Sunday (5/19) on the BBC News website, Kate Dailey reports, “The humble cassette tape, a happy memory for many music fans of a certain age, has staged a comeback for one Canadian company. The first order came in 1989: 10 cassettes. With that began Analogue Media Technologies, a company created to help bands market their music. Musicians would bring finished master recordings and graphic design templates, and Analogue, now also called Duplication.ca, would turn those materials into slickly produced albums, complete with labels, cover art and liner notes, ready for sale or distribution. ‘We’ve changed products depending on what’s been in style and what the demand is for,’ says Denise Gorman, part-owner of the Montreal-based company. It started with cassettes and vinyl, but then the trends shifted towards CDs, then DVDs and Blu-ray. Now, they find themselves returning to the medium that started it all. … Analogue now says that cassette recordings make up 25% of the business. … Audio purists love the analogue sound that comes from the classic cassette. ‘Digital will always be ones and zeros,’ says Fernando Baldeon, a sales consultant at Analogue. ‘Analogue is still the best sound from a recording.’ Vinyl, the purist’s darling, has that sound, but it also has a hefty price tag—C$14.10 ($13.80; £9.09) per record for a set of 100, compared to C$1.29 for cassettes.”
Posted May 24, 2013
