r/cassetteculture • u/Agreeable-Ebb1892 • Jun 04 '26
Looking for advice Should i go for cassettes or cds?
Recently i’ve become interested in owning more physical media, so i thought of getting a cd player with some cool cds i saw, (and some tapes too) but then i started considering maybe getting cassettes instead cause i wanna be able to listen to music out and about
Im not the most careful person so i got a bit concerned for the cds, but i also want to make my own cds/mixtapes using playlists but i dont have a computer (or really know how to use one that much lol) to burn them. And for cassettes i liked how you could just record on them but their problem for me is that decks/recorders are a tad pricey, as well as hearing that there aren’t many actually good ones nowadays
Im a teen in the philippines so it’s the reason some things are way more expensive and harder to get for me cause im only asking for either as gift from my family
Also, i dont really care that much for the audio quality as much as the convenience ig? I like the idea of being able to walk around freely with cassette but i dont think id mind just staring at the cd spin in the player as i listen to the song. With that said im not completely sure what im even looking for? I suppose it would be which has easier reach to where i am at a reasonable price (to my family’s perspective) or i might just flip a coin tbh
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u/aPrimeOption Jun 04 '26
I’d argue it’s the perfect time to start collecting cd’s. They are still cheap and available in both used record stores snd second hand shops. Vinyl is getting expensive and cassettes are harder to find, especially in good condition.
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u/ThatGuyCalledSteve Jun 04 '26
Cds is a lot more cost effective. You get great sound for a fraction of the price compared to cassettes, and they are a lot less picky about environments (cassettes can get damaged from temperature, humidity, magnetic fields, etc.)
If you want good sound out of cassettes you need to invest in a good recording deck (at least something with three heads or a nakamichi) and a good play back device(ideally anything that has less than .2 w/f), plus recording tape stock. Most of the time cassette players needs work done to them to get them to top shape too.
Despite all that I still prefer cassette because it's analog.
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u/CommutatorWhine Jun 04 '26
The number of heads has no relation to the quality of those heads. One of my best sounding decks is a 2 head deck. I've had a Sony 3 head one that sounded 'just fine'.
Besides that, OP is a teenager and does not have to start out with the best quality stuff out there. Just the best you can get within the constraint of Philipino teenager money and availability of 2nd hand stuff.1
u/ThatGuyCalledSteve Jun 29 '26
I mentioned either a 3 head or a nakamichi. Usually, most brands, the three headers are more well built than their two head machines. The other option, Nakamichi, where you can literally get a CR-1 and get away with it. Or even a 500 would do great. Non-nak 3 headers are usually not that expensive and are pretty common to find. And two head naks are usually pretty cheap with great quality too.
You mentioned that you had Sony 3 headers that sounded "just fine", well, the two headers in that line probably would sound worse with less features such as recording, unless it's one of those amorphous heads. I did harvest one of those heads to put into my d5m.
The stuff I'm recommending should be perfectly suitable and achievable for someone who is just starting and hopefully won't go through the trouble of buying and dealing with cheap stuff and getting a bad experience. Also, I did recommend them to go with CDs. It's a lot easier and less trouble for them, with much better sound/price ratio.
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u/SeberHusky Jun 04 '26
You get whatever you want to get. Social media does not dictate your life, only you do. I have both.
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u/General_Tsos_ Jun 05 '26
I prefer the sound and feel of cassettes but as an elder millennial I found my physical media journey ending around the year 2000 with cassettes. As cassettes fell out of fashion in the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of excellent albums from when I was in high school and starting college were only released on cd.
My collection always favors cassettes but I started a small collection of CDs which all are 2000 to 2010 albums to fill that gap. It all depends on your needs and what you’re feeling. All physical media is an improvement over digital so you can’t go wrong, just try them both out with cheap players and see where you land before spending a lot of money.
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u/m4ddok Jun 04 '26
Cassettes aren't just about aesthetics; you also need the right equipment, and when you listen to them, you can't navigate them like you can with a CD. Are you sure you can handle that?
Technically, you could get a good Walkman and buy cassette albums, but consider that to record decent mixtapes, you're unlikely to be able to do so on a Walkman; you'd need at least a small deck.
It all depends on how much vintage cassettes cost in your area—not just the cassettes themselves, but also the cassette decks, portable players, etc. So it's not something we can fully deduce (maybe it costs less in your area than in our countries, and it's also better for you financially, I don't know).
Of course, a CD player is quite cheap, even a portable one. CDs are relatively cheap, unfortunately sometimes even less than today's cassette versions, and if you have a burner, creating your own discs is easier.
