Retro Yakking

It’s a great pity that mainstream production of music cassettes ceased many years ago. I say this not because I think that humble mini-reel of magnetic tape could possibly offer a higher quality output than your typical CD-R, but because to me, it defines ‘music’.

I may have been a child growing up in the nineties when the CD player was king, but you have to remember that my family were absolute cheapskates relatively poor and could not afford the latest in state-of-the-art technology for me to play CDs. I’ve always been a bit behind the times like that.

Nevertheless, I developed an affection for cassette tapes which has stayed with me well into the noughties and whatever follows after that (tenties?). I will now attempt to explain why it is a far superior medium to the CD, at least in my eyes.

Why cassettes mash CDs into a fibreglass pulp

1. They aren’t delicate little flowers. Why do you have to hold CDs in that awkward way so as not to get thumbprints on the surface? The most important bits should be protected like on a cassette, where it’s very difficult to even access the magnetic tape by accident. What’s more, it’s fun to absolutely jam a cassette into your player and slam the tape door shut - now that’s a suitable prelude to the musical goodness you are about to embrace, not the tentative, automatic shutting CD trays you get today.

2. They can be manually rewound. An awesome thing about tapes is that you can cue them up to a certain point with a pencil, screwdriver or similar blunt implement. With a CD, you have to put it in your player and use the track skip, but even that doesn’t always get you to the exact spot you wanted. Winding cassettes by hand gives you a sense of achievement, and can be a fun activity in itself. No such frivolity with the boring CD - what a rip.

3. You don’t need a special pen to write on them. With tapes, you always get a neat little array of stickers to customise and label them to your heart’s content. CDs have no such luxuries - you have to buy so-called ‘accessories’ separately, at the stationery shop no less. What’s more, you have to fork out cash for a specific CD marker pen so you can label your discs without interfering with the magnetic alignment and stuff. Madness!

4. You can override the write protection. Now, I’m not exactly sure if you can do this with CDs, and to be honest I haven’t ever tried; I never felt compelled to record over my copy of The Verve’s A Northern Soul, however I presume your typical music CD is not rewriteable. Compare this with the cassette, which can be taped over (almost literally) with a bit of DIY tinkery - by simply taking some masking tape and covering the little holes at the top, you could annoy your parents no end by taping over their favourite albums! Brilliant.

5. They are the last of the double-sided media. I don’t know about you, but even though turning a tape over mid-way through an album could be chore, it was almost like having a whole other tape. Sure it was annoying when you got your As and Bs mixed up and rewound the wrong side, but artists actually used to make and pace their albums so they were in two parts, essentially two smaller albums for the price of one. With the CD, it was one long, continuous experience with a cracking start and a belting finish, but with a huge seven-track lull in the middle that for some reason musicians failed to address.

There’s also the little ‘please turn tape over’ messages you got right at the end of side A, perhaps followed by a pleasant little jingle before the inevitable hiss ending in a resounding clunk. Wonderful stuff.

• See also: Five reasons why VHS cassettes are better than DVDs

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