The Cassette Tape Revival: Rediscovering the Effort and the Attachment

I heard that cassette tapes are quietly making a comeback, so I dug my old deck and tapes out from the back of the closet. Before CDs took over, cassettes were the only way to "record" music. Air-checking, waiting to catch a song as it played on the radio, and the days of borrowing rental CDs and dubbing them onto cassette all come back to me as if it were just yesterday.

One of the joys back then was choosing tapes. TDK, SONY, maxell, AXIA, That's — even within the same normal position there were several grades, and I could lose hours just looking at the cases and designs. I'd push the recording level on the meter right up to the edge and switch on Dolby noise reduction. That's how I made my own "best-of" compilations, one tape at a time.

Looking back now, I think it was exactly that effort that created the attachment. The frustration when a tape snapped and cut off in the middle of a song, the agonizing over where the break between side A and side B would fall — I loved all of it. I never did manage to get my hands on the Nakamichi DRAGON I longed for, but I'm happy to learn that TASCAM and others still make cassette decks today, which gives me an excuse to digitize the tapes I recorded long ago.

Source: JATO online shop Magazine