. You know why vinyl sounds so awsome? If you didnt hit the hole dead center on the record or it got stretched slightly oblong , you got wow and flutter...

PS: i think the SNR of an 8 track was 48db, and that was a huge improvement from vinyl :p
 
dark_reign said:
Cool story but I don't miss pressure pads falling off, tape jams and the terrible dynamic range. They were great for making mix tapes for family and friends. :)
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This is mostly it for myself, as well. Something about making a mixtape was more special then. You know someone sat through and listened to every song they put on the tape while they were making it for you. Not quite the same as throwing together a cue list for a CDR and playlist for mp3s.
 
The last music cassette I purchased was Megadeth's "Rust In Peace" in 1990. I found it on CD at a used bookstore several days later, and that's when I purchased my first music compact disc.

Soon I preferred to copy music from CD and vinyl to cassette, and the cassette had to be at least high-bias (also known as chromium or CrO2) and preferably metal-bias in order to have the highest sound quality possible on my car's cassette deck. Normal bias, which was the norm for most prerecorded cassettes, just wasn't sufficient.

I accumulated many Maxell points during the 90s by buying high quality blank Maxell cassettes and then redeeming the points on the stickers that accompanied them for CDs I wanted. Before the program switched to where you could only select from a list of albums, practically anything you asked for was fulfilled, and that's how I got CDs like White Zombie's "La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1" (before Beavis & Butthead made the band popular), Skrew's "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame," Corrosion of Conformity's "Blind," Skin Yard's "1,000 Smiling Knuckles," and Alice in Chains's "Dirt."

I haven't purchased any blank cassettes since I got a car with a CD player in 2004. I got a car stereo system in 2009 that can play MP3 discs, so I don't ever listen to music from the original CDs anymore, as I make sure to rip MP3s from them and then copy those to a blank CD-R, and these days I buy most albums as digital downloads from Amazon, opting for CDs only when either the digital download option doesn't exist or in exceptional instances such as when Rock Candy Records releases a classic rock or metal album remastered with bonus tracks and a new 3,000 word essay by a veteran rock journalist like Malcolm Dome in the newly-expanded CD booklet.
 
Nasgul said:
Well, I still have my RATT Invasion Of Your Privacy tape, which I bought in May of 1988. 27 years old, and I also have two other that are probably 24 years old.

Nowadays, I put my music on a USB flash drive. Meh! Don't miss tapes.
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My first heavy metal concert was in the summer of 1985 when Ratt was headlining for its Invasion of Your Privacy album. I bought the t-shirt at the show, but then my parents threw it away a couple of years later while I was at reform school. Bon Jovi, on tour for his 7800° Fahrenheit album, was the opening act. I also bought that Ratt album on cassette and somehow lost it within a couple of years, but I eventually bought it on CD in 2006 and am patiently awaiting a remastered version from Rock Candy Records, which did a superb job remastering other Ratt albums like Out of the Cellar and Dancing Undercover, so that I can buy it again. My car stereo even at full volume doesn't do the old CDs (or MP3 files ripped from them) justice because they aren't loud enough, but remastered CDs tend to be recorded at a significantly higher input level and thus are sufficiently loud on my mobile system.
 
Dude vinyl is too mainstream gotta go with cassette.
 
Audiophiles claim cassette is better because it's analog. But isn't the master audio file which is recorded to the tape a digital source?
 
rigurat said:
Audiophiles claim cassette is better because it's analog. But isn't the master audio file which is recorded to the tape a digital source?
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If it is a pressing of a modern album then yes it would be mastered digitally. But in the heyday of cassette, it would have been mastered on multi-track tape, or towards the end of the era on DAT (Digital) Tape.

There were even some people who used VHS converted to audio tape, both digital and analog.

But these are same people who worry about how "pure" their 6 feet of copper wire is, but pay little attention to the fact that the signal is passing through 100's if not 1000's of tiny transistors inside the integrated circuits of their gear.
 
