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R.I.P. Cassettes?
Posted at 8:15 AM on July 29, 2008
by Dale Connelly
(6 Comments)
After a prolonged illness, cassette tapes are finally kicking the bucket.
The death blow? Audio book publishers are pulling the plug.
Apparently, the only people who still need the cassette are prisoners. Because prisoners don't have internet access they can't download music, and for some reason prisoners are also not allowed to have music on CD.
Why?
Perhaps there's a way to fashion a CD into a weapon by sharpening the edge. Tiny lethal Frisbees zipping around the cell block might make for an exciting scene in a jailbreak movie, but it would be a tragic waste of digital media in reality.
And so this potential misuse by some really bad apples in punishes the larger bad apple community. Not only have they lost their freedom, they're caught in an old format time warp.
I confess to having boxes and boxes of cassettes stashed away at home, but I can't remember the last time I listened to one. How about you?
Comments (6)
Cassettes were so fragile, I don't miss them breaking in my car. But I am still so nostalgic about courtship via mix tape. Somehow cds are just less sexy. There was something about sitting in your room painstakingly hitting pause, planning the perfect sequence and the hopefully witty remarks in between. The effort involved was seductive. Au revoir, cassette, you were my first love.
The reason mixtapes are so much better than mix cd's is simple: Side 2. more peaks and valleys.
That, of course, in addition to all the stuff Lori said...
Oh when they would get tangled up in the cassette player! It's been years since I've played a cassette tape. Now I say, Oh when the cd gets a scratch in it! Oy, we can't win.
I still have boxes of hundreds of cassettes. Some of them are worthless and cannot be played, but yet, I still have them for nostalgic reasons.
I still listen to cassettes about once a month or so. I have a lot of stuff on tape that I don't have on CD or MP3. Every once in awhile I'll get a hankering to hear someting that's on cassette only.
I have a few mix tapes, and we have our special Bing Crosby mix tape that we have to dig out every St. Patty's Day. Because it's not St. Patty's day unless you can sing "Who Threw The Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder" at the top of your lungs.
The key word in Dale's entire post is "warp" -- all the cassettes I've ever had are prone to warping and lost sound-quality. I think they were ill-conceived to begin with, kind of filling a stopgap between vinyl and CDs. Were they really all that popular or great to begin with? I have fond memories of cassettes, of course, but I'm not exactly sad to see them go.
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