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posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 13 2017, @06:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-old-is-still-old-but-they-are-making-more dept.

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the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer."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


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday November 13 2017, @07:32PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday November 13 2017, @07:32PM (#596397)

    No, where did you get that idea?

    Digital audio is superior in every way to analog, given a high enough bitrate and sampling frequency. TPM is a canard: a standard audio CD does not have DRM on it, it's just simple PCM audio. There's many audio formats that support higher quality with lossy and lossless codecs, and they're all DRM-free too: I recomment Ogg Opus and Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.

    DRM isn't a given in computing by any means. You can easily buy yourself a Raspberry Pi for $50 or less which has no support for DRM through TPM modules, run Linux on it, and listen to audio in one of the above Free formats.

    Just because Windows 10 is spying on you doesn't mean you need to listen to audio on shitty old analog formats that never had decent sound quality; it just means you need to stop using Windows.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:02AM (#596708)

    I actually wanted to buy a tape recorder for my kids (3 and 1 right now).
    I can trust a 4 year old with something more or less mechanical, he will understand exactly what's happening (therefore there will be no need to take it apart until he's 8 and starts wondering about the motor), and there's no risk of damaging anything important if he wants to play/record.
    a computer is somewhat more expensive, and much more complicated to operate.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:23AM (#596709)

    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.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:30PM (#596799)

    dude who would do all that stuff you listed

    just buy a $20 mp3 player and get a 2 gig CF card or something. better yet it supports headphones and probably AA batteries so you can replace them easily and even use rechargables if you wanted. great for workouts and probably won't break if you drop it

    people do not need to carry their ENTIRE library with them, or have internet connection.

    you make me laugh. you rag on windows 10 to play media as if its the only thing, then a raspebrry pi for $50? you think regular people are going to set one up? to use an actual computer to play music? christ you can get a used android tablet with a terrible horrible screen running 2.x something that plays mp3s just fine if you can figure out where to shove the memory chip.

    i cant think of anybody ever that just wants to listen to music on the cheap that even know what you said, except for the CD and DRM acronyms. they arent worried about windows 10 i promise you so stop being an IT guy and just press play