The Last Audio Cassette Factory

[ZLoth]

From Bloomberg:

The Last Audio Cassette Factory

Springfield, MO-based National Audio Company opened in 1969 and when other major manufacturers abandoned tape manufacturing for CD production in the late 1990s, the company held on tight. Now, the cassette maker is pumping out more cassettes than ever before.

FULL ARTICLE WITH AUTOPLAY VIDEO HERE

[TravelingBethelite]

Yay!  I still route for real, live, physical cassettes over digital and streaming music.

[Jardine]

Damn that's depressing.

Of course, I have neither bought, recorded or played a cassette in years, but still . . .

[Rothman]

I'm happy audio cassettes went the way of the dodo.  They deteriorated in quality very quickly.

[Jardine]

Damn, I have some great mix tapes somewhere.

I kept answering machine tapes too.  I bet it would be a blast to find and play them again.

[Henry]

I'm sort of on the fence about this. While cassettes were ahead of their time, they quickly went out of style when the CDs became popular. Still, I'll take tapes over CDs any day now, but neither can ever top the fine performance of vinyl records, and I'm glad they were brought back decades after the recording industry first declared them dead.

[Rothman]

Still, I'll take tapes over CDs any day now,

Why?

[hm insulators]

I'm sort of on the fence about this. While cassettes were ahead of their time, they quickly went out of style when the CDs became popular. Still, I'll take tapes over CDs any day now, but neither can ever top the fine performance of vinyl records, and I'm glad they were brought back decades after the recording industry first declared them dead.

Another vote for the good ol' vinyl record!

[1995hoo]

I have a bunch of mixed tapes downstairs that I've never recreated on CD because they won't fit. A CD holds up to 80 minutes and the shortest mixed tape I made was on a C-90, and I generally used C-100s. What I could do is to make DVD-Audio discs since my car plays that format, but I haven't bothered because (a) the process would be rather involved to rip the tapes to CDs, then rip the CDs to my PC, then transcode everything to the DVD-Audio format, then burn those discs; (b) my car also plays tapes, so I've never felt motivated enough to go through the process I just described when I can just stick a tape in if I want; and (c) when I made mixed tapes, I was really good at minimizing, or sometimes entirely eliminating, the moment of silence between tracks, and as a result inserting the track breaks when ripping to CD becomes a non-trivial task that also means I would have to sit downstairs the whole time inserting the track breaks in real time, and I just haven't had the hours of time it would take to do that. (As an example of this: I somehow got lucky with the tape deck's Pause button once such that I unintentionally discovered that the final chord of "You Shook Me All Night Long" is almost a perfect match for the beginning of "Who Are You"; on that mixed tape, which the card says I made in 1989, those two songs segue so perfectly it sounds like a single track.)

I suppose, as I think about it, that I ought to find the time on weekends to go through the process of transferring all that stuff because tapes eventually break, turn sticky, etc. I suppose in theory I could just go online and download all the same music and recreate the sequences using playlists, but it wouldn't be the same in terms of the gapless playback and the like. I also daresay a decent cassette recording from a decent source can sound better than the lossy-compressed stuff that's so common today.

It's funny, I found two blank Maxell cassettes still in the shrink wrap on a shelf downstairs the other day. I have no idea how old they are. Probably 1993 or 1994 timeframe. I think the last mixed tape I remember making (not counting one mixed CD and a massive seven-hour mixed DVD-Audio disc I now use on long roadtrips) was made in 1995 or 1996. It used to take me forever to make a mixed tape as I worked out song sequences and decided what should go together, whether I wanted some sort of theme, etc. I suppose that sort of thing becomes much easier these days with computer audio because you can construct a playlist as a test run. Editing a mixed tape after the fact wasn't so easy because you couldn't just overwrite one track due to the problem that it had to be exactly the same length as what you were replacing unless you wanted to go to the trouble to re-record everything else again (unless you were lucky enough to be replacing something at the end of the side).

[formulanone]

I didn't realize there's still new albums (or re-issues) released on cassette tapes. Notably, "Awesome Mix No. 1".

When we (er, friends and family) all made the leap to CDs, there was almost no turning back, unless a CD release couldn't be found. I don't really miss them, compared to having everything at my fingertips. but I still have about 20 or so in a box, although loose ones popped up here and there when going through some old boxes. I last bought an album on cassette tape in 1990, and bought my last new blank tapes about a decade after that (CD player was intermittently on the fritz in my wife's car). Last played them regularly around 2005, in case I'd mistakenly left my iPod at home, they served as backups.

That said, I don't play CDs anymore, either...unless I'm listening to an album I just bought.

[1995hoo]

I almost never bought prerecorded cassettes. They never sounded as good. I preferred to record the LP or CD onto a cassette.

[Rothman]

I didn't realize there's still new albums (or re-issues) released on cassette tapes. Notably, "Awesome Mix No. 1".

That's not very notable.  That's just a movie gimmick rather than a mainstream album by a major performer.

[formulanone]

I didn't realize there's still new albums (or re-issues) released on cassette tapes. Notably, "Awesome Mix No. 1".

That's not very notable.  That's just a movie gimmick rather than a mainstream album by a major performer.

2300 copies is an interesting footnote, in an age where you could easily and freely* find all the songs on YouTube.

* free as in "shunpike"

[Rothman]

I didn't realize there's still new albums (or re-issues) released on cassette tapes. Notably, "Awesome Mix No. 1".

That's not very notable.  That's just a movie gimmick rather than a mainstream album by a major performer.

2300 copies is an interesting footnote, in an age where you could easily and freely* find all the songs on YouTube.

* free as in "shunpike"

I'm still not following you.  With "Awesome Mix No. 1," people are buying it because of nostalgia or they want something related to the movie Guardians of the Galaxy.  "Hey, my kid liked that movie, now they, too can feel like Star-Lord!"

If anything, the low numbers sold or distributed show that this is the case, rather than people buying them solely because it's the only way to hear that mix.  As you said, the entire mix is actually available on YouTube essentially for free.

Like I said, if someone like Beyonce or Katy Perry released an album on cassette, I'd be more impressed and intrigued by the reasons behind the decision for such a release.