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Fannish 50 2024 #2: Cassette tapes
Feb. 20th, 2024 11:49 pmWell, these posts are definitely not proceeding at any great rate of speed, but at least I'm doing more than none? My theme is technically "older canons I'm nostalgic about" but I don't see any reason not to expand it to media in general.
Something random I have been thinking about lately: cassette tapes!
I assume that I happened to hit squarely in what is actually not a very wide window in terms of the general 20th century timeline (a decade or so, maybe even less) for experiencing cassettes as your primary means of music delivery at a formative age. I missed records completely - I've never even used a turntable - and CDs came in when I was in my teens; I got a CD player and a Discman as a teenager and from then on, music was mostly on CD for me, except for the occasional situation where cassettes made more sense (e.g. tape decks in cars, which IIRC kept being a thing into the late 90s/early 2000s).
But in between: cassettes! The first music I bought for myself was all on cassette, audiobooks were around (fairly ubiquitous in convenience stores for car drives), and they were also pretty commonly used in a school context, or kids' books that came with a cassette with songs or other bonus content, things like that.
Aside from that, cassettes were great for taping stuff. Actually, I feel like in a way, cassettes were more of an easy gateway recording device than CDs ever were; it feels like modern phone and digital camera recording is a lot more like cassette recording than CD/DVD, which were actually fairly challenging to burn to, especially if you wanted to create a device-playable version! But cassettes were just easy, the same kind of push-button ease of recording that we have with modern phones. It was so easy that a small child could do it, and in fact my sister and I used to make a lot of "radio plays" on cassette using one of those tape-deck-style player/recorders - like this. (Actually that is almost exactly what ours looked like in the 80s. I'm astounded they still make them.) We had a nearly infinite supply of free cassette tapes because my very religious aunt got us on a mailing list for a church that sent us taped sermons in the mail every week. Since my mom wasn't interested, sister and I promptly absconded with each week's cassette and used them to record whatever a couple of grade schoolers with a cassette recorder could think of - the aforementioned radio plays, music, audio "letters" to send to our grandparents, etc.
Cassettes were also great for recording off the radio. I mean, the quality was total crap, obviously, although somewhere in my early teens I acquired a dual cassette deck with a built-in radio, which meant you could record straight off the radio and at least avoid too much background noise. This also made it possible to record from tape to tape, or make mix tapes of my favorites. CDs were a step up in sound quality, but actually kind of a step down in being able to manipulate the music yourself, at least until computers caught up with cheap, recordable CD drives (which was the mid to late 90s). But it was still more complicated, because you had to mess around with codecs and ripping, as opposed to the visceral simplicity of sticking two tapes in the machine and pushing record; the only thing you had to watch out for was making sure you didn't record over the one you wanted to keep! Here it was useful to know that there was a little plastic tab that you could - push over? snap off? I forget exactly, but there was a copy-safe thing that you could use to stop a tape from being overwritten. (This was to stop it from being copied to, not copied from - basically made it read-only. There was technically anti-copy protection on some cassettes too, making the results come out screechy or garbled, but this was really more of a thing with videotapes.)
Do I miss them? Really not at all ... music on the computer is vastly superior in almost every way, especially now that I can play it from my phone directly to my car's stereo or other devices. But I liked them, and I do think that for sheer ease of use for a kid, for both playing and recording, they were great. In fact I think I still have a small box of old cassettes around here somewhere, some purchased ones and some home recorded. I'm tempted to dig it out and see what's in there and whether there's still anything at all around here that can play them.
Something random I have been thinking about lately: cassette tapes!
I assume that I happened to hit squarely in what is actually not a very wide window in terms of the general 20th century timeline (a decade or so, maybe even less) for experiencing cassettes as your primary means of music delivery at a formative age. I missed records completely - I've never even used a turntable - and CDs came in when I was in my teens; I got a CD player and a Discman as a teenager and from then on, music was mostly on CD for me, except for the occasional situation where cassettes made more sense (e.g. tape decks in cars, which IIRC kept being a thing into the late 90s/early 2000s).
But in between: cassettes! The first music I bought for myself was all on cassette, audiobooks were around (fairly ubiquitous in convenience stores for car drives), and they were also pretty commonly used in a school context, or kids' books that came with a cassette with songs or other bonus content, things like that.
Aside from that, cassettes were great for taping stuff. Actually, I feel like in a way, cassettes were more of an easy gateway recording device than CDs ever were; it feels like modern phone and digital camera recording is a lot more like cassette recording than CD/DVD, which were actually fairly challenging to burn to, especially if you wanted to create a device-playable version! But cassettes were just easy, the same kind of push-button ease of recording that we have with modern phones. It was so easy that a small child could do it, and in fact my sister and I used to make a lot of "radio plays" on cassette using one of those tape-deck-style player/recorders - like this. (Actually that is almost exactly what ours looked like in the 80s. I'm astounded they still make them.) We had a nearly infinite supply of free cassette tapes because my very religious aunt got us on a mailing list for a church that sent us taped sermons in the mail every week. Since my mom wasn't interested, sister and I promptly absconded with each week's cassette and used them to record whatever a couple of grade schoolers with a cassette recorder could think of - the aforementioned radio plays, music, audio "letters" to send to our grandparents, etc.
Cassettes were also great for recording off the radio. I mean, the quality was total crap, obviously, although somewhere in my early teens I acquired a dual cassette deck with a built-in radio, which meant you could record straight off the radio and at least avoid too much background noise. This also made it possible to record from tape to tape, or make mix tapes of my favorites. CDs were a step up in sound quality, but actually kind of a step down in being able to manipulate the music yourself, at least until computers caught up with cheap, recordable CD drives (which was the mid to late 90s). But it was still more complicated, because you had to mess around with codecs and ripping, as opposed to the visceral simplicity of sticking two tapes in the machine and pushing record; the only thing you had to watch out for was making sure you didn't record over the one you wanted to keep! Here it was useful to know that there was a little plastic tab that you could - push over? snap off? I forget exactly, but there was a copy-safe thing that you could use to stop a tape from being overwritten. (This was to stop it from being copied to, not copied from - basically made it read-only. There was technically anti-copy protection on some cassettes too, making the results come out screechy or garbled, but this was really more of a thing with videotapes.)
Do I miss them? Really not at all ... music on the computer is vastly superior in almost every way, especially now that I can play it from my phone directly to my car's stereo or other devices. But I liked them, and I do think that for sheer ease of use for a kid, for both playing and recording, they were great. In fact I think I still have a small box of old cassettes around here somewhere, some purchased ones and some home recorded. I'm tempted to dig it out and see what's in there and whether there's still anything at all around here that can play them.
