Tour the very last audio cassette factory

in hardware on 2016-06-15 00:36 (#1H7HM)

The last audio cassette company in the country held on tight as its former competitors abandoned cassettes for CD production. Now that analog has begun to make a comeback, the National Audio Company, or NAC, owns its market and is making more cassettes than ever before. When everyone jumped on the CD boat in the late 90s, NAC wasn't hurt because its customers were mostly spoken-word performers and people just buying blank media. So the company began slowly buying and rehabbing its competitors' equipment. "We were preparing ourselves to pick the music market up when it came back, and that's exactly what happened." Now NAC is making cassettes for Metallica, a special release of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, and what looks like countless basement recordings from smaller bands.

Banking so heavily on retro nostalgia is tricky, because what's retro and what's just old changes fairly often. Watch the full video, from Bloomberg.

Re: I grew up with tapes (Score: 2, Interesting)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2016-06-15 14:30 (#1H9DE)

It was actually a lot easier to make mixed tapes than it was to make mixed CDs. Almost every tape player I think I've ever had had an input jack and a record button, or you could just record off the radio. I don't think you could easily record music from the radio with a CD player and you needed specialized hardware to get the radio to play on a PC... Although now that I think of it, you likely could have played from the speaker jack on a radio to the mic jack on a PC and recorded that way. Still would be easier to just hit record on the tape player though, and it's not like the radio doesn't play "popular" songs TO DEATH!!! If you missed it just wait ten minutes...

In fact screw recording the songs, by the time the radio stations got through with them you didn't want to ever hear them again anyway. So much better now with the internet, you get a huge variety (for free) and practically never have to listen to the same thing twice ever, unless you want too.