Saturday, January 20, 2007

Tale of the tape


I threw out all of my old Music cassette tapes today. They were victims of technology. I used to play them in my old 1997 Altima on the commute to work, but when I traded it in for the 2004 Altima, I got the CD player. I thought that I could not give up the old comedy tapes like my Abbott and Costello and Sam Kineson tapes. Now I can listen to them on the Satellite Radio. When my small cassette player broke, I ran out of excuses. If I really wanted to replace my old Wendy and Lisa tapes, I would have done so by now. The clock is ticking for my CDs. Ten more years and I will buy myself an ipod!

1 comment:

Allen Gladfelter said...

y'know, tapes DO go obsolete. I have some tapes that I collected back in the day and I decided to give my old Janes Addiction and Public Enemy a listen and by gum did they sound terrible! I think the magnetic stuff on the tapes degrades over time.

And don't think you're set with CDs. They have a tendency to oxidize and delaminate. That means that they can crap out just from sitting around too long, too.

The most solid-state music archiving medium is STILL vinyl. They even make alser-readers for vinyl so that they will not suffer from needle wear. Pretty nifty technology, that... and expensive!