Are cassette tapes really coming back? I doubt it, but some seem to think they might. Besides, I'll be the first to admit I would not have anticipated vinyl coming back the way it has. Reading that post made me think back to the days of the cassette tape, so I figured I'd write about the one that stands out as my all-time favorite.
Back in the day, my preferred format for buying music was the cassette tape. I'm old enough to remember 8-tracks, but they were on the way out so that vinyl and cassettes were our choices. As much as I appreciated vinyl for the cover art, the record player was the weak link in my cheap audio system. Store-bought cassette tapes sounded better, were far more portable, could be played in my car (which is one of the few places I could count on listening in peace), and were much easier to conceal from my parents. That last one is a sad commentary on the state of even liberal Christianity in the 1980s, but it has to be mentioned. When they got their hands on a record and discovered the lyrics printed on the liner, I was going to catch hell.
The way most cassettes were produced in those days was by copying the design of the vinyl album. That is, the first side of the tape would contain the first side of the vinyl album, and the second side would be found on the other side of the tape. Cassette players quickly evolved to include an auto-reverse feature that would begin playing side 2 of the tape when side 1 ended without needing to be ejected, flipped, and reinserted. This was a nice idea but suffered from at least one problem. The length of the sides was rarely the same, and it was common for side 1 to contain a long tail (i.e., silence after the music had ended). One could either sit through it and wait for the auto-reverse to do its thing or fast forward to the end.