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The long slow death of cassette players
Cassette player 1:
This was (technically still is) my parents cassette player. It's part of a small stack system bought in the late 70s / early 80s that has a turntable on top and a CD player below. I sequestered it around 2003/4 and have had it in my room since 2005/6. The turntable, CD player and radio still work perfectly - only the drive belt for the turntable has needed replacing (this year) - but the cassette player died a couple of years ago and emits a constant sharp tone from one of the speakers.
Cassette player 2:
An old birthday present of mine. Probably from 1992/3 - I still have copies of 'History' by Michael Jackson, 'Things can only get better' by D:ream and 'Come on you reds' by Man Utd - and had been working perfectly until a month ago. Now it has started to regularly chew tapes. It often needed a bit of a warm up, by pressing play for 5 seconds with no tape in, but that no longer works and it has been going mid-tape. This is the player used for most tape rips on this blog.
Cassette player 3:
Best looking tape player I own but God knows when this was retired. It used to belong to my Grandad and was only recently uncovered. It has a record function and a pretty decent radio - now set to Radio 5 live for the football. Sadly, it will reach its end in 2012 when this country (for invalid reasons, in my opinion) will scrap analogue radio for digital. The rewind function no longer works with a tape in - although a flip and a fast forward does the same job - and the play warbles.
Cassette player 4:
A.k.a. 'The last hope'. Not sure how old this is. I'd guess it was bought for long car journeys to the south of France and Italy we developed a yearly habit of making in the mid-late 90s. It would be fair to say it was superseded by a discman after a couple of years whatever the case. It's the only one I own that still works perfectly on a regular basis.
You're probably now thinking to yourself, 'who cares?', or, 'so?', and you're probably quite right to do so. I guess I'm just wondering about the future of formats in general because once the last of these tape players goes I'm unlikely to buy a new one. Maybe I'll cave eventually but I don't think I love the format enough to bother. It's a shame because I love the music contained on a lot of them.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the future of cassettes?
Do you also just buy them for the music or would you pick it over other formats?
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Hoping to have the next post up on Saturday with all the usual updates.
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