When you go When you walk into a record store, the cassette section (yes, record stores have a cassette section) will be filled with not only old cassettes but new wrapped albums from last week. A format that was once considered a thing of the past and caused album sales to drop—due to its ease music piracy—have gradually made it way to go back home along with the vinyl revival. Cassette tape sales increaseand 2023 is predicted to be an even bigger year for the format.
But why is the cassette back? Big artists like Taylor Swift and The Weeknd have released cassette versions of their current and previous albums. Movies and TV shows like Guardians of the Galaxy, 13 Reasons Why, and Strange things also had cassettes centered as a main prop. All of these factors helped introduce the format to a younger, curious generation of music buyers. Those familiar with the format may consider cassettes low-fidelity, but like vinyl, the quality of your listening experience depends on the device you use to play your music. Finding the right equipment is a bit more difficult for cassette tapes as the industry continues to catch up with the return of the format. Here’s everything you need to know about starting (or restarting) your cassette collection in 2022.
You will need a cassette player
Before you spend a ton of money, the best way to start collecting cassettes is to see what audio equipment and media you already have. It’s been 15 years since the cassette tape was ‘dead’, so you can probably find an old Sony Walkman by asking friends and family if they still have one in storage somewhere. . You may not have owned a cassette before—and that’s okay—but if you do, you might find old tapes or albums that you forgot you still have. As someone who grew up with popular cassettes, I started accumulating them years before I had a real cassette player. I sometimes pick up a cassette while in record store, know one day I will play it. After finding a used Yamaha cassette at a local record store, I was finally able to truly appreciate what audio cassettes have to offer.
Steven Alejandro, director of hogwild’s profile in San Antonio, Texas. “But they are more prone to wear and tear and need repair than turntables.” Alejandro has worked at Hogwild since the 80s and was its manager for 20 years. He says the store has expanded its cassette area over the past few years.
The original appeal of cassettes was their portability. You can play them in your car (like mine), on your home stereo, or attached to your hip with a portable music player. Cassette decks give you the highest quality sound because they’re a permanent system that typically connects to a receiver you already have (if you have a component stereo or home theater or even a home theater system). old-fashioned vinyl setup). While the new cassette decks are still in productionClassic can be cheaper.
You can still buy clean and fresh portable cassette player online or at your local record store. They are surprisingly easy to detect as a “dead” media. A vintage cassette player can be an investment if you’re looking for a truly nostalgic or similar feel to the music players used in the past. Strange things or Guardians of the Galaxy. Companies like recall sells refurbished Walkmans that are guaranteed to function properly. Retrospekt can even repair some cassette players if you have one that needs a refresh. Boomboxes sit perfectly between a cassette and a portable cassette player. Newer boombox-style cassettes players from Crossley and the pill-shaped CD–cassette boombox combination from Sony keep that nostalgic feeling.
