[HN Gopher] Attention K-Mart Shoppers
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Attention K-Mart Shoppers
Author : rpmisms
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-04-16 15:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| rpmisms wrote:
| It's a collection of K-Mart PA tapes. Enjoy.
| roarkeful wrote:
| This just transported me to the past, shopping with my mom... The
| difference in tone is sharp vs. e.g. modern Wal-mart
| duxup wrote:
| They even have images of the tapes with the legal notice to not
| duplicate them on there ;)
| kraptv wrote:
| On a slightly related note, Internet Archive archivist and
| notable speaker Jason Scott (@textfiles) shared to his Twitter
| followers Juicy the Emissary's "Attention K-Mart Choppers" - an
| enjoyable remix from this collection. He linked to the Medium
| article here: https://medium.com/micro-chop/traveling-back-in-
| time-with-ju...
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| If only vapourwave was still popular.
| throw28198 wrote:
| i mean, it still is, it's just that the window of nostalgia
| shifted so "vaporwave" has mutated into various strains of Y2K
| [0] and "windows 7" feeling music [1]
|
| [0] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX9D5dmCM8Lo3
|
| [1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47t3ywNfFeeqSj6gJDjvgF
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Some of my favorites are the purile humor of FrankJavCee and
| the Simpsonwave excellence of DANKMUS.
| lagniappe wrote:
| RIP FrankJavCee
| catapart wrote:
| Wild to actually hear the prices. Shoes for less than $3 USD![0]
| It's a fun time warp!
|
| [0]https://archive.org/details/KmartJuly1992Generic?start=447
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| What a needle in a haystack find... excellent.
| trvr wrote:
| How did you find this?
| tgtweak wrote:
| sigh _upvote_
|
| Leave it to k-mart to never let you down.
| edferda wrote:
| Oh boy this was a good one
| neodypsis wrote:
| lol, never expected that to happen here
| neckro23 wrote:
| I picked this tape at random and just got to this part. Imagine
| my surprise.
| crazygringo wrote:
| How the hell did you find that.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Never does a deep search in The Archive let anyone down!
| whalesalad wrote:
| Listening to October 1989 right now. Loving it! I'm going to
| download every single .ogg file and create a radio station that I
| can just tune into while working. Surprisingly effective for the
| flow state - even with the random product announcements.
| kmoser wrote:
| Who knew that K-Mart music from 1989 would be the perfect sound
| track for vibe coding in 2025?
| neodypsis wrote:
| Were you able to find the tracks using Shazam? It is having
| trouble matching the one from the 28:00 mark here:
| https://archive.org/details/KmartFebruary1990
| tempodox wrote:
| They have overdrive and inconstant playback speed! Wonderful.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Favorite vaporwave rendition of this:
| https://adamneelymusic.bandcamp.com/track/k-m-a-r-t
| amiga386 wrote:
| From "The music theory of V A P O R W A V E" where Adam Neely
| not only explains and critiques Vaporwave but takes a big
| steaming dump on it by creating the track that captures and
| parodies its entire aesthetic.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s
|
| He got his source material directly from this archive.org
| collection, as it says in the opening titles:
|
| "On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of
| digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org,
| free for anybody to use.
|
| Vaporwave producers rejoiced."
| aantix wrote:
| I need one of those "Blue Light Special" lights attached to my
| laptop.
|
| Probably will need to develop an SDK for it..
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Quite a bit of wow and volume instability on these tapes. Wonder
| if this is due to the cassette player quality or the tape being
| worn.
| dylan604 wrote:
| yes. cassette tape was a shit format. the longer the cassette,
| the thinner the tape itself was. the type of tape formulation
| also played into this. the more brown the tape was, the lower
| quality. higher end tapes were much darker nearly black.
|
| tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow.
| the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even
| if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs
| would have that wow when played back in other cassette players
| that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty
| heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound
| quality.
|
| I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for
| years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The
| value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used.
| I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order.
| For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored
| tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least
| that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose
| the cheaper tape regardless.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A once common sight lost to time is the cassette tape that
| got eaten by someone's car stereo and thrown out the window
| (presumably in anger). In later years, broken CDs sometimes
| made an appearance but nowhere near as frequently as strung
| out cassettes.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| I think it's interesting how they've worn.
|
| > The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's
| becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-
| reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30
| minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each
| month.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Listening to some of these, and it just floods back the
| horrendousness that was cassette tapes. They were horrible, yet
| they were amazing. They were great in every way except for their
| main purpose of listening to the recorded content. The sound was
| atrocious. From the muddled sound from losing all the fidelity of
| the highs because they were usually lost to any attempt at
| lowering the infamous tape hiss. The slow draggy sound from a
| tape that was stretched or the player having loose belts on the
| driving mechanism. Or worse, when the recorder did and no other
| player has the exact same issue so every player sounds like the
| batteries are dying.
|
| For those too young to have to suffer through your youth of
| listening to such inferior sounds, just be grateful. For those
| trying to be hip and bring back old formats, stick to vinyl.
| Cassettes are worth losing to history.
| function_seven wrote:
| My brother and I bought the same album back in 1994. Stone
| Temple Pilots--Purple.
|
| I had it on CD, he bought the tape.
|
| The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a
| little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my
| copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-
| bought copy.
|
| Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II
| cassettes for the released album.
