Its interesting to see cassette tape sale going up. https://www.gearnews.com/cassette-tape-comeback-as-sales-boom-why-you-should-record-to-tape/
Great article, I was this close to donating my Tascams a few years ago but luckily held on them. Tapes have always been a great angle for bands and now that you have to do some work to play them, they are even more in fashion. There's a ton of audio people that hate cassettes and just don't understand it, that's fine, they can listen to music in their own style. The rest of us that remember hitting that first rock and roll slide on the 1/2 pipe coping while Black Flag was playing on a boombox will always have a place in our libraries for cassettes. Walking around school with a Walkman on and crazy 80's music, who cared about sonics, it was FUN! I love digital, I was writing programs for my Apple II to digitize music back in 1982, I've alway love it but when I find a garage sale cassette or album, I play that way before anything else and usually listen to both sides cuz I know it's probably all good. If you watch Professor of Rock on YouTube, he has the top 10 of whatever year 80's, most of it is still being played on extreme rotation today, unfortunately new bands don't get to even close to that exposure.
Looking at prices today you would be kicking yourself if you had. In contrast many of the digital recorders from the late nineties are going for a fraction of the price of a tape Portastudio. I have been reading up on both and a common complaint is that with the digital ones you spend more time referring to the manual than recording music. A couple of good articles on Portastudios https://eandt.theiet.org/content/ar...-the-four-track-as-the-portastudio-powers-on/ https://reverb.com/uk/news/the-tascam-portastudio-through-the-ages Elsewhere I read that Bob Dylan recorded an entire album using one.
I was in my youth during the analog age... I never got "good" with digital... For me cassettes were all about portability and ease of use, though fidelity was important: - I used cassettes to save wear on my albums: I'd buy and play my vinyl once, then record to tape... - In college in the late 70's then thru 80's, I used only Maxell (UD)XLII and XLIIS tapes in my Sony TC-K71: those tapes still sound great to me! - Portability: you can't just stick a CD in any pocket, like you can a cassette. How many empty CD cases with lost CD's do you have? - Cassettes don't skip: you can't beat a cassette for walking or running or any exercise activity... my early Discman skipped so bad i went back to cassettes - my kids grew up during the "Napster / Nero / iTunes" era, and I still have their old iPod's somewhere... loaded with great mixes they made... but I just never got good with Audacity, recording and manipulating files is much harder to me, besides I'd still like to listen to my music I physically own... I follow "FMTuners" forum: there is a current discussion on pricing someones high-end tuner collection for sale: I thought one comment was particularly appropriate: "...Considering the demographics of the analog and vintage tuner ownership I'd expect a downward trend in pricing. It seems many of our more esteemed members and avid collectors are basking in the twilight and will be feeding tuners to the market in the foreseeable future. Supply will outstrip demand as the younger crowd has no attachment to the 60's, 70's, or 80's. Not to mention their preference for all things digital. Tell me I'm wrong and I might hang on to the stash a bit longer. "...
I'm a fan of the whole series so I'm not happy with just an amp, I need the tuner, cassette, eq and any other accessory that went with the amp. That's one of the reasons I have so many tape decks, they match the other stuff. It's too bad the kids don't like tuners, I blame it on Clear Channel for torching radio back in the early 2000's, watch the documentary on it, they got rid of the local DJ's and went with a national team. They also got rid of all the local music programmers and went to one national programmer. No more local news or breaking bands, some of the great reasons to listen to radio. Even with the exploding popularity of 80's music, they still play the same 200 songs they did then, maybe that's why cassettes are popular, the other 10 songs are usually pretty good and some albums had 2-5 great songs that get little airplay today.
I think that is true for most items. In the 1980s I was into collecting valve (tube) radios. They haven't really appreciated at all since then. My late Father was into tinplate trains like Lionel and the demographics for those are even worse. A colleague who is also into vintage electronics described it as a "nostalgia wave" which I think is accurate. He was the one who imported a Korg MS20 synthesizer from Japan just before Korg decided there was so much nostalgia for them the reissued it (probably not too difficult on a synth that is just PCBs, sheet metal and wood). While some things change others stay the same. Who would have guessed that 25 years after release people in their 40s would be getting all nostalgic about computer sound cards ? p.s. On the subject of tuners I have told the story before how in 1979 the guy I was working for fitted a digital frequency readout in his HiFi tuner and impressed everyone else in the electronics company office.
Tascam on Shopgoodwill right now! You never know where you will see this stuff! (shipping is a crap shoot though)... I would not have known what this was if Mister X hadn't mentioned them! https://shopgoodwill.com/item/165778696
Those are the later series, the earlier ones were like large mixing boards and built like tanks. I picked up an even later model for a few dollars, it was pretty cheap but even that one has gone up in value lately.
