mediageek called the cassette revival way before anyone

I’m not generally one for tooting my own horn, but here at the end of 2009 it looks like I was a good two years ahead of the curve when I predicted the cassette revival waayyyy back in February of 20022007. I must admit that my prediction was a bit tongue-in-cheek, not so much because I didn’t think it was possible or reasonable, but because my cynical side can’t help but be a little…er, cynical, about resurgences of technology recently considered passé or obsolete.

Earlier this year I noted the appearance of more cassette-based indie rock labels, mostly dealing in very limited-edition runs of EPs and albums. My own recent travels to record stores like Aquarius in San Francisco and Reckless in Chicago turned up small cassette sections in both store where just a couple of years ago there had been none.

But the real cherry on top was stumbling across recent posts all about cassettes at Stereophile magazine, the home of super high-end audiophiles, where CD players can cost $17,000 and speakers require a second mortgage. Stereophile’s Stephen Mejias was himself spurred to think on the subject of tapes by a recent article by Calum Marsh in PopMatters, “Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture.” Critical as Marsh may be about this ferric oxide return, his very tackling of the subject admits one simple fact: a cassette revival indeed has occurred.

And who was there first? Uh huh, that would be the mediageek.

Aside from the fact of my first arrival, however, I’m rather ambivalent on the whole debate on whether or not the cassette revival is just crass indie-marketing sheathed in manufactured street-cred. For those with still serviceable cassette decks I guess it’s kind of nice to be able to get some new tunes that you didn’t have record yourself. At the same time, the reason I have working cassette decks is because I still have music on cassette not duplicated in another medium, and I still find albums on cassette that are expensive or nearly impossible to find in another medium. I guess these special cassette-only releases qualify, in a way, though by design, not happenstance.

It’s not like cassette-only labels are anything new. Labels like ROIR were cassette-only back in the 1980s, and many cassette-only labels have survived in the interim due to economics and ease of one-off duplication and distribution, if for no other reason. The only reason we can call it a trend now is that bands that otherwise have seen relative indie success distributing their music on CDs are turning to cassette labels for limited editions. If it was still mostly the domain of bedroom noise and industrial bands, we probably wouldn’t be reading about this trend in as mainstream a pub as Stereophile.

Now that indie rock collectors and other hip elites can snarf up limited tunes on cassette I’m wondering if we’ll start seeing more plastic fantastic decks show up in Target, and if the used market will inflate. If you’d taken my advice two years ago then you’d probably be sitting pretty on a nice deck that sold for hundreds in the 80s but that would’ve cost you $15. You’ll be spending more on a super-exclusive new tape by a bunch of bearded guys from Portland.

Now I’ll sit back and see if this hot new trend makes it all the way through 2010 and outlives being a trend, like the vinyl resurgence has. Meanwhile, I’ll remind you that my hipster trend-spotting consultancy is still in business, but my rates are going up fast.

Cassettes Are a Weird Way to Distribute Music?

My, oh my, where has the time gone. Sure, cassettes might be nearly obsolete and decidedly retro. But weird?

Wired’s Epicenter blog recently compiled “10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music.” But, really, the list might be more accurately characterized as “10 Unique Ways,” rather than weird. Seems that some popular indie bands like Dirty Projectors are now releasing some albums on cassette again, making the format #8 on Wired’s list. At least blogger Eliot Van Buskirk had the good taste of linking to my somewhat tongue-in-cheek 2007 post titled, “Next Big Retro Thing: The Cassette Revival.”

Of course, distributing new music on cassettes stands out only because the format’s been largely abandoned by the mainstream. I emphasize new music because I’ve certainly seen cheap cassette compilations of country classics and oldies still turn up at truck stops and dollar stores. Cassette-only labels were an underground music fixture in the 80s and 90s due to both the low cost of doing limited edition releases and the relative ubiquity of cassette players.