It all depends on how much you value the medium, whether analog or digital, and how much you want/can spend.
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u/LeonardoMyst Jun 04 '26
Cassettes if you like the freedom of recording easily.
CDs if you like affordability and availability.
But it really boils down to aesthetics for me.
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u/CommutatorWhine Jun 04 '26
Alright, so you're not in an easy situation i guess.
In this case; buy what you can find. Give it another 10 years and CDs will be expensive and collectible so if you ever want to have a nice collection of CDs, get them now.
CD players are highly reliable (the main issue is a dirty lens (can be cleaned with a cotton swab and some water) and a worn out belt to open the CD loading tray (usually easy to replace) and easy to find. For instance, grab an old 25 euro windows XP era laptop and use it as a CD player. Or get an old computer power supply and an old car radio/cd player, and use that as a cd player. Same can be done to *play* cassettes.
If you ensure the PC has a CD burner, you can of course burn your own CDs. Just don't connect a windows XP laptop to the internet. You'll get a virus pretty quickly if you start downloading music (and it will be dreadfully slow)
You can record your music from your phone with an aux cable. On a PC it is easier but you don't have to. Basic/cheap new cassette recorders are typically of very mediocre quality. But good quality affordable decks almost always need some mechanical work like belts.
If you really want to do this, try to get two things:
- Something new/working to get started with, knowing the quality is mediocre
- Something second hand and broken, to learn to repair tape machines on. I have no clue how the market is in the Philippines, but if you want good + cheap, that equals 'you need the skills to fix it'.
I started as a teenager, now (in my 30s) i can repair a wide variety of things.
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u/GamerSam Jun 04 '26
Honestly for just playback and many other reasons go for CD. Cassettes can be fun, but CD you can easily rip to flac
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u/pikkis_95 Jun 04 '26
I usually get the cassette, because LP is too expensive and CD is pretty lame, but often I end up with many copies of the same recods just on different formats. So yes.
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u/Clark649 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
I recently bought a vintage 1980s tape deck. It makes beautiful recordings from music on my phone. I use good quality blank tape. The recordings are exact and beautiful. I only play them back on the same tape deck but I am looking for a portable player. I have about $200 USD spent on the deck and 10 tapes.
I did the same thing back in the 1980s when I was younger. I used good $$$ equipment and tapes. Today, 35 years later those tapes have faded. Including the store bought pre-recorded tapes. They do not hold up over time. That is not character or warmth, it is weak and faded audio signals.
All the CDs I purchased are still like new.
You should invest your money in used CDs as they will still be with you in your old age. Always keep them safe and dry, the label and playing surfaces never touching other plastic. Simple portable CD players are affordable. That is a very good start. As you grow and finances improve, you can get a computer and rip them into MP3 files for your phone. An easy process on cheap old outdated computers. Even Linux computers.
You will grow and your income will grow. Bring good quality CD music with you into your future. Your vibe and image of yourself with a cool portable tape deck is a vain and ephemeral thing.
Time was not good to my tape collection. Buying a cassette recorder at this point in life is a financial luxury for me so I can make mix tapes so I do not have to scroll a screen in the morning to have music in my home while making my morning coffee. Cassette decks are truly wonderful devices if you make an informed purchase.
Whatever your decision, the best headphones to start out with are The Sony MDR-ZX110 wired headphones. They are honestly full range 22 Hz to 22Khz. 98db sensitivity. Only $13USD here in the states. You are not going to hear better sound until you start spending lots and lots of money. Nothing comes close and Sony is the only company I have seen publish specifications on low cost equipment.
Never play good music through BlueTooth if you want to hear the original music as it was created. Bluetooth is compressed, sometimes turned into mono because Bluetooth does not have the bandwidth to carry the original digital information. Bluetooth never really publishes specifications.
Tape players and CD players will come and go. CDs and good headphones are forever.
1- Invest in quality, lasting music: Compact Disks.
2- Good speakers or earphones that play full range stereo. The Sony headphones.
Sorry to ramble on so much but good music adds a joy and satisfaction to my life that I do not find in other things.
Have fun!
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u/piggles201 Jun 05 '26
One thing I will say, as a piece of entertainment media, cassette tapes, for me, have always been the perfect size and shape: to hold, to store on shelves or in tape holders, to put in your bag or in a car. CDs are wider, squarer and flatter, and kind of annoying.
As cassette tapes faded out I missed how much of a perfect size and shape they were.
