The article is factually incorrect.  Cassettes degraded if you didn't demag and clean the player.  And they were better for car listening than larger, unboxed eel-to-reels.  

I can imagine a situation where, to mask tape noise, a driver buys noisier tires.  

Steve Smolian



-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Hirsch
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2015 12:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Xmas Eve greeting

This link to an op-ed
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/opinion/our-misplaced-nostalgia-for-cassette-tapes.html?ref=opinion&_r=0>
in today's NY Times should warm the hearts of those cassette and CD diss-ers and Grinches on this list (you know who you are <g>). I personally still have a functioning TASCAM MK-II deck that was intended to be a transfer-to-digital device when I purchased it around the turn of the millennium, but is more often used simply for playback of items in my collection of tapes, carefully assembled in the 70's, 80's and early 90's.
I know that I am tempting fate, but even the ones that are 30+ years old still sound OK to me and mechanical failure has only been an issue once or twice and even then, I think the playback mechanism was to blame rather than the tape itself. Of course, my satisfaction with what I hear may be the happy result of my auditory capacity's decline as I slipped slowly from my 20's to mid-60's as the tapes experienced their parallel decline in frequency output.

Bah, humbug,

Peter Hirsch