While mostly overtaken by CD-Rs and downloadable MP3s, cassette labels have survived. Plustapes is a Chicago-based label putting out new independent music on cassette each in limited editions of a hundred or so. Earlier this year the music blog Expressway to My Skull compiled a list of active cassette-only labels and places to find them.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of releasing music on cassette is that it’s possible to record and duplicate albums entirely in the analog domain easily and cheaply without a computer. If you want to get fancy you can find a cassette four-track at a thrift or pawn shop so you have more recording and editing flexibility. Then get a dubbing deck and you’re set. It doesn’t have to be about analog fetishism — it can simply be about being cheap.

Perhaps the enduring charm of the cassette has to do with its fundamental nature as a recording medium that is very accessible, but imposes real practical limits on its duplication. It’s easy for nearly anyone to duplicate several dozen cassettes using inexpensive dubbing decks, but quantities of much more than that require commercial duplicating services. Like ‘zines, cassettes can be a near-mass medium, where you can reach hundreds with a work that the creator still fashioned and touched with her own hands.

Now that we can take for granted the ability to reach a nearly unlimited audience with a perfectly-duplicable MP3 file, there’s something to be said for a sound medium that can’t be had by anyone with a ‘net connection, that didn’t roll off an assembly line. It doesn’t have to be a case of internet vs. cassette; I think there’s room for both to coexist, even in symbiosis.

Obsoletion Watch: Portable TVs

Analog full-power TV got a bit of a stay of execution this month, with Congress voting to delay the digital TV transition until June 12. The passage of the stimulus bill should loosen up some more money to fund DTV converter boxes to help more households avoid the loss of TV service. However, Bohus of RetroThing points out that there’s a class of sets that probably still will be left behind: portable TVs.

As Bohus points out in the video below, converter boxes are often much larger than the portable TVs themselves, and aren’t battery powered. Those are just a couple of reasons why portable TV watchers will be left will little more than home shopping networks and evangelical Christian low-power TV stations come June 12. Watch Bohus give a fun overview of the soon-to-be-obsolete sets:

On Tonight’s Radio Show: The Value of Retro & Vintage Technology

On tonight’s radioshow my guest with be Bohus Blahut, one of the bloggers behind the popular Retro Thing blog which tracks vintage gadgets and technology. It’s a site I’ve been reading for a couple of years not just because I have my own love for vintage tech, but because I think there’s value in holding on to, preserving and finding continual usefulness in the tools and gadgets which the mainstream consumer products industry would have us believe need to be tossed out and replaced.

Bohus lives in Chicago, so he’ll be live in the studio which gives us an opportunity to take some calls in the second half of the show. If you’re in the Chicago area, listen live at 9 PM CST on WNUR 89.3 FM, or tune in online (live stream). The studio line is 847-866-WNUR (9687). If you miss the live airing, catch it online at the radioshow website, or any of the show’s affiliate stations like WRFA, Jamestown, NY and WTND, Macomb, IL.

Rumors of VHS’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Oh, planned obsolescence, you are such an insistent mistress.

It seems like the end of the year news hole combined with the imminent digital TV transition (which does not necessarily mean the end of analog TV…) has sparked additional interest in the press ringing the funeral bells for that most ubiquitous yet unloved video medium, the VHS videocassette. The renewed attentiveness was triggered by a recent LA Times article about the last remaining supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes to retail stores. The discount supplier tells Times reporter Geoff Boucher,

Photo credit: the waving cat / flickr

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”

Boucher notes that the last major Hollywood release on VHS was 2006’s “The History of Violence.” However, that does not mean it’s the last VHS release, since there are certainly direct-to-video, corporate, promotional and independent releases still being churned out on videocassettes. And that’s just US market. What about VHS in less developed nations especially India and Latin America, where the push to new formats goes slower because there’s that much less disposible income?

I don’t have a beef with Boucher’s article so much as the second-order press and blogosphere reaction that seizes upon the “VHS is dead” meme rather than the more specific point that the production and distribution of pre-recorded VHS movies are ending. My problem is two-fold. First, I can’t help but think the minor panic-inducing tone of the overall reportage is timed and focused in order to help drive DVD and Blu-Ray sales, especially amongst the digital disc holdouts who up to now have been satisfied with their VHS collection.

