14 DAY TRIAL // No, it's not a versus: it's a time-travel! If you're more than 25, then you're in! I mean you're old enough to have been infected with the tape mania back in your teens and thus know what I am speaking about. 30-minute and 60-minute, 90 and even 120-minute tapes resided on our bookshelves and inside our home libraries. Filling up the drawers and building a shrine by themselves, the tapes came in right after the reel to reel mania cooled down a bit.
Vinyls existed then as they do exist now and as I guess they will still exist years after we're dead, yet tapes were something new and very cool, especially as the walkman ruled supreme and was offering mobility to those music lovers who until then had to either stay at home or carry a boombox with them.
Now, don't you go thinking that tapes have been completely forgotten, because it is obvious that they have not (and I detain proof for these words). Still people are selling and buying cassette players and decks and recently, some one month ago, an MP3 , USB device was launched in a boombox-like shape and it had a cassette unit in it - and proof better than this that people are still into cassettes I guess it's hard to gather up.
In a century so loaded with almost extreme technology it could be rather hard to believe that people could still be listening to tapes. Myself I guess I listen to some of the hundreds of tapes I used to own and which by some miracle are still in place.
For those younger ones, let's say some 10-15 yo, I am sure that tapes look like a very strange and even hilarious contraption: "why tapes when there are 4GB thumbdrives?"
I can almost hear them ask... well, far from me the idea of sounding like an old man mumbling about something in the past - yet I guess that those who still have tapes and cassette decks could actually tell their children/nephews about that age.
Funny thing that back then almost no one was concerned about piracy and tapes roamed freely in various conditions and many of the artists who today are "well-known" have become so just because we used to listen again and again to the same cassette, same side or even recorded our fav song on the whole tape...
Finally, I must thank those behind tapedeck.org for the really nice job they're doing. Nothing fancy, just a database with pictures of more than 130 cassettes, a very beautiful reminder of the past days. And no, they weren't 7.1 nor was their sound THX-certified or surround!
