![]() Data-compressed audio-using technologies such as AAC, MP3, and Bluetooth-delivers the same range, although with a few distortions that can subtly coarsen the sound of voices and instruments. As I found a few years ago, when I ran a bunch of technical measurements on high-end cassette decks, cassettes couldn’t come close to the quality of CDs.ĬDs can flawlessly reproduce the entire range of audio from 20 hertz (half an octave below the lowest note on piano) and 20 kHz (a frequency too high for most adults to hear). When it comes to audio, there are always those who insist that the old is better than the new, but with cassettes, that’s a tough claim to back. Why cassettes sound worse than other audio formats Some folks still have those tapes, buried deep in a box in the basement, and they might want to relive the joy of hearing Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” mashed up against Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” or Van Halen’s “Panama.” Or perhaps their kids want to feel the tactile thrill of playing music by slipping a physical object into a pastel-colored player full of mysterious moving parts-an experience that Spotify and YouTube can’t replicate. In the ’80s, people made mixtapes-usually collections of their favorite tunes by an artist or within a genre-that they often shared with friends and crushes. Fast-forward to the present day, and even a kid from the 2020s might be cassette-curious, thanks to Guardians of the Galaxy (video).īut there are other cultural reasons for the cassette’s resurgence. For a lot of kids in the 1980s, a Walkman was as essential as a Swatch watch and a can of styling mousse. Cassettes were the most popular audio format of the ’80s. ![]() ![]() But if you want to get into cassettes and are ready to suffer the relatively lousy audio quality, we have advice on how to find serviceable players and tapes.Ĭonsidering the cassette’s fragility and relatively low sound quality, the obvious reason for its resurgence is its retro kitsch. It’s hard to find a quality cassette player today. It can be tough for tape-curious shoppers, too. But while there’s no denying the visceral thrill of ’80s-style synthesizers or the seductiveness of the decade’s most soulful balladeer, the renewed interest in cassettes has left audio experts puzzled and record-store owners scrambling to figure out a format that some people are too young to remember. Even cassettes-the sometimes-dysfunctional format pushed aside by the CD- have made a comeback. To record with TapeDeck, you must have a built-in microphone, use device plugged into your Mac's line-in port (such as a microphone, record player, etc.), or another audio input device (USB input, Bluetooth headset, etc.).For kids who came of age in the 1980s, the 2020s are proving to be the best decade for music since their teens. m4a audio files, so you can copy them into iTunes and synchronize them with your iPod, or email tapes to others. TapeDeck has these too, but they're full-text searchable. An audiocassette has a label (where you can write a little bit) and a case liner (where you can write a lot).You can adjust the recording quality to trade file size for recording length. TapeDeck's recording quality is far better than that of an audiocassette. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |