Vinyl comeback now, cassette tapes next?

I think VHS or Beta HIFI stereo tape would be best. You would use the entire surface of an 1/2" tape.

The thing is, many listeners have never truly listened to a quality cassette recording on a good deck. If one wants to transfer analogue sound of vinyl onto another analogue format one really has it best with a good cassette deck and audio cassette tape. Yes, Reel to Reel is better, much so in some cases but it's not as user friendly.

Factoring though today that many used cassette decks can be had it can be hit or miss as to how well they still work. But if you land one that is operating properly and you truly do learn to record on it well, you can get killer copies of vinyl and Cd.

I for the fun of the hobby got back into cassettes oh about 2 years ago. I have bought many decks from thrifts and eBay, some pretty good 3 headers that are very cool and others that were snagged at thrifts for cheap. I have a few keepers though that I will never get rid of now. But let me tell you they work great in making very serious analogue copies of my vinyl. It gives me an ability to get most of that vinyl sound we all seem to love and be able to do it that is quicker and easier to use. Sometime I just do not want to bother dropping a vinyl disc on my turn table but want to get close to that sound. Rolling tape gives me longer playback times between flipping tapes over too.

Besides its just fun picking a tape out from my stock of blanks and setting it all up. The meters dancing and seeing tape rolling is just another part of our audio hobby so to speak.

Yes there were some good cassette decks made several years ago. I used to compare the better ones to my 1/2 track R.R and signal to noise and frequency response was pretty close. You could make surprisingly good recordings that exceeded commercial cassettes. I have one somewhere in the garage, might have to dust it off and see how it sounds.

Cassette's are actually quite trendy now within the uber hipster music scene. It's so much cheaper to record on a cassette then make a 7" record. Obviously the sound quality is sub par and that's why the lo-fi indie hipsters love it. It's also retro to the younger generation who only know digital formats so it makes it cooler. Legendary indie rocker Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth, wrote the book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.

Those who put down cassette have never heard a Tandberg TCD3014a, or a Nakamichi 1000ZXL recording onto Sony Metal Master, Maxell Vertex, or TDK MA-XG tape.