Magnetic Lazarus, or “How I Learned to Love Cassette Tapes”

While I’m just 23 and this concern was more apt in my dad’s generation, there is no denying that, like the vinyl resurgence of recent years, the Compact Cassette is making a comeback. I picture an odd, possibly slightly backward group of individuals (like me) who are spearheading this retrograde revival. Lazarus laid the framework… Vinyl and Cassettes just followed his example.

Being born in 2001, I am technically a younger sibling to most modern media formats, squeezed out between Big Brother DVD and Little Sister Blu-Ray. It took the collective psychic brainpower of the entire Bay Area reviving the vinyl record, and then another year for my dad to get over the inexplicable nature of this revival before I ever set eyes on a 12-inch petroleum- based platter. Then, by the time I had developed any sort of musical sensibility or taste – the two- bit, black-market audio-sharing websites like Napster and LimeWire were long dead, and legal streaming was the norm. Physical media, to my peers, was a thing of the past; a novelty at best or an inconvenience at worst. Many of those I went to High School with have never been able to properly rid themselves of this notion. Neither have I, for that matter. I still flick on Spotify for convenience nearly ninety percent of the time… but the “inconvenience” of physical media is almost a kind of magic to me. Consider that this music format which was the height of convenience in my dad’s generation, is the furthest thing from it in mine. Maybe that notion is where some of that so-called magic for me stems from. I admit there’s no reason for it to be that way… but people joke about me being a sixty-five-year-old in a twenty-three-year-old’s body, and I’m just starting to believe them.

All of this is to say that I still find charm in the cassette tape. Not only do I love the process of recording a mix onto them, laying together a more rigid ledger than any digital playlist will allow; but I also find great sadistic pleasure in weaving scattershot comedic sound samples into the tapes to break things up (my latest gag: “Daisy” by Brand New finishes playing, followed by seconds of silence and then Sir Patrick Stewart asking “er… I am circumcised, right?”). All this adds a certain twisted level of panache that I love to exploit. Additionally, many of the bands that I enjoy – particularly the Black Metal / Old School Death Metal variety – love to issue their releases on cassette. Some even go to extreme lengths to recreate the authenticity of true-blue old 1980s bootleg recordings and, in some cases, even home-dubbing their releases onto Maxells or RTMs or TDKs or whatever old blank tapes they find in grandma’s basement. The cling wrap melted together from years of sitting on that shelf after Auntie Jeanne bought Granny a CD player/radio.

The crown jewel of my cassette tape collection is an official music release, drenched in real dried human blood. I don’t play it too often, it flakes off and crusts up the tape heads. Seriously.

For several years, after I upgraded from the old sound system that my dad had lent me (a Denon all-in-one bookshelf system) to a shiny new NAD D3045 integrated amp with a NAD turntable and some ELAC bookshelf speakers with matching subwoofer, my tape listening and recording habits were limited to my dad’s old Walkman (a Sony Walkman Professional) that I had wired into the back of the amp (well, he helped me do it). My cassette consumption and recording began to drop off since the process became more of an elaborate song-and-dance than I cared for. Now, here I sit, writing these words directly across from a TEAC W-1200 Dual-Cassette Deck, minding the retrospective frustration I carried with me when I tried to get that damned Walkman to make noise through my rig, to get it to record, to figure out which of the wires in that arcane tangle was the magic one that I needed to reconnect… POOF! All a figment of the past. This machine is what I needed the whole time.

This thing is beefy. And not in any sense relating to its size or weight – it’s more of a beefy presence. The sort of presence you imagine a real quality cassette player to have. There’s something that happens when you interact with it – maybe it’s just the magic of having a deck – but the soft-closing windowed cassette ports, the satisfying tactile “klik-klak” when you press the power button, the crispness of hitting play or stop, hearing the mechanical parts “chik-whshass” into life and start whirring, spinning those little tape spools, then the music sears forth in that way. That particular tone that only the specific arrangement of magnetic forces can replicate… I can honestly say that the first thing I remembered about owning a cassette deck was how much I missed it.

