Hey Curbsiders of all ages – I have a question for you: Do you still play tapes in your car?
I’m about as old as you can be and still be a Millennial. I had a Speak and Spell as a kid, bought tapes in the mid-90s as an early teen, and inherited my parents’ record collection when I was about 16 or 17.
E.T. Phone Home!
Call me a nostalgic (I know there are several of us here – I’m looking at you, Joseph Dennis ;)) but I have always carried a torch for music from before my time and for old technology that harkens back to simpler times. An older Boomer buddy laughed at my record collection the other day (I have about 250 records), remarking that I was his only friend who still had records. But records are collectable! And valuable! Tapes, fragile, and very flawed in terms of sound quality and fidelity, have not been collectable in the past. But the times, they are a-changing!
Would you believe me if I told you that Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” on tape would net you $20 on eBay, which is probably as much as the vinyl would cost?
Lookit, I was an early adopter of the iPod, and I’m guilty of stealing all kinds of digital music during the golden age of piracy (circa 1999-2008). But even if the quality is subpar, nothing but tapes are going to do for my 1981 VW Westfalia. A CD player would be bogus. And one of those faux-retro MP3/Bluetooth single DIN units? Don’t make me ralph, man.
I still rock the tape suitcase that my mom had in the trunk of her Broughamtastic 1986 Cutlass Supreme. Mom stopped listening to tapes 25 years ago, and hers are long gone. And a good number of my own tapes have sat in hibernation in my parents’ attic for 20 years before being claimed again recently.
My actual tape collection in Mom’s vintage tape suitcase!
Some of you are going to give me guff for this, but I’ve been through five cassette decks in the last year. Three were purchased only for me to find that they were fundamentally incompatible.
The VW decks from Clarion require a Monsoon preamp.
The Blaupunkt bit the dust after I took it apart and tried to solder in a new motor.
The Panasonic kept auto reversing cassettes into oblivion (when it wasn’t straight-up eating them).
Are you old enough to remember the once common sight of a broken tape along the roadside, spewing its guts into the breeze and arching out like the bulge of a sail?
Recently, a buddy gave me a new cache of tapes to listen to. He recorded these in the ’80s from records he borrowed off of friends. You can hear the vinyl surface noise on the recordings, but the tapes sound great. As I type this, I’m listening to Hendrix’s “Rainbow Bridge” in Dolby C, dubbed by my old buddy on 7/12/87. That was a long time ago! But hearing it now, sitting in my van with a beer, is a time warp back to simpler times that I can still foggily remember.
I had a Fisher Price tape player in ’87 that I used to play the tapes that were in my collection, some of which still survive to this day. I’m an old soul, and always have been; and it’s got to be tapes in my Curbside Classic!
What about you? Are you still rocking your old tapes?
No, I havent seen a tape player that worked in a car in a very long time the 97 Sentra I bought and flicked a couple of years ago had a cassette player but Ive go no tapes either I gave the buyer of it a Kenwood CD player to install I pulled that from a previous flick Sentra and hadnt used it yet.
The only one I have left
I still have a ridiculous number of tapes that are played mostly in the house. The only car in my fleet that still has a cassette player is my 2002 Chrysler Concorde Lxi. It has a factory CD/cassette/AM-FM radio. The CD player isn’t acknowledging CD’s but the tape player is still going strong. My two classics have a Pioneer AM-FM/CD/USB which is used mainly for playing music on USB flash drives and the occasional CD. I laughingly refer to the flash drives as “micro 8 track tapes”.
When I still had my ’96 Ford Aerostar I did play the “Soul Train” tape (lower left) I found already in the cassette player once or twice, as well as one with recordings from The Monkees my mom still has (lower right). Most of the other cassettes my family owns have Christmas or other holiday songs on them–“Traditional Christmas” (top left) and “On the First Day of Christmas” by CBS Records (top right) being just 2 of them.
My ’05 Chevy Astro only has a CD player although some models have players for cassettes AND CDs. The CD player still works & I’ve used it once or twice also.