Second, it’s overly simplistic to say that VHS is dead just because prerecorded tapes will become more scarce in 2009. One of the most disruptive aspects of home videocassette technology is the fact that it’s recordable; with a VHS VCR you don’t have to simply rely on a steady stream of commercially prerecorded content. I’m willing to bet that millions of VHS VCRs are still in service across the US doing just that — recording someone’s favorite movie on TV or timeshifting a favorite TV program.

Sure, millions of people have shifted to using DVD recorders or DVRs for that purpose, or are time-shifting by watching things online. But that population is still a small percentage of the whole, characterized by having the income necessary to afford these more expensive technologies, combined with the knowledge, interest and will to use them. VHS is dead for a certain class of people, but not the whole country.

Nevertheless, it is true, as one TV report said, that “VHS’ days appear numbered. ” But then, that’s been true pretty much since the first year of DVD, when that technology went on to set records for fast large-scale adoption. Even then the writing was on the wall, just as it is with nearly every single consumer electronics technology ever introduced. Do not doubt that from the time when the first VHS recorder rolled off the assembly line that the electronics giants didn’t have dozens of designs for its successor on the drawing board. It just took until 1997 for DVD to strike the right combination of size, convenience, image quality and price.

Obsolescence is not a natural process, but one planned right into the consumer economy. Now, I’m not arguing against innovations and the succession of technologies with better, more attractive qualities and greater utility. I certainly barely watch VHS tapes myself, and mostly rely on my DVR and on DVDs. So VHS is not a vibrant everyday technology in my household. Yet, that does not mean VHS is useless or dead.

Of course this is the sunset for VHS, but I question the rush to scare people into buying new technologies. Certainly, my recommendation to anyone who has VHS tapes that have irreplaceable stuff on them to consider copying them to DVD, whether it’s a home video or an out-of-print movie (you don’t even need your own DVD recorder — most chain drug stores in the US will do it for you). But that’s as much because of the inevitable slow degradation of magnetic media as it is the eventual death of VHS. I’d make the same recommendation if your precious memories are on DVD — though copying a rare commercially recorded disc will prove more difficult due to digital rights management.

Some justification for declaring VHS’ death rests upon the analog TV transition happening in February. And while it is true that your old VHS workhorse will not be able to record the new digital signals directly, it’s not counted out. The first reason why is that if you still have an analog TV and are using a cable converter box or one of the digital converter boxes for over-the-air broadcasts, then your VCR should still be able to record their digital output. Furthermore, even new digital TVs still have analog inputs for VCRs, DVD players, game consoles and the like, and will continue to have them for a long time. So getting a new flat-panel TV doesn’t mean you can’t still watch your VHS tapes.

Let’s remember that vinyl records and cassettes were declared dead in the early 90s when CDs finally became predominant. And yet, here we are in 2009 and we’re reading about the minor resurgence of vinyl, and you can still buy new books on tape. Sure, you’re not going to find the newest rock albums on new cassette, and new vinyl LPs are still made in tiny numbers compared to CDs. Yet that does not qualify a format as “dead.”

It’s arguable that the LP resurgence is driven both by nostalgia and a hardcore minority that has contended that vinyl sounds better and therefore stuck with the format through the CD era. Cassettes also have some nostalgic allure for many, especially when it comes to memories of mix tapes, while having a much tinier fanbase who cling to the format for its sheer fidelity. I think it’s too early to tell if there will be gathering nostalgia for the lowly VHS videotape in the same way. I’m not sure people have the same emotional attachments to recordings of TV shows and movies that they have for music… but that could just be me.

If you’re wanting to rent or buy the newest Hollywood movie releases then you’re going to need a DVD player — but then, just about anyone with that desire in the US already knows that and has made the appropriate decision. If you’ve still got a VHS VCR and are happily using it there’s no need to panic. Now might not be a bad time to pick up a spare VCR if you can afford it, nor is it a bad time to consider making DVD backups of anything that’s really valuable to you.

