Vinyl records made a comeback in the past couple of decades, so it’s not entirely a complete surprise that cassette tapes are back in as well. There are several factors that have conspired to bring this sixty year old technology back from the dead. Numero uno is probably the pandemic. Musicians of all stripes have had to cancel live performances for the last couple of years, but still needed a vehicle to promote their new material. Pressing CDs is expensive because you have to make and sell a ton of them in order to be cost effective. Only big names with deep pockets and a large fan base can afford that. To a lesser extent, that holds true with vinyl, too. Cassette tapes, on the other hand, are still a dirt cheap avenue to release music, thus extremely popular with small labels and independent bands.
Nostalgia appears to be another reason for the cassette comeback… well, sorta, except the small tape format is most popular right now with music lovers under 35 years old (so they say). That’s odd, from the nostalgic angle, since CD’s started replacing cassettes 40 years ago. Apparently, though, analog sound reproduction is an highly prized quality, one which cassettes and vinyl can deliver, while digital formats cannot. In short, CDs, streaming audio, and digital copies don’t have the range to authentically reproduce the sound of a live band, due to compression techniques used in making digital recordings.
At the center of the cassette tape revival is a company that has been in the tape biz since 1969. National Audio Company, based in Springfield, Missouri, started out distributing reel-to-reel tape, gradually becoming a giant in cassette tapes in the 1970s before CDs began to take hold in the early 1980s. When the last of the tape manufacturers shutdown their operations, National Audio purchased and refurbished used equipment to make their own. Today, they’re the largest audio tape manufacturer in the world and the only one in the U.S. Tours of their facilities are available. Or, if travel isn’t on your itinerary, check out the many YouTube videos found under “National Audio Company cassette”, like this one:
“The Last Audio Cassette Factory” (3:50)
