what is the appeal of cassette sound effects / analog cassette sounds? is it nostalgia?

Nostalgia for sure, but it also makes the sound less perfect in a way that can be interesting musically. It adds harmonics, slightly detune everything, compresses, adds noise.

It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.

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sandworm101 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Ie they sounded like crap. Those of us old enough to live through the tail end of cassettes loathed them. Just like records before tape, every time you played them they sounded a little worse than the last time. And you rolled the dice on whether your player would eat the cassette. CDs were like magic. Nobody should look back.

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overfeed 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Nobody should look back

Vinyl has outsold CDs for many consecutive years in the recent past. A strong retro-trend is booming right now with (mostly young) people rebelling against things that are aesthetically too sharp or crisp. The imperfections you decry, are seen as "authentic".

A few people are paying more for their wedding to be recorded on an old SD Camcorder rather than 8k. I suspect it's part of a whiplash against (tech) companies "ruining everything" and a yearning for a simpler time by people too young to have experienced it

	▲	sandworm101 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Simpler time my ass. Try organizing anything without email or cellphones. It was hell. Filming your wedding on vhs isnt nostalgia when you also have a hundred iphones in the room. Nostalgia would be using a VHS only to have it fail and your wedding video disappear... forever. It's up their with nostalgia for slide rules and cars without seatbelts: they seems cool now because you do not have to actually rely on such things.

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TrojanHookworm 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Those qualities are exactly what makes the casette/analogue sound appealing to some ('organic', 'imperfect' etc.) Sonic aesthetics cannot be reduced to a question of fidelity alone.

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speedgoose 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m old enough. The bad sound quality is the point.

It’s like emulating old video games. On a perfect display it doesn’t look very pleasing but if you add CRT and NTSC analog artefacts, it may have some charms.

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LearnYouALisp 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, it's not quite...