Deadly Ramon said:
...and these days I buy most albums as digital downloads from Amazon, opting for CDs only when either the digital download option doesn't exist...
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I bought several Cars albums recently from Amazon. They were $4 shipped, brand new. I thought that was a fantastic deal. So I get good quality rips for my main collection and using Apple Match (or even Amazon Prime Music) I can still conveniently get digital copies on my portable devices if needed (or other computers).
 
Cassettes. I dont remember the last one I bought but I remember the first CD I ever bought. Queensryche's Empire. That was 1990 so my last cassette had to be something before that. I have a home gym set up in the garage and only have a cassette player out there to listen to so I still listen to all my old tapes from back in the 80's. Reminds me every time why I hated them. No amount of nostalgia will make me forget trying to rewind to hear a song I love and going to far, having to keep stopping and playing to see if it was at the beginning or not, having the tape end in 20 minutes and having to get up and flip it over. Yeah, glad those things are gone. LOL
 
Still waiting for someone to post nostalgia article of 240i VHS tape over 1080p BluRay video.
 
ZLoth said:
Still waiting for someone to post nostalgia article of 240i VHS tape over 1080p BluRay video.
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Remember when dvds first came out and the laser disc camp thought lasers looked better since they were recorded uncompressed?

What they didnt tell you was they were recorded via composite, there is a reason why most laser disk players didnt have a svideo out...
 
MacLeod said:
Cassettes. I dont remember the last one I bought but I remember the first CD I ever bought. Queensryche's Empire. That was 1990 so my last cassette had to be something before that.
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Empire was the last really good Queensryche album in my opinion. After that, I heard its song on the Last Action Hero soundtrack called "The Real World" and was so disappointed that I didn't bother keeping up with Queensryche after that, with the exception of Operation Mindcrime II. That one also didn't hold a candle to the original Operation Mindcrime from 1988.
 
Deadly Ramon said:
Empire was the last really good Queensryche album in my opinion. After that, I heard its song on the Last Action Hero soundtrack called "The Real World" and was so disappointed that I didn't bother keeping up with Queensryche after that, with the exception of Operation Mindcrime II. That one also didn't hold a candle to the original Operation Mindcrime from 1988.
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Promised Land was really good. I liked it almost as much as Empire. Hear in the Now Frontier was where it all went horribly wrong. The whole CD sounded flat as hell, like they were singing outside in a field or something. Mindcrime II was the only CD Ive bought from them since. I dont get how they could go from being the best band ever IMO to the horrible stuff theyre putting out now. Metallica I get, they sold out for the money but Queensryche was never that big so I dont know what the hell they were thinking. Doesnt matter now that Tate has left and they all hate each other. Theyll never get back together and fix it.
 
I think my last cassette purchase was Collective Soul's Disciplined Breakdown album.

And cassettes sucked for extended sex-in-the-car sessions.
 
Cassettes bring back so many memories. Dragging around the ridiculous sized portable players, flipping it over at a certain time on side A so it started on my favorite track on side B. The good ol days.
 
MacLeod said:
Promised Land was really good. I liked it almost as much as Empire. Hear in the Now Frontier was where it all went horribly wrong. The whole CD sounded flat as hell, like they were singing outside in a field or something. Mindcrime II was the only CD Ive bought from them since. I dont get how they could go from being the best band ever IMO to the horrible stuff theyre putting out now. Metallica I get, they sold out for the money but Queensryche was never that big so I dont know what the hell they were thinking. Doesnt matter now that Tate has left and they all hate each other. Theyll never get back together and fix it.
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My favorite Queensryche material is the self-titled EP and The Warning, though Rage Against Order, Operation Mindcrime, and Empire are extraordinary, too. While the band may never reunite and reproduce the glory days, at least there is other material from the 80s that is very similar to that 80s Seattle heavy metal sound, including Fates Warning, Hittman, and Crimson Glory.
 
Deadly Ramon said:
My favorite Queensryche material is the self-titled EP and The Warning, though Rage Against Order, Operation Mindcrime, and Empire are extraordinary, too. While the band may never reunite and reproduce the glory days, at least there is other material from the 80s that is very similar to that 80s Seattle heavy metal sound, including Fates Warning, Hittman, and Crimson Glory.
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Rage FOR Order
 
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