Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
Cassette tapes. I like discs, but tapes… Damn that belongs in a museum. Even tho I do admire the technology.
(Unless for like, storage backup and stuff where it can be actually useful.)
You remember portable CD players before they had a buffer cache? Couldn’t even keep them in your pocket without skipping like mad.
I don’t, but I’m aware of that (same in cars). I only got into CDs near the end of their popularity, maybe that’s the main reason I’m sick of tapes and like discs. (Altho frankly, any portable/headphone audio was shit compared to what we have today.)
The thing that blows my mind about tape is that copying 1:1 is real time and takes the exact same time as the track is long. Or that making a copy always lowers quality with every generation. Analogue media is whack, man.
Absolutely! And if you had a cassette that you wanted to write over (that wasn’t meant to be recorded over), you had to stuff a piece of paper in it.
That write prevention was punch card technology. Floppy disks also used it.
And how they later market on later CD players as “now comes with 30 second anti-skip!” which barely worked.
In the late 90’s, the technology was incredible tho. The little machines were fucking monsters. A few years ago I’ve got a few portables from that era and even with antiskip disabled, it’s super hard to make some of them skip. With it enabled, it’s probably impossible without the device falling apart.
It’s also interesting how even despite obvious abuse and shitty shipping, those things work perfectly. The cheap plastics and close to zero weight would suggest they wouldn’t last a month, never mind 20 years.
I had an MP3 CD player that would still sometimes skip if things were bumpy enough. First time it happened, I was like !?
I still love CDs, but don’t miss vinyl records at all. I grew up in the original vinyl era and was very happy to no longer have to bother with a big and unwieldy format which is physically degraded during every play and which you have to tiptoe past the player to avoid making it skip.
I’m a vinyl guy and how you enjoy music doesn’t affect me, BUT: there’s something wrong with your setup. It’s not level if it’s that sensitive
I never got on board with CDs because no one knew how to master them for the first few years. Everything sounded quiet, tinny and harsh in the wrong way, so I went back to LPs. Eventually they figured out how to optimize music to that format but then the loudness wars came along and made everything sound like shit again. There was a brief period in the 90s when CDs sounded fantastic.
If you try to make records too loud the needle will physically jump out of the groove so they have to be relatively normalized (unless you try to fit too much music on one side in which case the record gets super quiet)
There is/was something like a loudness db. I’ve got a bunch of CDs from the top of the charts and man that’s so good.
You mean you don’t miss your tape deck eating your cassettes and having to wind them back into the cartridge with a pencil? Weird.
That’s at least better than chucking the broken tape out your car window and having it become a tape snarl by the side of the road.
I was visiting my parents one year and found some old cassette tapes. I showed them to my kids and played a song. My youngest liked the song and wanted to hear it again. He was surprised when I couldn’t just hit “repeat.” Instead, I needed to rewind, rewind, rewind. Not far enough. Rewind, rewind. Too far. Fast Forward. Too far. Rewind. Too far but good enough.
CDs are in decline and vinyl is prohibitively expensive and the lead times to get a record pressed are insane because your record will be stuck behind the millionth Urban Outfitters special edition of Rumors… so cassettes have made a weird comeback in underground scenes. Worst fucking format
I still have them, and a player (Nakamishi 700 ZXL), and a Revox B77 with reels. I don’t have functioning 8-tracks anymore. I have the tapes and equipment, but the tapes all broke. I need to find way to fix them (restore the loop).
There’s to much music lost just because the medium isn’t available anymore and it wasn’t economicaly viable to transfer it to a newer medium. So many records that didn’t get transferred to CD.
I don’t miss the cassette tapes, but I don’t miss even more the big cassette cases that I used to carry in my car with all the tapes in it!