[Gulliver]

The problem with comparing to the vinyl revival is the old case of apples and oranges. Even during the period when vinyl sales were very low, turntable manufacture at all price points never ceased. Numbers manufactured and sold dropped starkly and some manufacturers did get out of the market or cease to exist....but the market never dried up completely and turntables were always available...from cheap to high end.

It's also considerably easier to make a half decent turntable than it is to make a half decent cassette deck. And no half decent cassette deck has been made since the dawn of the 21st century. The Yamaha KX393 was the last hi-fi deck to be made, probably circa 2000 with a few units still on sale in 2004. Since then nothing. The only cassette transport being manufactured is the godawful Tanashin thing which is cheap and reliable but incapable of good performance in terms of wow & flutter. Last year someone (Might have been Tony Villa of "Cassette Comeback") contacted Tanashin about them producing an improved version of their mechanism and they came back with an eye-watering cost and minimum order number. Nevertheless he persevered enough to find out if sufficient people would buy a proposed new cassette recorder with the improved mechanism....and the answer was "no".

Unless someone wins the lottery and decides they want to lose a lot of money on the production of a new cassette deck, it's not happening. In addition to the machanism, who is producing good quality stereo cassette heads? Nobody. The current Teac/Tascam branded machines are as good as it gets now....and they are worse than an entry level Tandy jobby from 1979.

Yamaha, Sony and other companies who used to make great decks no longer have any capacity to do so. You may as well ask Ford to make another run of Sierras. Strangely enough, while in the 80s it was the electronics that were costly....now it's the mechanical parts. A decent performing cassette deck needs high precision parts in a very complicated mechanism. The rest of it....the noise reduction circuits, logic control, any other gizmos is comparatively easy today....but try getting precision machined parts...and no....no 3D printing system comes close to being good enough. There may come a time when 3D printing is sufficient but currently people have tried 3D printing gears and cogs for cassette decks (and cameras for that matter) and found them sorely lacking.


Cassette tape is still being made. The RTM-FOX C60 and C90 are decent type I cassettes which I have tested and personally put somewhere between a typical TDK D and AD. Capture C60 manufactured for Splicit by GreenCorp of Australia is also available, not quite as good but certainly decent enough. NAC of Missouri are working on something they claim will be the best type I ever, though I have to say early examples were comparable to sandpaper. They have since released something which may be improved so "watch this space". I happen to know another former manufacturer of cassette tape is also gearing up to produce it again. So the raw material is there, though you can kiss goodbye to the special brews like Maxell XLII or any type IV. As pointed out already, data and video tape bear little relation to audio tape in that they're not designed for a linear analogue signal at all. indeed for video or data storage a signal which is highly non-linear and which saturates early is preferred. The companies offering data tape would not be in a position to make audio tape any more than you or I.

There are good reasons to use tape though. Last year I rediscovered the joys of the walkman. My Samsung Galaxy S9 has an excellent digital music player of course, but the volume is strictly limited for my safety. Not so the walkman, I can record to tape and actually enjoy the music while I am on the train. The Samsung always seems just a touch too quiet. Especially since I enjoy music with a wide dynamic range. It's also often easier to make home recordings on cassette than on some digital device or a PC. I still record from FM radio and found that the convenience of just recording to cassette (or occasionally reel) beats any digital solution.