But make no mistake, there’s no indication that you won’t be able to buy a new VCR or blank VHS taps for quite some time to come. Unlike Polaroid film or other single-manufacturer technologies, VHS was licensed far and wide. As long as there’s a buck to be made making and selling recorders and tapes, they’ll be out there.

Like cassettes and vinyl records, VHS tapes and VCRs will continue to live alongside the technologies that are supposed to replace them. Going out of favor does not mean obsolete.

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Cheapskate Audiophile

As a geek videophile audiophile there’s the tendency for that interest to be conflict with my critical side that questions our modern consumerist capitalist economy. I believe that balance can be found, as long as one accepts that it’s nearly impossible to be entirely non-comsumerist without checking out of modern technological society altogether. Yet, it is possible to temper the consumerist side while still having enthusiasm for good audio and video and the aesthetics of sound and vision.

In particular, I think I’ve always been an audiophile. I’ve been obsessed with sound and music since I was a child, and I’ve always been interested in finding better, more pleasing, more realistic sound reproduction. While in high school in the mid-80s I bought my first component cassette deck, amplifier, CD player and turntable. All of this gear was decidedly “mid-fi” by audiophile standards, but still whet my appetite for sound that was significantly better than the boomboxes and discount-store compact stereos used by most of my peers.

While I’ve been willing to spend some amount of disposable income on audio gear, I’ve also been hestitant to lay down the kind of cash required to buy in to what is considered the “high-end” of audio gear. This is the world of $1000 CD players, $5000 turntables and $10,000 speakers. Certainly, the kind of craftsmanship and design excellence that goes into many of these products has real value. At the same time I think much of it is the audio equivalent of Ferraris and Lamborghinis — semi-impractical exotica meant to give the affluent something to spend their money on, while giving the less-affluent something to aspire to.

My experience in slogging around in the low-end of the high-end has proven to me that good sound does not have to be an exotic rare commodity only for the rich and golden-eared. In fact, very pleasing and accurate sound can be had for as the same or less money than it costs to buy a home-theater in a box system at Wal-Mart or Best Buy.

There are multiple paths to being a cheapskate audiophile, many of them DIY. The more industrious or crafty amongst us build some of their own gear, either from kits or from scratch. Others perform minor modifications on mass-market gear that results in sonic gains.

Possessing neither the skill nor patience to take these routes I instead keep my eyes and ears open for the bargains — gear that achieves unusually good results at an unusually low price-point. The ‘net is a real boon for all of us cheapskate audiophiles by giving us easy access to this sort of info that otherwise would come by word-of-mouth, technical books or low-circulation specialty magazines and newsletters.

To demonstrate I’ll show off my current cheapskate system which I use in my home office for music listening and audio production. The core cheapskate item in the system is the Sonic Impact T-Amp, which I’ve written about before. It’s a cheap, plastic $25 stereo amplifier based on a new digital amplifier design that rocked the audio world three years ago by producing sound more like an amp some 20x its price. The T-Amp is rated to produce 15 watts of power, and I think that’s probably stretching it. More likely, it delivers around 8 watts into most speakers. But they are still an incredibly clean, transparent 8 watts.
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Don’t Be Spooked by Threats of Obsolesence

One of the unfortunate effects of our capitalist economy is the constant drive for new and better. Well, really it’s mostly new and novel, with better being a secondary consideration. That means obsolescence is something that constantly looms over industrial products, especially tech products. But obsolete does not equate with useless or worthless–not remotely.

With the rising popularity of digitally downloaded music, whether through file sharing or an online store, the imminent death of the physical compact disc continues to be predicted. The cries have become louder in the last few weeks as Atlantic Records announced that its digital download sales (which includes ringtones) surpassed its sales of physical CDs.

I’ll admit that these days I probably listen to more MP3s than CDs, especially on the go. Yet, I still have a collection of over 1000 CDs, most of which I have not ripped to MP3–my MP3 collection is comprised mostly of purchased music and stuff I’ve traded with friends. I do still listen to CDs, especially when I want to listen critically. I realize that absolute fidelity is only one factor in how we choose to listen to music, it’s still important to me and many other people. While MP3s and other compressed files can sound quite good, they are no match for the uncompressed source.

