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My son (21) just bought a Sony Walkman cassette player and he loves it

Neddy

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Well, very good for your son- all good point, esp the tactility of it all.
Wonder how many of 'us' would have used/tolerated dial phones (for those that had a choice) 10-20 yrs after touchtone came out!
Granted it just replaced the physicality of LPs with a (far) more portable variant.
I always hated the 'the gotta play in the sequence we determined' aspect of LPs, hence loved making mix tapes on cassettes.
Still have most of mine, plus some radio tapes and a bootleg of Charles Mingus.....and still need to order a belt repair kit for my 'last generation' Sony 3 head deck :)
 

Snoopy

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I see how Walkman's and vinyl might be interesting to the younger generation that grows up with YouTube, iPads, Spotify etc and has everything available all the time and basically everywhere.

If you so much stuff to choose from it might offer a sense of simplicity that they have never experienced before.

But I manage just fine to sit through whole album's while streaming them. I'm 36 this year but I did grow up with LPs (parents), casette tapes and VHS.. and I was big into collecting DVDs and blurays...

Honestly I don't miss Media that gets worse everytime I play it and requires maintenance and lots of physical storage space.

But I like the Sony Walkman daps that look like a old Walkman..or to display covers through roon . But that's as much of "connection" to a medium that I need
 

DMill

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I’m trying to think of anything positive to say about cassettes… I suppose if you had a deck with dual heads it was pretty easy to make your girl a mix tape with Journey ballads that you’d thought she’d like. Actually that might’ve worked for me once or twice. Thumbs up for cassettes. :)
 

Astrozombie

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Some bands recently had been releasing their new albums on cassette + vinyl + cd + streaming + Amazonmp3. I know in the US there was only 1 factory left making them a while ago, idk about now.
 

Midnight Audiophile

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I'm petty sure I got my first Walkman in high school in '84. First thing I popped in it was The Doors: Alive She Cried I remember I was blown away by "Gloria" and the sound quality. In '89-90 I was working for an ad agency while in art school and had the pleasure of working on this ad. We built the hats out of Sculpey:
s-l1600.jpg
 

Digby

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Much like 78s, there is a some fantastic and a lot of, at the very least, interesting music that only came out on this format.

A lot of new age music came out on cassette only and if you give the panpipes a swerve, there is some stuff that gives Tangerine Dream a run for its money in the ethereal synthy goodness stakes.
 
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LightninBoy

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I’m trying to think of anything positive to say about cassettes… I suppose if you had a deck with dual heads it was pretty easy to make your girl a mix tape with Journey ballads that you’d thought she’d like. Actually that might’ve worked for me once or twice. Thumbs up for cassettes. :)
That is literally the exact same thought that went through my head when he told me about his walkman. First - "What is the point?" then "Remember those mix tapes you made for the girls?"
 
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LightninBoy

LightninBoy

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Some bands recently had been releasing their new albums on cassette + vinyl + cd + streaming + Amazonmp3. I know in the US there was only 1 factory left making them a while ago, idk about now.

Some years back bands were distributing demos via cassettes. My son bought a demo cassette of a popular black metal band (as popular as black metal can be anyways).
 

Digby

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Some years back bands were distributing demos via cassettes. My son bought a demo cassette of a popular black metal band (as popular as black metal can be anyways).
I remember this starting around the early 2000s. I think the original intention was to make it more difficult to end up on p2p file sharing programs (remember those, another blast from the past!).
 
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