Tour the very last audio cassette factory

by
in hardware on (#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 evilviper@pipedot.org on 2016-06-16 00:30 (#1HB83)

There were numerous stand-alone CD recorders which would allow you to record to disc linearly just like an old cassette tape recorder. They weren't popular because being able to mix, edit, etc., on your PC before recording, as well as record bit-exact (audio or data), make copies, and record faster than real-time were such huge benefits.

Plus CD-Recorders were expensive, just like cassette recorders were when they first appeared. Now you can get dirt-cheap CD burners, but nobody wants them... Everybody has moved on to solid-state audio recording with microSD cards or similar if they still have a need to record at all (most don't, and just "download" audio already digitized).
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