That’s why I’m not surprised to read a Wired Gadget Lab post directing me to this story from the UK’s Telegraph reporting that the sales of portable CD players there are up 50 percent over last year. Amongst the reasons they cite are price ( I’ve seen units here sell for $15 or less) and the fact that many people find using a computer to download to an MP3 player to be difficult.

One very obvious reason I want to add to the list is that maybe a whole lot of people aren’t interested in giving up their CDs in the first place. If you aren’t interested in dealing with the iTunes music store (especially if you don’t want to pay the iPod price premium) or any other online music store, and you don’t relish the task of having to rip and compress your CDs yourself I can see how the supposed convenience offered by MP3 players and digital files can look pretty darn inconvenient.

Folks over 30 can probably remember when they got their first CD player, moving over from listening primarily to vinyl LPs or cassettes. I knew a lot of people who all but dumped their analog music collections for CDs in the early 90s, lured in by the promises of better sound quality and convenience. By and large those promises were fulfilled, compared to the lo- to mid-fi sound experiences most people were accustomed to getting from inexpensive cassette and record players. But it was also a pretty big cash outlay for a lot of people, many of whom replaced their music collections with the same titles on CD as the popular press sounded the funeral march for the soon-to-be-obsolete vinyl LP.

Now twenty-six years after the introduction of the CD we have none other than the New York Times writing about the resurgent interest in vinyl records, sales of which are up 36% this year. Weren’t these fragile, scratchable, pop-and-click-filled analog dinosaurs supposed to be a curious historical artifact by now?

Myself, I never abandoned my record collection. When I bought my first CD player in 1987 I also bought my first decent turntable. From 1988 through the mid-90s I really cleaned up buying used vinyl for a song as other music lovers dumped their obsolete analog archives. I still buy both used and new vinyl, though since the big purge of the early-90s the good stuff isn’t quite as cheap anymore.

I’m sure a fair majority of the folks who dumped their vinyl for CDs have never looked back. But I’ve talked to and read about plenty more people who are buying new turntables to play their last remaining albums that never turned up on CD, or who are even going out and rebuying LPs they got rid of because their CDs just don’t cut it.

So keep this in mind when you hear bloggers and the press declaring the end of the CD and all physical media. It makes complete sense to me that sales of portable CD players are up because I can believe there are plenty of people who just want something will play all the music they’ve acquired without all the hassle of ripping and storing MP3s. Why “upgrade” to MP3s and iPods if CDs still work just fine and you’ve already got an investment in music on CD?

Of course, I do think the trend towards digital files and mass storage is real and underway — I do have a couple hundred gigs of MP3s on a server at home. But these technologies tend to live side-by-side for far longer than the technorati recognize. The cassette didn’t kill the LP, the DVD still hasn’t killed VHS, and the iPod won’t kill the CD. Even formats often joked about as comparative failures lived almost as long as the CD has–from laserdiscs (in production 1978-1999) to 8-tracks (1964 – 1988)–and still have their fans using them everyday.

The newest and shiniest technology can be very seductive, but utility is what wins the day. For a lot of formats there eventually does come a day when finding a working player becomes harder and harder. But for something as ubiquitous as the LP, cassette or CD that moment is a long way away.

The folks snapping up CD players this holiday season aren’t technophobes or luddites, they’re just reasonable folks who maybe don’t want to foolishly abandon the shiny little discs they spent good money for.

When Underground Culture Was Hard(er) To Find

Filmmaker Danny Plotnick’s “Out of Print” is an absolutely brilliant and simple but effective short film about the somewhat lost pleasures of hunting down underground media, from cult films and bands, to underground literature and zines. By his own description, it’s “an ode to the counterculture of the 80s and 90s when unearthing quality culture was a real treasure hunt.”