My 2011 Ranger has neither (just the basic am/fm radio) but 99% of the time that’s all I need for music on road anyway.
We also have several LPs and can play them along with our cassettes & CDs on this Digisonic Radio & Combination LP/Cassette/CD Player (in order from top to bottom). EVERYTHING on it still works, even the CD Player remote!
My 96 Roadmaster has its original tape/CD deck and it works. I have a number of old tapes which I occasionally will tap into when the mood strikes. I never bought many tapes back in the 80’s. I would usually buy the vinyl and record it onto tape for listening in the car. I’m glad I did it that way now, since the records are better to have today. I switched to CD’s in the early 90’s and have yet to buy into the whole file download thing. I like to have something physical when I spend money on music.
All Hail the mighty Redbook CD! Finest mass-market music medium ever developed. (Theoretically, SACD and DVD-A and whatever “high-rez” format is currently being ignored are “better”; but 1) they were never really mass-market; and 2) they were no “great leap forward” in the way CD was from cassette, and could be from vinyl if the CD was mastered properly.)
Yeah, I’ve got cassettes and cassette players; but I haven’t actually put a cassette into a player in…years. Maybe over a decade. The home cassette players aren’t even connected to a music system. Gonna have to change that, someday, and “rediscover” some old music. Thanks for the push.
My automotive cassette players get a cassette-looking adapter crammed into them, and then a portable CD player connected via the headphone jack. I sometimes (rarely) listen to music on the highway. Never in-town; music is too important to be background noise.
I have AM/FM/Cassette radios in three of my old vehicles, as well as several portable cassette players, and a dual recorder player for my stereo system. I replaced the OEM AM/FM/Cassette/EQ radio in my DD S-10 with an OEM CD player. As an amateur DJ, I always dubbed cassettes from my extensive vinyl collection, never bought pre-recorded ones. I also have a CD player/recorder which I use to digitize vinyl and cassette collections. I primarily play CD’s nowadays. BTW: I also have a pristine Sony cassette Walkman, AND a Sony digital Walkman that I somehow have never gotten around to uploading music into!! 🙂
Last experience with cassettes was the day I moved out after my divorce. I set up my ex’s car with a CD to cassette adapter from the cassette case, because she hadn’t been able to make it work during the separation.
Hell Yeah!
I still have cassette units in some of my vehicles. If they die, I’ll just have to find a replacement cassette unit, or at least one with an aux input, like the Sony CD-radio in my ’96 Tacoma. With that, I can play a cassette walkman, portable CD, MP3, I-Pod, or just about any device that has a headphone jack.
Plus, with my old Sharp Dolby cassette deck, I can make mix tapes, from online and most any other source, without worrying about copy-guard, download glitches, incompatible CD burns etc…. My old Sharp records it all!
I am testing out another format – an analog-compatible SD-card audio recorder I found cheap on Ebay. Main flaw is it’s weak output when played through amplified computer-speakers. But my Tacoma’s Sony has much better amps. So maybe I could transfer a whole bunch of my cassettes on to one SD. We’ll see.
Happy Motoring, Mark
Yup a stereo 8-track in my 1976 Cadillac – hoping to use whatever the hell this is to play tunes from my iPhone……I have a collection of several hundred 8 tracks (including 40-50 quad tapes)
My son still plays cassettes in his 2003 Buick which has a combination CD/Cassette deck and mostly old ones from my collection, My 2002 F-150 only had a CD from the factory and the replacement single DIN unit I had on the shelf is also CD only. Interestingly my old 900Mhz motorcycle radios have an aux jack for a Walkman, and I have heard of people using the aux jack on modern stereos to play old cassettes.
Maybe *this* is the reason I’ve saved most of my cassettes: for the day I purchase a CC of my own and can play those tapes in my car. I like that thought. Dolby Noise Reduction, all the way.
But of course 🙂 I actually have 3 shoe boxes full of 8 Track tapes for the Cadillac, as well my original Cadillac tapes from ’74 ’75 & ’76 obtained back then as a child, that used to come with your new car on delivery.
Although a while back last year, this was my latest addition (and the CB still works too! –>>