Wednesday, July 05, 2023
Manufacturing and forgetting
It is easy to forget how to do something, and very hard to figure it out again
One Tapeheads contributor notes that while vinyl and turntables remained diminished but alive over the decades—meaning that lots of factory equipment and accumulated know-how remained—cassettes fell off a cliff. Vital intellectual property around the technicalities of cassette-deck manufacturing was discarded or forgotten. Companies folded or decisively moved on. The industrial ecosystem in which exemplary equipment could be made evaporated. And it’s virtually impossible to bring that back, especially with only a small hobbyist market remaining today.
Labels: manufacturing
