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Testament’s “The Preacher” came up on shuffle on my iPod yesterday, followed closely by “Devil’s Island” by Megadeth. For whatever reason, it reminded me of my long-departed tape collection.

Sometime in 2004, I finally threw out the milk crate full of cassettes that had been riding around in the back seat of my car for 10+ years, dating back to my first year in college. In general, I hated tapes, but man! There were some great ones in there that would stay in my tape deck for days on end, courtesy of auto-reverse.

Some of my favorites (Side A / Side B):

• Fugazi, 13 Songs / KMFDM, Naive (the original version, not the re-released remix version)
• Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique / Anthrax, Attack Of the Killer B’s
• Pantera, Cowboys From Hell / Prong, Beg To Differ
• Ministry The Mind is a Terrible Thing To Taste / Jane’s Addiction, Nothing Shocking
• Testament, Souls Of Black / Faith No More, The Real Thing

I occasionally hear talk of tapes making a comeback among the hipster crowd. I can sort of understand it from a nostalgia perspective—a pack of TDK 100-minute tapes and various friends’ CD collections meant I could have a lot more music than I could afford to buy on my own. Then there is the whole Cult of the Mix-Tape.

Still, I find stuff like this 2009 article from the Telegraph to be pretty ridiculous:

Demand for blank audio cassettes has soared as music fans return to the analogue sound of the C60 and C90 tape for listening to tracks.

Nostalgia for the richer sound of cassette tapes could see a revival similar to that enjoyed by vinyl records that were once displaced by the CD.

“The richer sound”? Seriously? They go on to quote some clown from an audiophile magazine saying “It is about the quality of sound with an analogue recording which is so much richer than the very flat digital sound you get in an iPod.” Yeah, please—tell me next how it will sound even better if I buy some $150/centimeter speaker cable and headphones made out of platinum-dusted moon rocks.

I suppose if by “richer sound”, he means that distinctive warble from where the tape got stretched out, or the muffled, backwards-masking sound that meant your tape player was 3 seconds away from eating the tape, or the hollow tinniness that came from leaving your tapes for more than an hour in a hot or cold car, then I can definitely see what he’s talking about.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.