Cassettes - better than you don't remember
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it whenever cassette quality comes up, as proof that cassettes sound good with decent gear, metal tape and Dolby noise reduction.
What it is
Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends voltagex_ · 2016-07 · on “Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month”
TechMoan on YouTube has a great video on cassette tapes - granted he's got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment. [this video]
Recommends anonova · 2017-01 · on “Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off”
> They sounded bad. Cassettes weren't _that_ bad. The problem is that there were essentially different grades of tapes and players that supported different noise reduction techniques, and people tend to remember the ones played back with low end gear. Here's a great video on the subject: [this video]
Recommends ZenoArrow · 2017-01 · on “Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off”
>"As others have attested there is nothing good about tapes." Tapes weren't as bad as you may think/remember, at least not from an audio point of view, if you Type-IV cassettes and Dolby S noise reduction you can get pretty decent sound output: [this video] I personally preferred MiniDisc, but I don't see them making a resurgence, probably lots of proprietary parts of the tech owned by Sony.
Recommends rwmj · 2017-09 · on “Take a trip through music history with Archive.org's Great 78 Project”
Matt from Techmoan did a couple of videos about how to make cassette tape sound very good: [LINK] [LINK] They're worth watching but to be honest it hasn't made me want to convert all my music to tapes. Edit: The link I was actually looking for is: [this video]
Recommends voltagex_ · 2018-07 · on “Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases”
[this video] - "better than you don't remember". This is an interesting watch if you've got the time.
Recommends klez · 2025-12 · on “Modern Walkmans”
Take a look here[0] for a discussion about cassette quality. TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools. [0] [this video]
Cites kalleboo · 2019-08 · on “Cassettes Are Back, and It’s Not About the Music”
A video on the subject of cassette tape audio quality from Techmoan: "Cassettes - better than you don't remember" [this video]
Cites kalleboo · 2025-03 · on “Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home”
With decent equipment, cassettes sound fantastic [this video] Unfortunately all the cassette mechanisms (and cassettes themselves) manufactured and sold new today are complete garbage. And the old ones need a lot of (physical) maintenance to get back into spec.