I didn't discover it until cassettes were long replaced, but there is an unbelievable difference between what most people had and what was available with an unlimited budget. With high end decks and media, the quality can get really good. They also made decks specifically to address the problem you mention with features like automatic scan, high speed ff/rw, and fine enough tolerances to never screw up your tapes.

The biggest problem with them was it was nearly impossible to find recordings on higher quality cassettes. Most everything was sold on the cheapest, most garbage cassettes possible.

Right, I know a lot cassette defenders say that my issues stemmed from owning a cheap system, but anyone who had the money to buy a high end cassette set up had the money to buy CDs, so they bought CDs.

Cena Mark is right. Casettes are the worst. Jazz music casettes worst of all.

Casette's scratched that special itch of easy to play back vinyl records but impossible to record on them at home. So you bought a casette tape recorder/player and you could bootleg vinyl. Also your own stuff and dj mixes. And live acts, of course. Fisher Price even made a camera that could record 5 minutes of video using the litte fuckers. Eat that, Youtube.

I'm not sure why you would want to go back from digital recording. I've ripped a lot of the live stuff I recorded from tapes just so I could fix a lot of the garbage in the mix. People yakking, dropouts and tape flips. Good digital can be really good, but too often spoiled by hamfisted manipulation. Lossy music compression for example: WTF!

Cassettes were great because you could make copies for you friends and grab stuff off the radio. None of that is even remotely relevant. This is just hipster bullshit.

Anyway, to my ear a well made real time cassette recording from an analog master sounds noticeably better than a CD, and I can say in all honesty that I'd been on to that since long before the revival. I went back to cassette in I think 2006, maybe 2007.

Eat it, vaporwave kids.

This is you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Sg7bq6wuw

BTW, If you're listening to music on cassettes you're listening to music incorrectly. The best way to listen to music is on CDs through a Sega CD. Its the only way to hear your music through blast processing.

No way, first generation, first hardware version Play Station (the one with the RCA outs). I've been on board that fad for over a decade (since my last CD player broke and all I had left was a Japanese Playstation I got for ).

http://www.stereophile.com/cdplayers/708play/index.html

Not that it really counts since it's also been nearly a decade since I bought or played a CD in general, and even those were stuff I only got because it was never released in another format.

The last CD I bought by choice was either The Love Below/Speakerboxx or the Sleep Dopesmoker reissue, I forget which came first.

Don't get me wrong though, I almost never listen t music on cassette, I jsut use it to give music to other people. I got 1500 unused blank tapes free from a middle aged punk who was divesting the leftovers of his 90s DIY label back in 2006 and I've got to do something with them.

but i really don't want to use them anymore.

yeah, playing with tape recorders was pretty much my favorite thing to do from around 6 years old until, I don't know, the middle of college when I finally got a good computer. The computer got old really fast though, and I went back to tapes a couple years later.