For a point of reference, the decks I have interacted with in the past include:

– The Dual cassette deck in the Denon all-in-one system.
– The stock cassette deck in my dad’s 1992 Acura Vigor, which I affectionately named “Leroy” (the car, not the cassette deck).
– My dad’s Sony Walkman Professional that I considered a “deck” if only that it had play/record functions and essentially supplanted the old rig.
– This very new TEAC W-1200.

When it comes to stacking up against this menacing rogue’s gallery of audio appliances, I happily seat the TEAC at the top. Granted, it’s been many years since I have rolled something on that first system, so while I’m sure it has a similar caliber of performance as the TEAC, it is many years more antiquated. This is something that is very clear even in retrospect, when I look back at the many years that I had the Denon all-in-one setup towering over the left side of my computer desk. At the end of the day, it was a combination piece that had a 3-disc CD player and other accouterments… the TEAC is a dedicated piece, with no focus on any other tomfoolery, and that focus pays dividends when it comes to performance.

Then, in comparison to the Vigor’s hardware, the TEAC is a blowout. With the Acura, in particular, there was a giant gulf between the quality of home-recorded tapes and those that had been dubbed by a record label. Anything that wasn’t home taped sounded like hot ass. Anything I had made myself sounded passable, accounting for the 1:1 recording times… playing out every song as opposed to quicker dubbing seemed to yield better results… but at the time I was only recording cassettes so I could get around the car’s lack of an AUX cable. I soon graduated to one of those horrible cheap cassette/AUX adapters… but that’s another story.

Lastly, I wouldn’t deign to deride the Walkman, such a staple of culture… but I never actually walked with the damn thing. In full honesty, getting the Walkman to cooperate with my listening rig wasn’t beyond my technical reach… but far, far, far beyond my patience. It soon returned to my father’s hands, where he could finally put that suede carry case back on it.

Now before some of you out there start chiming in with the notion that I could have purchased some classic (hopefully restored) higher-end cassette deck off eBay with three heads, the various flavors of Dolby noise reduction, and all that, my dad advised me against it. According to him, while some of those old decks are tempting, they are hard to repair, parts are scarce and, Dolby doesn’t make the noise reduction chips anymore. For the asking price on many of the better units (largely out of my budget), I’d essentially be playing Russian Roulette. While maybe not the same as some of those “heyday” decks, the new TEAC would be more reliable and serve me well. Can’t exactly argue with that.

The point of all these anecdotes is to illustrate that getting my hands on the TEAC had all the sensations and nuances (after all sorts of foibles and variances with past hardware) of interacting with a proper machine. Something that represented the complete article – wholly dedicated to the scrolls of black plastic that had been collecting dust on a shelf for far too long. It reminded me of a moment in my day job – after two horrifying years had passed during which I toiled with a tattoo machine that was poorly maintained by my own hand, the poor rust-colored “doorbell” struggling to cope with the daily work I subjected it to. I had reached a breaking point with my “Hater” liner and set forth to purchase a tattoo machine from the legendary Aaron Cain… which was worth every penny, its weight in gold, weight in salt, weight in whatever mineral or otherwise quantifying value that could be ascertained. To me, laying my paws on the TEAC W-1200 represents that same transition, however you may entertain it. From Mass-produced to Master-craftsman; from the Small Fry to the Big Leagues; from Freak to Mighty; from some sort of lesser form to a greater, more superlative, complete, satisfactory conclusion- Use your imagination. I’m running out of metaphors, and the tape is starting to draw to a close. I want to set my fingers still before the satisfying “kla-chik” of the end of the plastic spool being pulled taut, the machine remembering that it’s time to come to a close and leave it to the human to flip the cassette over. Keep the noise going, high volumes. Jack the subwoofer back in – I had to unplug it (freeing up a set of outputs) to record all the tracks for my mix, and it feels damn good once the low end is back in play for listening. This computer keyboard is much too loud to allow for any such sonic pleasantries, abominable “klik-klaks” that leave no breathing room… the welcome tactile feedback has its own time and place when the words are flowing, and the conscious mind takes a back seat to let the fingers run rampant on those glowing green buttons. All of that ruckus is for another time. For now, I need to let the Glowing Letters be quiet and let the Great Magnet of the TEAC do the talking…

“Home Taping is Killing Music” my ass.