Also interesting in the Pitfork article is this video, here unembedded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkGMJBqZawA
I had never seen the Elcaset packaging before.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 7:38 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] What Your Music Format Says About You
> Hi Eric:
>
> I'm really surprised about the cassette fad. I can't understand it. Those things aren't
> particularly cool artifacts, and they sound really bad. Do people pass around mix tapes again? Why
> not just burn CDR's? So much easier to compile and mass duplicate, and they sound better. In a
> modern context, why not just make playlists in itunes and share those?
>
> I can see the vinyl niche, and enjoy it myself. Vinyl can be mastered and manufactured to sound
> quite good (although nowhere near output=input to the original source), and the 12x12 artifact is
> just irresistable when it's done right.
>
> I own a lot of original vinyl of my favorite music. When I find a digital source that sounds
> better than that (sometimes, not as often as I would have liked, the CDs were clearly superior,
> sometimes nowadays the HDTracks version ends up great), that becomes my go-to playback. I never
> wasted my money on mass-duped cassettes. My father had been in the tape duping business, in fact
> one of the first cassette dupers in the US. He told me all the compromises and problems involved
> with high speed duplicating, and opined that cassettes were designed as dictation media, and they
> worked great for that but not for high fidelity music transmission. He was right.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric Cartier" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 7:27 PM
> Subject: [ARSCLIST] What Your Music Format Says About You
>
>
>> Hi ARSClist friends,
>>
>> There's an interesting article
>> <http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9748-what-your-music-format-says-about-you/>
>> on Pitchfork about the "panoply of [format] choices" listeners have these
>> days. I collect records, CDs, and cassettes, and I recently became a
>> Spotify subscriber (basically because I couldn't bear to hear one more
>> goshdarn Geico commercial interrupt an album, but also because I stream
>> music at work and home for hours each day). I prefer rock and R&B and
>> classical music on vinyl, electronic/ambient music on crisp CDs, and any
>> genre (and mixtapes from friends) on cassettes. The cassette resurgence is
>> real, I think, and it's cool at local shows to dig a group's set and hand a
>> band member $5 or $10 for a tape at the merch table afterwards. It's a good
>> format for small groups to use to get their music into fans' hands.
>>
>> Which formats do you prefer? Is anyone still listening to recordings on
>> ADAT, DAT, or MiniDisc? And has *anyone* ever played or owned Elcasets? (To
>> be honest, I'd never heard of that format until tonight.)
>>
>> In sound,
>>
>> Eric Cartier
>> Digital Librarian
>> University of Maryland Libraries
>>
>>
>
>
|