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When I got back into vinyl in the mid to late '90s, I could go into a thrift store and walk out with arm-fulls of pristine vinyl for a song. So, vinyl became my way of auditioning new (to me) music at very little expense. The days of cheap, plentiful vinyl are largely gone and things like Pandora radio have become my new way of expanding my horizons but I've also started buying cassettes. In most thrifts they're still cheap and available by the bucketful. The downside is most of them sound like crap so they're definitely a preview medium but it is fun to fire up the ol' tape deck again.
I occasionally throw in a high-quality tape just to remind me of what was eventually possible at 1 7/8 ips.
Follow Ups:
... again. Many of the smaller, independent record stores are now stocking them, and I recently sold a bunch for $0.75/each trade credit. Resale prices are about $2.50 per. Ironically, I just sold my high-end Pioneer cassette deck (for about $100), but I still hold on to a 3-head JVC unit which suffices. Several local bands are issuing home-duplicated cassettes, and there definitely seems to be a market for them. People love funky artifacts ...
Michael in Knoxville (home of 6 great independent record stores)
I like to mess with cassettes a bit for a couple purposes. For one, I like making mix tapes still. They are great for when people are over and you don't want to get up and down and change records. Toss on a couple long mix tapes and let them play over a couple times.
And then there are the new releases on cassette that are available. Mostly the new stuff on cassette is part of the synth/noise/underground experimental music scene. A lot of this stuff is only available on cassette, usually pretty cheap.
I will occasionally grab a tape at a thrift store, but most of the old tapes I come across are played to death and the sound is pretty bad. I usually only grab something if I really want the music and even then I will usually always end up grabbing another format eventually.
I've accumulated a lot of 'em over the years. It didn't help when a local grocery store had a row of shopping carts with new cassettes for a dime each. I bought a couple hundred of them that day. I have more music than I will ever be able to listen to in my lifetime.
Anyway, I'm slowly getting the cassettes ripped to digital on the computer, then I'll probably liquidate most of them. I have a 3-head Nak deck, so I can squeeze the best quality out of them on their way into the computer. Other than my main Nakamichi deck, I have a couple of TASCAM 122s and 5 other decks sitting around. The appeal of cassettes is that they're dirt cheap & plentiful. And you can't find a lot of that stuff on CD or LP.
When played back on a properly adjusted machine, most sound mediocre. A few sound like crap and a few sound truly excellent. I don't rip the crappy sounding ones.
Cheers,
Bobbo :-)
I'm an inveterate thrift shop crate digger. I'm still finding cheap LPs in this area (NW Wyoming & Billings, MT) but some thrifts are getting 'clever' with pricing, e.g. well known Classic Rock titles $3-$20, whatever they can get away with.
I find tons of cassettes at $0.10 to $0.25 apiece. I always look through them and have found some real gems that were not released on either LP or CD or if they were, are exceeding difficult to find in those formats.
I think the new up and coming cheap collectible is now CDs. In the past couple years I've been finding tons of CDs at yard sales and thrifts and the price is steadily coming down to where the norm is a buck apiece.
Here's my CD finds from last week, from the local Habitat For Humanity thrift shop:
Really liking these CDs so far. The Miles Davis disc is a real trip. Miles with his distinctive playing mixed with a Hip Hop beat and Rappin' vocals!!!
to put the music into their iCRAP and carry around 460,720,323 hours of music on something that fits in their pockets.
A lot of times, however, stupid fools forget to look and go home to find the jewel case is empty. Don't ask how I now this.
One yard sale yielded about 30 CDs I was happy to find...Blue Note reissues. Many don't have great sound, but a few do! AND, of course, <$1 is a bit less than finding an original at a used LP store.
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Music. Window or mirror?
I buy the castoff blank cassettes that have been recorded on once by novices (tabs intact, low levels on the tape, nothing written on the index card, sometimes labels still unused and intact) and just rerecord when album radio shows play stuff I don't have otherwise. I have over 1000+ cassettes from working in used record stores. Nothing like recording used LP's in mint shape when working on record store clerk's wages. Still yet to find that Dragon for pennies...
Freedom is the right to discipline yourself.
Keep looking for a Dragon. Six months ago, I found a nearly pristine one in Goodwill for $12.
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