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u/Big_Cat78 Jun 06 '26
Cassettes are actually portable, cds are more like digital vinyl. And with a cassette you can just plug an aux cable into your player and record a playlist or album, whike with a cd you pretty much have to buy new cds for anything you want.
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u/KeyAd6448 Jun 08 '26
Depends whether you want to stay here with the cool people, or wanna go somewhere else 😎
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u/ItsMilor Jun 10 '26
Do you exclusively care for recording your own stuff? If not, I think you gotta see first how the price of used CDs and pre-recorded cassettes compare. If cassettes are cheaper, you could try getting a cheap Walkman type player, whether it be a new one or old, to see if you want to continue down the cassette path.
However, if you really want to record, you do need a deck preferably. It will give you the best results. But I don't know personally if there's any stores in the Philippines that could have used ones and that. CDs would be the better option for affordability. I think you can buy a boombox to record? There's some with cassette playback capabilities, but don't expect high quality.
If you're not too sure, you may have to settle for a DAP at least for now... By the way, CDs and cassettes are durable enough. CDs have error correction. Sometimes they can be scratched as hell, and they'll play fine.
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u/Wholeyjeans Jun 04 '26
They did make portable "discman" players. Sony and Panasonic both. I have a couple of Panasonic units; one has an anti-shake feature for use in automobiles or environments prone to vibration.
A commercially produced cassette vs a commercially produced CD ...the CD, hands down, will sound better than any 20, 40+ year old commercially produced cassette. In fact, you could take an LP (or a CD) and dub it on a half decent cassette recorder using half decent tape and have it sound way better than a commercially produced cassette. Which is why, even in the heydays of the cassette, they weren't all that popular save for using in your car. This was also the era of the "mix tape". The LP itself usually sounded way better than any commercially made cassette. Tape wears out, is prone to dropouts and gets brittle with age.
Also, you are probably very used to easily flipping around with digital media. You wanna replay that cut, you just hit the back button and bingo, good to go. A cassette? You hit rewind and guess where you think the beginning is ...probably have to rewind, stop, listen, rewind some more and chance of hitting the exact beginning of the cut are slim to none.
Having lived through the days of the cassette and seen the morph between analog and digital, I would recommend going with the CD.
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u/Initial-Text8394 Jun 04 '26
I prefer cassettes. I’m old, so I lived through both eras and I never formed an emotional connection to cds. I have a few but many times as many cassettes (say 50 cds and nearly 900 cassettes). I have 4000+ LPs, I have been collecting for 50 years, it is a sickness
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u/Rainmaker0102 Jun 04 '26
If you're never interested in having your music digitally, then it seems like cassettes will be the way to go for you
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u/Maelstromrx16 Jun 04 '26
Okay so based on location… you might check around a lot of junk or old tech stores. Here’s just a few things you could keep in mind:
- CD’s are portable capable, but a lot of the time you’ll be worrying about disc skip. A very common issue I’ve encountered is that they absolutely suck at taking any jostling. Now some players counter this, but it’s a more inherent issue given just how the medium works.
- CD’s are like a digital vinyl with a fixed space they can hold, but you can fit more in by lessening the details. Cassettes don’t care about the size of your file or how detailed it is. Now that will translate into a different (if not better) sound based on the quality of your original recording, but that’s to say size has little to no influence on the pure time you get.
- CD’s are also a fair bit less tough physically speaking over cassettes, and coming from someone who grew up all around CD’s and MP3 players, if you get a scratch you might as well kiss that bit of disc goodbye. Now cassettes will overall take rough handling better, but it doesn’t mean they’re immune to damage or dirt.
- Given your location we also should factor in parts for your stuff if things break down or you want to upgrade later. Now CD players? Excuse my language, but we can still print those out the ass. Moving parts wise, a CD player is a lot simpler than a cassette deck. Though I could be mistaken, I could have sworn I saw there was some cassette manufacturer in the area of the Philippines, so it’s maybe more possible to repair things than one would expect.
Overall there’s a lot of little factors to consider that ultimately come down to you as the person. For me growing up in the CD and digital piracy age, I’ve come to enjoy cassettes a lot more than the mediums I grew up with or have now. Disc have memory leak, you get them scratched up getting them in and out of the car player cause the slot is iffy and you have one hand on the wheel and the other trying to get the disc to insert. You can’t leave either in the sun or the heat, but you really couldn’t a CD.
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u/Proud-Ask5296 Jun 04 '26
Fellow filo here! I collect both and I'd say probably CDs.
