Just kidding, a few youtube videos got me up to date. I used to be a digital audiophile, but came across cassettes in a yard sale one day. Now I have a box of them but no way to play it. Looking forward to the journey ahead!
Welcome to the forum Carpet! For older members, cassettes hold a special place when music was king and usually part of your lifestyle. We would take them everywhere, mostly copying an album, buying prerecorded, or recording direct from radio and playing them until they died (now were finding out they live forever). While the format gets a lot of elbows (think Gordie Howe), it was really loved by most users and the equipment used to play tapes was some of the coolest industrial, electrical and mechanical design ever! Enjoy the journey, if you love it great, if you hate it, let us know. Looking for equipment? Put a thread in the wanted section, some members have hundreds of players and don't mind moving a working unit to someone with a real interest. Lately I've been combing magazines from the 2000's with some early portable digital equipment, please post anything you have, we all have the common bond of music and love to see all of the great equipment.
They are those little rectangular shaped things that were once very popular... oh I see what you did here hahaha just kidding. Welcome!
This thread got me thinking about how many millions of cassettes were given as Christmas presents in the 1980s. Enough for Sony to think it was worthwhile having a full page advert. I received the pack with the Sony Rock Review book and still have it (and probably the used tapes somewhere).
True. The advert above was in a Woolworth's Smash Hits special. Woolworth's kept going here for longer than in the USA, making the mistake of concentrating more on Physical Media just before downloads became the big thing. Most Filling Stations had a selection of pre-recorded cassettes too. I have pointed out before that in 2008 Ford were still selling new cars with cassette players in them in the U.K., with only their latest / up-market ones getting a CD player
Good ole woolworths, if they didn't stock it you didn't need it lol. Even had a restaurant in a couple of them in the town where I grew up.
Still missed by people of my age, especially for the Pick and Mix sweets. I probably bought half of my CDs in the local Woolworths during the 1990s as they had the best selection. Two silly things about their demise are: There is now a successful chain of shops called Wilko who sell a similar range of goods to Woolworths in the 1970s. They were one of the last chains to still stock branded cassettes. Maxell URs which were possibly the last ones made by any of the traditional manufacturers. It was only three years ago that they stopped selling them https://www.reddit.com/r/cassetteculture/comments/gl35mv/maxell_ur_90s_discontinued_in_the_uk/ If you had U.K. shares in Woolworth's you would have actually done alright. In the 1980s they set up a DIY subsiduary called B&Q which is now the most successful one in the country. Our equivalent of Home Depot. A Woolworth's history site which explains that https://www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/aboutwoolies.html
Thanks for that bit of history! Radio Shack is another one i miss. Always a good stop for that item no one else sold.
Welcome! Please don’t buy a “modern” cassette player from Amazon or you might throw that box of cassettes in the trash. Probably one of the best and entertaining YouTube videos on cassettes are from Techmoan. If you haven’t watched them, grab a cup of joe, relax and enjoy!
Here is a treat for you https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ There will be plenty of cassettes (and 8 tracks) in there We had Radio Shack here in the U.K. from the mid 1970s to 1999 although they were called Tandy, like their computers. They were literally killed off by Mobile Phones. Phone Retailer "The Carphone Warehouse" was looking to expand rapidly and bought them out so they could convert every Tandy into a Mobile Phone store. Ironically they have now closed just being a section in Curry's the U.K's equivalent to Best Buy. We also had a chain of electronics shops called Maplin. I often used to joke that Maplin had turned into Tandy having a very similar product range of RC toys, Disco lights etc. However they went bankrupt in 2018
