Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
National Audio Co. is the only company in the U.S. that produces cassette tape. Now, as cassette tapes enjoy a resurgence in popularity, National Audio has less than a year's supply left of the stuff, The Wall Street Journal reports.
For the last 15 years, National Audio's co-owner and president Steve Stepp has been clinging to his company's dwindling supply of music-quality magnetic tape. In 2014, National Audio's South Korean supplier stopped making the material, so Stepp bought out their remaining stock before they shuttered — and has been left with a shrinking stockpile ever since.
Although the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer." That's why the company — which makes cassettes for everyone from indie bands to Metallica — is planning to build the U.S.'s first high-grade tape manufacturing line in decades.
Crap! Where am I going to store my TRS-80 programs now?
Source: https://theweek.com/speedreads/735269/america-running-cassette-tape
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:23AM
One of the Ogg developers has an article about this (Google it if you care). The signal to noise ratio (S/N) can be converted directly to bits per sample.
If I remember the numbers:
Home recorded cassette tape is about 6 bits.
Professionally recorded cassette tape is about 8 bits.
Vinyl gets up to a whopping 10 bits.
CD's are 16 bits, since then the numbers have only been going up.