I have fond memories of seeking out and encountering this stuff in the backs of magazines and zines, in the racks of independent book stores and at hole-in-the-wall record stores. It’s easy to romanticize those times when there was no such thing as a Google search, and it might take years to get your hands on a particularly rare piece of culture. It’s also easy to overestimate the availability of stuff nowadays. Still too many truly valuable cultural relics remain out of print, never having been transferred to digital, and possibly lost to all but a lucky few. Furthermore, just because an MP3 or video has been released onto the web now doesn’t mean that someone will necessarily take the time and effort to archive it for the future.

Nevertheless, times have changed, and a little nostalgia never hurt anyone. (via Stinkfight)

Making the Most of Limitation

One of the most continuously engaging and inspiring elements of DIY culture is the limitation. Of course, lots of creators would love to have millions of dollars to blow on equipment and 80 hours a week to dedicate to a project. But that’s not a reality for most people, and I think too much energy and time go into thinking, “Oh, I’ll finally be able to do this project when I have this thing and oodles of time to use it.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t projects and techniques that demand some baseline of investment, but in our money and productivity obsessed culture it’s far more prominent that these material concerns get in the way.

Lately I’ve really been enjoying the blog at OnSuper8.org, which is dedicated to filmmaking on small-format film, like 8mm and super8. Like a lot of media that people think is dead, 8mm film is still alive, and you can still get fresh new stock for it, too. OnSuper8 posts a lot of videos of films produced on 8 and I find them consistently more creative and engaging than 90% of what’s on the web. What I appreciate most is how the filmmakers make the most of the limitations of the format: it’s small physical size and limited resolution, the short length of reels and frequent lack of live sync-sound.

Right now OnSuper8 is posting a series of the best films from the Straight8 Festival, which features films that are shot on just one cartridge of super8 films, without any post-production edits. Any editing is done “in camera,” meaning that any switch between scenes occur because you stopped the camera and then restarted it. The resulting films are all three minutes long, because that’s how much film fits in a cartridge. The challenge is to use those three minutes wisely and not shoot tons of footage because you “can fix it in post.”

I’m really impressed by Nick Scott’s “The Other Half,” where Scott devised a custom matte box in order to block out half of the frame, leaving one half unexposed, and then running the film through the camera again to expose the other half. Since the super8 cartridge is only intended to be used once it took a little creativity and trial-and-error to pull it off. It’s like a lo-fi version of Timecode.

Scott also documented the formation of the technique and filming “The Other Half,” resulting in an exceptionally interesting “behind the scenes” video.

It’s true that these retro-tech movements can succumb to being more about fetish than utility and aesthetics. But anyone who’s ever read a digital audio, photo or video message board knows full well how much wankery is devoted to fetishizing multi-thousand dollar cameras, microphones and other gear that rarely get put into service to produce a damn thing.

Films like what OnSuper8.org is featuring more than make up for the other hipster-retro dreck.

Minidisc in Bizzarro World, or, It’s a Wonderful Format

CNET.uk has a feature on “Format wars: the tech that should have won,” sizing up some media and computer systems that lost out in the marketplace, despite their technical advantages. The article imagines a world where technologies like the 8-track and Betamax predominated, instead of cassettes and VHS. Two of my favorites–that I still use–are included, minidisc and laserdisc:

Laserdisc was light years ahead of its time, pre-dating even compact disc…. The picture quality was amazing for the time, offering 440 lines of picture information in PAL and 425 lines for NTSC. That made for a picture that was twice as good as VHS, and very nearly as good as DVD….

MiniDisc was fantastically versatile. You could buy pre-recorded music on the format or simply use your hi-fi to copy a CD to a blank disc. MiniDisc’s hard outer case meant the surface of the disc was far less likely to become scratched and damaged over time.

Aside from the obvious problem of having media and devices that aren’t supported anymore, sometimes locking away precious content forever, there’s a real unnecessary waste behind format wars, as landfills bulge with discarded tapes and computers. It’s good that there are some unique, resourceful souls who go out of their way to collect and preserve this lost tech, helping us both hold on to cultural legacies, but also keep useful items out of the waste stream.