Is there a cassette revival going on?

If you’re of a certain age, recording to cassette tape was probably one of your first experiences of music technology. This may have involved holding a radio against the mic of your tape deck to capture the sounds of the Top 40 (cursing the DJ for talking over the song as you did so), or recording your school band on a four-track machine.

As with a lot of recording mediums, the cassette appeared to have died a death, but it does seem that there might be some life in the old spool-based dog yet. A couple of recent plugins have been designed to give you some of that lo-fi magic in your DAW: Fuse Audio Labs’ TCS-68 ($59), for example, emulates the preamp, tape system and three-band EQ from an old eight-track machine that was released in 1990. There’s also Klevgrand’s DAW Cassette ($40), a plugin deck that can be used to introduce saturation, distortion, noise and wobble, and lets you choose from metal, chrome and normal tape material options. You can also reduce the tape, head and motor quality, while cassette fetishists will be pleased to learn that there’s even a Dolby Switch with A and K weightings to choose from.

Of course, if you have a real cassette deck kicking around, there’s nothing to stop you from recording your DAW’s output into this and then sending it back into the digital domain. This will certainly degrade the sound, although the end result might not be altogether desirable. It’s certainly not unheard of for people to do this, though.

Having said all that – and despite the fact that, to many people’s surprise, Tascam actually released a new $500 pro-level cassette deck recently in the form of the 202mkVII – we can’t say that a mainstream cassette revival is on the cards. Vinyl might be back, but the advantages of the cassette are few and far between, and it was never a particularly desirable or collectible format. That said, we’re glad it’s still floating around in the background, if only for nostalgia’s sake.