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: 1)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2016-06-20 11:16 (#1HS0F)

I just never thought of it before, although that's how I use to do some mixed tapes. I'd connect one tape player to another over the mic-head jacks so I could play on one while recording on the other. I even suggested it once to a guy that ask me how he could record a song he wanted for his wedding from YouTube and I suggested getting a double ended cable to connect the headphone to the microphone jack on his PC.

Never occurred to me until that comment that I could have connected a tape player to the PC, but I guess that's because I never had reason to do it. It was such a short time from when we switched from tapes to CDs to when Napster became available, then YouTube and now we have all kinds for services for getting music without the hassle of waiting for it to be played on the radio. You can listen to anything you want now whenever you feel like it.