this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Vinyl records being popular again is very cool and not a comeback I would have ever expected. What's really interesting to me is how much better quality they are than in previous decades.
Records had been around for a century (vinyl for about 40 years) by the time they were phased out of mainstream music distribution in the late 80's. Over time, manufacturers used cheaper and thinner vinyl to the point where they were just complete and utter shit.
The ones they put out today are thicker and closer to audiophile grade than their predecessors.
Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.
Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.
Similar story with VHS to be honest.
There's a "minimum acceptable quality" which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.
Audiophile now is very different, because it's not a mass market consumer format any longer - it's a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.
Really? I've heard the opposite: that modern cassette players are garbage because they all reuse the same Chinese mechanism with mono playback and no Dolby noise reduction.
If you want a good cassette player, you're supposed to buy one from the 80s or 90s, preferably a Sony.
Yeah that's exactly the problem with modern cassette players, they're almost a waste of money. And the tape that is still produced today is quite terrible compared the old tape, so you also have to find old tape as well
Well yes that's true.
The modern hobbyist resurgence is in vinyl, not cassette. I was only mentioning cassette to make the point that the same phenomenon occurs in other media too - of technologies getting worse over time. Especially true in cassette, in fact.
Good cassettes players are old ones.