CHEEPER BY THE HUNDRED

I love audio cassette tapes. Though they've fallen out of favour with North American consumers, this venerable medium still has its plusses.

One of my pet peeves with digital media is that most CD players won't resume playing at the point when I stopped the track. Cassettes and their players have no such problem. They resume at the same place when you've stopped them.

CDs and DVDs are fragile. One little scratch at the beginning and the whole disk is ruined. My mom discovered that fact when she scratched her name into the metal coating of her disks. Cassettes, on the other hand,  can take moderate abuse. Even if the tape snags in the machine, it can be carefully extracted and wound by hand back into the shell. The sound at that point is garbled but the whole recording isn't ruined.

Many third world people still use cassette players and recorders. I'm in contact with a retired minister who puts out a cassette magazine for blind subscribers. As many seniors find digital media, especially accessing it on computers, to be confusing to them, cassettes are still ideal for providing their entertainment.

My minister friend also sends cassettes overseas to missionaries in Nigeria and Philippines. Since he doesn't know how to use a computer, I tape good Christian programming from web sites and send the cassettes to him. He then sends them to blind subscribers of his Vision Tape Ministry and to missionaries. Some episodes of UNSHACKLED!, which I send him, are translated into local languages by missionaries. I've heard that the people they work with are delighted to read the stories in their mother tongues.

Thanks to National Audio Company, I have an ample supply of brand new cassettes. They even have some on sale from time to time. I was able to buy two-hundred C-62 leaderless cassettes for only twenty cents each. Now I have plenty of tapes to record good teaching programs on from my computer.

I've also been able to buy used tapes from local folks and reuse them for spreading good Bible teaching. Two women even gave me some commercially-produced music cassettes of varying lengths to recycle. This is helpful when a sermon isn't long enough to put on a C-62 tape.

In my heart, there's a soft spot for the tape traders of the nineties. Independent musicians found that the cassette was a good medium to reach audiences with their music. People often traded those tapes or made compilations of underground bands' tracks. I treasure those home-made albums. The photocopied graphics give them a unique quality not found in slick commercial tape productions.

I wrote about my own music in How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powel's Books.

CRAZY FOR CASSETTES.

Long after most folks have given up on cassettes, I still find them useful. Even better, a few companies continue to manufacture them. One of those is National Audio Company. I found this company a few years ago on the Internet. As cassettes and players grew scarce, I realized I'd better find some and buy them before they were gone. That's why I put in an order for 300 C-95s. Now I have plenty of tapes. I also bought some cassette recorders when they were on sale at a discount store. While not being top end machines, they still played tapes. Additionally, I bought several VersaCorders from C. Crane Company. These record at regular speed as well as quarter speed, making them handy for taping long talk shows. Now that the company has discontinued selling them, I'll have plenty of machines in store for the future. Some friends have mentioned to me that the sound quality of cassettes isn't as good as digital media and that the tape gets mangled easily. I've found that only the cheap tape recorders or old decks that have become misaligned will eat tapes. By carefully winding the tape back into the shell, I can keep on listening to it. CD-Rs also are prone to CD rot. One tiny scratch and the whole disk is ruined. I have tapes from decades ago which still work while some of my CD-Rs from six years ago are inaccessible. Many elderly folks also prefer cassettes. They're easy to play and stop. Additionally, the cassettes start at the exact spot that they were stopped. This is so handy when listening to long talks. CDs won't allow that. A user must scan back and fourth to find the spot where the recording was stopped. I'm also involved with providing programs on tape for a Christian cassette magazine called Vision Tape Ministry. Jack Kinley, the main force behind this free publication, doesn't know how to use computers or how to connect CD players to his cassette machine. I tape sermons from the Internet and send those to him through the post. Many of my tapes have been used as part of the bi-monthly publication.