Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling

WSJ ^ | November 4, 2017 | fidelis

[fidelis]

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.

The world is running out of cassette tape.

National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music...

[Davy Crocket]

well Amazon has tons of the cassette tapes.. TDK Maxell, sony..

[howlinhound]

“Old CD’s and DVD’s make for great target practice.”

..and excellent beer coasters.

[ADemocratNoMore]

FWIW, the image you posted is labeled memorex-ad-2.jpg .

I remember it well and it was from Maxell, circa early 1980’s. Good find.

[Salamander]

I remember driving down the road and seeing what looked like miles of tape fluttering happily on the shoulder, after someone got ticked and tossed their 8 track or cassette out the window.

Good times.

[glorgau]

Analog is king, digital is for people that can’t handle reality!

[ADemocratNoMore]

> I still prefer to buy CDs and rip them.

Dittos here. CDs are higher quality than mp3s, used CDs are ubiquitous and cheap and blank CDs cost pennies per unit.

I’ve found that mediocre sounding mp3s sound better when converted to .wav format and for those really special recordings I’ll up-res to 24 bit 192k resolution with Sound Forge and play back the digital file with a USB DAC. On high-end equipment there is a noticeable though subtle improvement in dynamics and imaging.

I’ve heard some decent sounding cassettes but there is usually some degree of hiss present even with Dolby C. DBX encoding worked great with cassettes sounding as good as CD but it was never a portable format, with a few exceptions.

[ADemocratNoMore]

> Analog is king, digital is for people that can’t handle reality!

If you sample rate is fast enough Digital becomes Analog ! Besides, to quote Einstein, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

[ExGeeEye]

It’s been a while since I found the ad for new-manufacture “his master’s voice” style crank-wound phonographs, but...I do know where I can find new steel styli in case I want to fire up my 109-year-old cabinet “Pathephone” (convertible for use on RCA-style records or, with the sapphire ball stylus, the Pathe “hill-and-dale” records).

[FlyFisher]

I have that framed,(it’s called “blown away”) hanging in my living room. A buddy made be buy decades ago saying it was the quintessential me.

[Charles Martel]

Also, clean your tape heads often.

Heh. I remember being about 13 years old and my bossy younger sister, who was about half my age at that time, being grossed-out by the head cleaning supplies that I left strewn on the desk in my bedroom.

IIRC, it was a rather pharmaceutical-looking bottle of Teac head cleaner and a bundle of long swabs in a rubber band. She thought I should be more diligent about confining that stuff to the bathroom, where it belonged.

It took me a minute before the reason for the misunderstanding cut through my confusion, then I was doubled over in laughter. The best part was that she felt embarrassed and thus didn't pester me again for over two weeks. :-)

[Charles Martel]

Yeah, I remember the poster having the Maxell logo. I guess someone mis-remembered it as Memorex and named the file that way. Must be the glass tipping over - Memorex had a shattering wine glass in its “Is It Live Or Memorex” ad campaign.

[E.Allen]

I believe the speaker is a JBL 100

[DAC21]

Was a manger at a TDK plant in Irvine CA. from 1986 to 1993. During peak demand we made as many as 7.5 million cassette tapes a month. Ahhh the good old days...good paying Manufacturing jobs in California.

[Songcraft]

"I’ve collected a lot of MP3 music over the past few years, but can only play them on an MP3 player with earbuds; or on the computer. I’m not up to date on any of this stuff anymore, and have no idea of what kind of player/speaker system to buy to play MP3s in the house."

I'm in that same boat, playing MP3's only on the computer, or the small mp3 player with earbuds.   Can anyone else here who is more up to date on these things recommend some kind of bigger, tabletop mp3 player for the home, with speakers that really sound great, that you can play ripped CD/mp3 files, or downloaded mp3 files on a thumb drive on it?

[billyboy15]

Next thing you know, people will have dang 8-tracks in their cars again.

###########################################################

Whataya mean, “again”?

[billyboy15]

You can easily play your mp3 music thru your home stereo system using Bluetooth.

If you are interested in details let me know.

[ADemocratNoMore]

> I believe the speaker is a JBL 100

You are correct Sir ! Great eye !

The distinctive grille gives it away.

I had the L88s (two way version of the 100s) for a few years in the early 70’s. Those didn’t come with the fancy grills.

[ADemocratNoMore]

> Can anyone else here who is more up to date on these things recommend some kind of bigger, tabletop mp3 player for the home

As per the suggestion posted by billyboy15, Bluetooth is an option. You can transmit from a tablet or phone to an add-on receiver connected to your audio system. Check out Parts Express for some good hardware or E-Bay or even Circuit City, etc. Another option is to look around for a CD or DVD player that will play mp3s burned to optical media on your home computer, or with most CD/DVD burning software including the functionality built in to Windows since XP you can just drag and drop mp3s to the write cue and they will be automatically converted to .wav files and the resulting CD can be played on most any commercial player. One thing to consider is that you may have to play around a little as some machines don’t like some brands of disks and they might choke if you feed them a disk with over 74 minutes of content.

Finally, you can get a decent digital media player from Amazon for under $50 or so that will also play HD video files into HDMI. Just make sure it can handle USB thumbdrives and memory cards, has separate audio out and can handle .mp3 and .wav files.

Finally I would recommend something like the FIIO M3 or X1 portable music players, $50 and $100 respectively. You can get them all over the place, just Google the brand and model numbers. These players will not take a thumbdrive but will use high capacity MicroSD cards and will play just about any audio file you can throw at it. Just plug the headphone out into the line-in on your audio system and keep the audio of the player turned way down.

[wally_bert]

I have a bunch of 1” alumunim tape flanges in a bin.

They’ve been there for years.

There is a quad tape in a box too.

In a closet is a Beta SP machine I got cheap on Ebay a few years ago.

[MayflowerMadam]

They’re handy quilting templates.