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I’ve been hit by audio nostalgia this past week.

I took out my big crate of cassette tapes (that maybe carries about 300 tapes), and plugged in an old Pioneer tape deck to my home theater/audio setup at home and went back in time.

The simple act of opening a cassette case, taking out a tape, plopping it into the deck, manually pushing the deck in and pressing play is so old-school but it brings back so many memories. I remember the first tape I bought (a used copy of The Police’s Synchronicity) played on a very small and dinky bright red (it was the 80s!) Sanyo radio/tape recorder with just one speaker. It was a time when I was still getting hits and misses with my blind purchases because you can’t usually listen to tapes first at the stores near my home and I hardly have access to info on many bands (no internet, remember?). I still have those tapes and I still can’t listen to them because the music is just so bad.

I remember swapping tapes with friends and making mix tapes that I listen to in my daily two-hour commute to university and using a very hefty and utilitarian Sanyo tape recorder that I think was the basic model they had then.

A lot of has happened between those analog years and now. But analog will still be there to transport me to those wonderful years.