IMO it’s all about minidisc. Those things were the best of all worlds: tangibility, quality, convenient size, neat little players. Their only drawbacks were due to a lack of ubiquity.
Surely this is a better nostalgia investment than tapes. Tapes!
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Copy protection and proprietary protocols. I remember having to do analogue transfers from one digital medium to another. [shudder]
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8 Tracks had some inherent probl…
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(click) lems with playback.
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My first debit card purchase ever was a pack of blank cassettes in 1992. I needed an excuse to use the debit card to buy something, and you can never go wrong with some blank tapes.
8 tracks are not quite as reliable as cassettes. That’s why I chose the 8 track as the sound source for the 1959 Edsel that my brother and I plan to drive in the 24 Hours of Lemons Rally in August. I bought a beat-up, rusty player from 1975 Caddie on Ebay and got it sort-of working. The passenger has to spin up the motor by reaching under the dash and poking a finger in a hole we cut in the top of the unit to get the tapes to play, though. It’s the price of progress.
I’d have gone with cassettes, but they are too darn reliable and good sounding.
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Would this be on a pre-recorded minidisc? ie buying an album on one?
I only ever had blanks.
Maybe we can bring back the medium and ditch the nonsense.
What I appreciate about cassettes is that they clarify what format fetishism is NOT about: Quality reproduction of the audio.
Most of the time when I see fresh blank cassettes being sold in music stores or the local Hipstorium, I check the fine print. Ah, there it is: Normal Bias. Normal Bias tapes are for recording speech during a business meeting and are noticeably crap at reproducing music that involves drums and/or more than one instrument at a time. What you want are the pricier High Bias or Metal Bias cassettes if you seek mixtape love. Or if you want to fire up the old Four Track.
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The people born too late to experience, and therefore recall, any of the things you just described. I can’t see anyone who made the transition from cassette to CD* regretting their decision. Five seconds after I hit ‘play’ on the first CD I ever bought, I thought ‘Wow, screw cassettes.’
*Vinyl lovers, put away your pitchforks. I said ‘from cassette to CD’.
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Had a Sony portable minidisc recorder in the 90/00s. Didn’t ever love it but it was cheaper than the ports DAT I had before it.
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They were archives of live musical performances from an opera festival: I was presented with a bunch of minidiscs and asked to convert to a more convenient format. The budget stretched to a second-hand player from Ebay, but no further!
Minidisc used ATRAC lossy compression didn’t it? Still a lot better than the audio on cassette though.
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I haven’t used the optical drive in my 5 year old mac yet.
I still rip CD’s and watch DVD’s regularly. Cause the streaming services do not have everything and the library has quite a lot of stuff.
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Just because I havent used the built in optical drive in my iMac doesnt mean I dont use external optical drives for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Plus the slot on the side design is just not convenient.
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Heh. I’m wearing plaid since my mother dressed me in a nice, comfortable check shirt as a kid. Drifted into my teens, still my favourite choice. Grunge came, made plaid their uniform, I carried on, grunge went away, my shirts were just shirts again. Now hipsters are claiming or associated with plaid? No problem 
I’ll outwait them too. My kids wear plaid shirts now, and look damn good in them, too!
Good enough for Jack Kerouac, good enough for me.
Er, something about a lawn goes here, I think…
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Can’t do this with an MP3:
Nakamichi FTW
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Gotta love those high bias metal reel tapes, too.
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