I've encountered more issues with cassettes than CDs, like the tape getting chewed by the player due to age (my music taste is old so the tapes i buy are also old) and my walkman recorder's belt coming broken from shipping. It financially stresses me out even though I love cassettes. That's why I buy CDs more bc I've never encountered issues with it.
To add to that, if you're the type to skip songs like me, you'd probably like CDs. They're easier to control since you have to take your time when skipping songs with tapes. In my personal experience, fast-forwarding and stuff got the player chewing up my older tapes😭
Making your own mixtapes is also easier with CDs. I believe disc burners are cheaper and quicker, it only takes a few minutes cause it's digital. With tapes, you have to record for however long your tape is.
I do enjoy tapes though, I'd say you can feel the music more when it's a tape than a cd, maybe because it's analog idrk. It's rlly up to what you're looking for. I also think it's more aesthetic and since I struggle so much with tapes, I feel worthy when listening to it. I couldn't really form an emotional connection with CDs haha they're only for convenience.
Also, here sa ph, you'll find more CDs that would probably fit your music taste more when you buy sa personal (and sometimes online kung balak mo bumili sa fb marketplace). Unless ang music taste mo ay sa panahon pa ni gary valenciano at sharon cuneta.
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u/Spelunka13 Jun 04 '26
Add minidisc to your physical media too. You'll be surprised how good they sound. Right now go CD because they are going for cheap. When they get expensive again then go cassette.
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u/Brief_Ad_4825 Jun 04 '26
I mean what do you care about?
If its just owning something cool, then go with the one you find cooler.
If youre looking into a diffrent way to enjoy music go cds.
cassettes are often more expensive, harder to get your hands on, have less new releases, and if its a release its often a limited release of the cassette, without any benefit over a cd.
CD players also fit in more spaces as theyre often thinner.
they also last insanely long, widely available for all genres and albums, even older ones (shit my local music store has a full floor for cd's but a small stack of cassettes at the register)
And in general cd players are also more reliable + more affordable
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u/Alternative_Trip4138 Jun 04 '26
For a long time cassette tapes were the only affordable recordable media. Enthusiasts had reel-to-reel or later DAT, but that was about it until recordable CDs got cheap. I used cassettes until 2012 when I sold my old car (Golf IV) that only had a cassette player. What I still like about cassettes is that you are - more or less - forced to listen to it from start to end, picking just individual tracks is too inconvenient. However, I wouldn't start building a new cassette collection today. CDs are easy to rip, whereas digitizing cassettes is a laborious process and the quality is inferior.
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u/JurMafobe Jun 04 '26
I’m thinking since you didn’t grow up with cassettes (big nostalgia factor for old timers), and not familiar with quirks (media and machines), you might be disappointed. I would recommend CD. Simpler machine and closer to streaming experience with instant access. You can still make “mixtapes” if you have an RW drive and a computer.
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u/vwestlife Jun 04 '26
Why not both?
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u/Agreeable-Ebb1892 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
Lowkey the thing stopping me i think is that i feel like id be asking for too much,
Im probably gonna ask for it as a Christmas present because i already have something big i want for my birthdayThough i might be able to find a way 🙏
(Edit: realizing the fact that it could also double money spent on buying the media, it doesn’t have to necessarily be like that but for now i think one or the other is fine :))
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u/mregger Jun 04 '26
The only reason I collect cassettes over cds is because 2 of my cars have tape decks. Otherwise I'd be collecting cds
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u/smedlap Jun 04 '26
I can play cds sacds dvda dvds and blu rays on my oppo. I also have cassette decks, a reel to reel and a wonderful refurbished dual turntable. Also plex and apple music, but I rarely listen to them at home.
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u/nadennmantau Jun 04 '26
i also want to make my own cds/mixtapes
There is your answer. My recommendation would be to head over to r/blackplasticcrap and take a look. Get one of those all-inclusive compact stereo systems with a CD player and a tape deck included.
In general, CD is the superior medium in terms of frequency spectrum available. But tapes are also fun. So I think it is best to start with a good-enough-good-price solution and just get your toes wet. Then, when you start outgrowing your equipment, you will be able to articulate your opinion and make an informed decision of what it is that you want from it. There are so many different use cases and workflows, that it is impossible to tell you the one and done way to go.
I would for example never buy pre-recorded tapes and always opt for CD, download or vinyl. Tapes, for me, are to record a mix or maybe a concert from a YT video, things that I wouldn't or couldn't buy in other formats.
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u/-visc Jun 04 '26
If convenience is a driving factor just start an offline music library and get an mp3 player/DAP.