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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the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer."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
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Tuesday November 14 2017, @07:35AM
A sort of geeky British YouTuber who has become quite popular did a couple of different videos about how formats like vinyl and Phillips compact cassettes were actually capable of sounding much better than most people remember. You might have heard of him, he goes by "Techmoan". Funny guy.
I'm not interested in going back to collecting cassette tapes, but it was fascinating how he demonstrated that good quality Chrome tapes recorded with the last generation Dolby S noise reduction (which was only available on a few higher-end decks at the end of the cassette era) yielded a noise floor and dynamic range virtually indistinguishable from CDs. He did something similar with vinyl. We think of cassettes as sounding bad because the players were cheap with poor speed control and the cassettes mostly used cheaper ferric tape with higher inherent noise.
He's done a whole series of videos about obscure retro audio and video formats, how good they were (or weren't), and why they ultimately failed in the marketplace. Always very well researched and surprisingly interesting even if you initially think it wouldn't be. I recommend the channel for anyone with the slightest interest in retro electronics and such.
Should I let you discover the hilarious puppet shows after the credits on your own? Yeah.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