When Taylor Swift’s releases her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” in October, it can be heard on the usual places, including streaming, vinyl and…cassette tape?
The cassette tape was once one of the most common ways to listen to music, overtaking vinyl in the 1980s before being surpassed by CDs. But the physical audio format has become an artifact of a bygone era, giving way to the convenience of streaming.
Or, that’s what many thought.
In 2023, 436,400 cassettes were sold in the United States, according to the most recent data available from Luminate, an entertainment data firm. Although that’s a far cry from the 440 million cassettes sold in the 1980s, it’s a sharp increase from the 80,720 cassettes sold in 2015 and a notable revival for a format that had been all but written off.
Cassettes might not be experiencing the resurgence of vinyls or even CDs, but they are making a bit of a comeback, spurred by fans wanting an intimate experience with music and nostalgia, said Charlie Kaplan, owner of online store Tapehead City.
“People just like having something you can hold and keep, especially now when everything’s just a rented file on your phone,” Kaplan told CNN.
“Tapes provide a different type of listening experience — not perfect, but that’s part of it. Flip it over, look at the art and listen all the way through. You connect with the music with more of your senses,” he said.
Vinyl has to be mastered differently (using the RIAA equalization curve) because vinyl is a crap medium. Low frequencies, unequalized, can cause the stylus to jump out of the groove. High frequencies tend to be attenuated. And it’s noisy as well, and the noise gets worse over time. The “warmth” afiicionados treasure is mainly harmonic distortion from the amp reconsituting the equalized sound.
See above. Bass has to be compressed in order to be written to vinyl in a way that doesn’t damage the record on playback. The amp then decompresses it before you hear it. Compression and decompression do not increase fidelity, instead what you get is a decompressed signal with the same reduced resolution as the compressed signal on the vinyl. In other words, you lose fidelity during the compression process, and information which is lost cannot be put back in later.