In Thursday’s (10/20) Wall Street Journal, Lauren Rudser writes, “Luke Thordarson is an audiophile with a houseful of fancy amplifiers and speakers, but he has been hunting for one special piece of technology to complete his setup. He found it on a blue tarp at the flea market here one Sunday recently. … Nestled between a car rim and some used blenders: a Technics RS-616 cassette deck. … Mr. Thordarson, a professional DJ, is part of a small group of cassette-tape connoisseurs, a fringe of audiophiles who find the tape’s flat tones and fuzzy hiss to be a comforting throwback. Most music lovers have abandoned cassettes. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is removing the term ‘cassette player’ from its Concise dictionary. Sony says it stopped shipments of its Walkman cassette player in Japan earlier this year. But cassette devotees say that tapes are underappreciated. They see cassettes following in the shadows of their analog brethren, vinyl records, which are currently enjoying a renaissance. … U.S. music-cassette sales are up about 50% to 23,000 albums so far this year, compared with the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But that statistic doesn’t include all private tape production or sales of blank and used tapes.”
Posted October 21, 2011
