What most impressed me was the acoustic performance of the theatre.

But...one of the other people in the tour group was a self-confessed audiophile and he told everyone who cared to listen about the distortion and flutter of the sound system and said that it needed hours of work to fine tune the expensive equipment.

If I didn't know it before then, it was obvious to me that I was no audio expert.

It was similar when vinyl fanatics dismissed the Compact Disc (CD) albums when they were introduced as being too 'cold' compared to the 'warmth' of a vinyl record. My experience with vinyl was that records were often scratched or had dust on them and they popped and crackled like Coco Pops.

One thing that even my limited high fidelity hearing can attest to though is that the cassette tape definitely is poorer sound quality. The cassette was introduced by Philips in 1963 but became wildly popular through the seventies and eighties with the cassette used in everything from a 'boom box' to car stereos and the biggest consumer hit of the decade, the Walkman. Were you 'Wired for Sound' as Cliff Richards put it?

The cassette tape itself is only 3.81mm wide and that contains four magnetic tracks - a stereo track in each direction.

The tape then only moves past the read heads at 47.625mm per second.

Add in some stretching and dust and chewed tapes and the CD couldn't come fast enough. 1993 was the year that CD sales overtook cassette sales.

Twenty seven years after the cassette was king, it is making a comeback. In the UK in the first half of this year, 65,000 cassette albums were sold. Lady Gaga sold 12,000 of her latest album on cassette!

Overall sales have doubled compared to the same period in 2019.

There are some things in life I just don't get and this is one of them.

Vinyl and CDs and streaming are all better quality than cassettes.

Finding a song on a cassette is a clumsy process of fast forwarding and hoping - even vinyl is easier. Streamed music won't skip when used in a portable device. CDs don't degrade in quality.

I am really struggling to see why anyone would want to buy a cassette.

Predicting the technological future is incredibly difficult because every now and again, you see something like this increase in cassette sales and it just doesn't make sense.

Oh well, if you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em. I am sure I have an old Walkman and an eighties mix tape somewhere in my bottom drawer. I am off to do some roller-skating!

Please tell me any reason why you would buy music on a cassette at ask@techtalk.digital.