Chances are it was the early- to mid-90s.

The best thing about the cassette tape for a long time was the fact that it was so easy to record your own audio onto it. In fact, we still talk about the “mix tape” even though now you can burn it to a CD or DVD or simply store it digitally in iTunes or stream it from Spotify.

Looking back, though, that was about all that was good about the tape (if you’re feeling nostalgic, take a look at some Walkman photos back in the day when they played tapes).

The quality was inferior to vinyl, right from the start, and it deteriorated the more you played them. Try to play a duff tape in a dodgy player and it soon turned into brown ferric spaghetti.

Some manufacturers must think that there’s still some demand for the cassette. Take Pioneer, still making its CT-W606DR double auto-reverse cassette deck available.

Yeah. Double. High-speed dubbing FTW!

Perhaps there are people who still have cassettes lying around. My advice would be to get them transferred to digital storage as soon as possible. Maybe Pioneer’s solution is the way to do it, but at $229 it’s not a cheap way of doing it.

Other features include a ton of Dolby noise reduction, a music search (ahhh, the whirring of cassette tape being fast forwarded or rewound).

The nineties flavour continues:

“includes CD-Deck Synchro for easy recording from a CD player”

Yes, recording from a CD player.

Tape lives!

Product page (Via)

Actually, no, scratch that, I haven’t, but I can see some use for the DIY fridge magnet clock here.

The idea is that you attach the basic mechanism to the fridge door and then place various “activity” discs around to form the 12 hours of the day. In fact, you could probably use even less, as seen in the picture.

The concept is probably good for those who have a very regular schedule, but I don’t think it would work for me. Though I might get up at much the same time every day and make a coffee, I don’t need the fridge to tell me to do that. Plus, I don’t think I’ll be regularly (if ever) taking part in some of the activities depicted on the blue magnetic discs:

Make what you will of some of those. You could probably quite easily make your own activity discs too.

Where does the kit come from? We don’t know, sorry.

Via

Martin Wilson is a long-standing artist using traditional film photography as his medium.

His web site showcases 16 big art pieces that are stitched together from individual, ordered 35mm film.

Once Martin has developed the film, he scans it in and then place the final image together, including the shot numbers under each frame. He swears that he doesn’t cheat at all using Photoshop, and if he makes a mistake or shoots a frame out of place he starts the whole project again from scratch.

In a digital age when so much is manipulated via Photoshop, surely this has to count as master geekery? Take a look at some of the amazing artwork on his site. You can buy it all, too, and not for stupid prices either.

(Via)

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.