Media: Quality Vs. Convenience

Long-time friend and contributor Daniel Dern noted an NPR item about cassette tapes that mentioned sales quadrupled last year. If you’d asked me before I read the item, I’d have told you there were no more cassettes. But if you’d asked me five years ago about a resurgence of vinyl, I’d have laughed in your face. Who would want skips, surface noise and degradation with every play? Answer: apparently, a bunch of young people who have no idea what they’re in store for. Give me a CD.

As an audio guy, of course, I think cassette tapes are an abomination. The quality of audio on a tape is directly proportional to the width, and the speed. Broadcast quality was defined as 7 1/2 ips on quarter inch tape, so 1 7/8 ips on a .15 tape didn’t fill the bill for me; just for everybody else in the non-pro audio universe.

And Betamax should have beaten the vastly inferior VHS, while Laserdisc should have beaten them both, HiDef before its time.