|
| A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound
| pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-
| forward, though.
|
| (Also, Dolby NR _was_ terrible. I 'd rather have the hiss than
| have the muted highs)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't forget about quality loss from manufactured cassettes
| being high speed dubs. There's significant quality loss as
| you increase the dub speed.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| I still have cassette tapes encoded with dbx rather than
| Dolby and the former's sound quality is much better than the
| latter. I'd recorded them on Technics decks, which is why I
| still keep an old deck of that brand for playback and ripping
| as the bias values are identical.
| scelerat wrote:
| Cassettes had a bit of a resurgence in the late aughts to 2010s
| among DIY/punk/indie bands due in part to the widespread
| availability of cheap (often free) old players, older used cars
| with tape decks, and cheap four track recording devices.
|
| It would be very common for a new band in that time to have
| their first release on cassette, and then after they could
| scrape up the dough, press a vinyl single (CDs being very
| digitally uncool). There were several niche labels from that
| time whose bread was buttered with cassette sales.
|
| You're absolutely right the sound quality sucks, but as a child
| of the '80s whose first music collection was purely cassette
| based and played back on a Radio Shack cassette dictation
| player, that sound has a nostalgia for me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| nails across the the chalkboard has a nostalgia sound as
| well, but I don't want to spend time listening to it if I
| don't have to!
| MisterTea wrote:
| Yeah. I lived on tapes, stuff ripped from radio, other tapes,
| and CDs. I honestly don't remember thinking tape sound was that
| bad, worse than CD's sure. Most of the audio gear kids and
| young people had access to were cheap walkmans & headphones,
| boom boxes, and crappy all-in-one stereo systems likely made
| everything sound like shit and we were oblivious. It wasn't
| until I was older and befriended someone who was into sound
| production that I put a bit more thought into audio gear.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I used to work for a VHS dub house while working graveyard
| shift. There was a weekend radio program that would play
| underground tunes not normally broadcast. It was a multi-hour
| broadcast longer than cassettes. Instead, I would hook up a
| tuner to a VHS audio-in, and record the entire broadcast on
| VHS HiFi tracks. I'd then listen to that tape through out the
| week. Lather, rinse, repeat.
|
| We all put up with stuff when we have to. We no longer have
| to. Bringing back formats for nostalgia is _fun_ , but for
| anything other than cassettes. Hell, my first car had an
| 8-track in it. My dad had a supply of blank 8-track tapes and
| an 8-track recorder in the home HiFi setup. I would record
| modern releases from CD to 8-track and rock it in the car. So
| yeah, been there done that
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Little did I know as a child that those security alert
| announcements weren't real. I'd often go around the store looking
| for the police arresting someone they chased down for shoplifting
| but always ended up disappointed. Probably watched too many cop
| shows in my youth.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Wow... I spent a lot time in the Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart
| in the early/mid 1980s, so I probably heard these exact tapes.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| ditto...i tried from afar seeing what the spot is now, what
| happened to flipside, and ogden 6.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Not to hijack the thread.. but Ogden 6 (and Fox Valley). A
| lot of memories.
| mzs wrote:
| I think Ogden 6 is being razed for a future Costco.
| qrush wrote:
| Anyone else hiding inside of clothing racks away from siblings
| (or the world) listening to this???
| dylan604 wrote:
| right up until the parental unit twisted my ear dragging me out
| of the rack. never did it again after that. such great memories
| of parenting in the 80s
| cf100clunk wrote:
| There was a security guard dressed like a NYC cop as they did
| back in the early 60s who grabbed my ear and made me leave the
| toy section because I was trying to open packages with my tiny
| hands when mom was in another aisle. I was terrified of K-Mart
| from then on.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'm listening to this because Spotify is (was?) down, what a
| gift to find.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Oh, fun! These came up on HN a few years ago[0]. Recycling some
| of comment from then:
|
| The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded
| these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The
| booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me,
| too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station
| that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery
| store when I was growing up.
|
| Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the
| recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home
| town, too. He died in November, 2020.
|
| He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company
| EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in
| the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an
| IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff
| because gas stations and credit cards.
|
| Quoting the obituary[2]:
|
| He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to
| pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store"
| broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of
| Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY
| called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping
| with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
|
| There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He
| absolutely still has that "radio voice".
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464
|
| [1]
| https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...
|
| [2]
| https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI
| cf100clunk wrote:
| SomaFM NEEDS to put up a stream of those recordings atop ambient
| electronica, please!
| numberwan9 wrote:
| SomaFM does have a Vaporwave station [1]
|
| [1] https://somafm.com/vaporwaves/
| siavosh wrote:
| so many emotions. thanks for sharing.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This is what the internet was made for, this is great
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'd say it was how the internet was used for a short period of
| time before the greedy corporate overlords moved in.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| K-Mart headquarters were in my hometown and I drove by them
| yesterday and they finally tore them down. Happy to see some
| K-Mart nostalgia here.
| nullbyte wrote:
| Some of these tracks are absolute bangers
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I don't know why but I absolutely love to go through things like
| this. They are a window into a past in a way no history
| article/book can bring out. Just raw, unfiltered content.
| debo_ wrote:
| I listen to the Christmas tapes from this collection each
| December. It's become my defacto Christmas soundtrack.
| albedoa wrote:
| I wonder if anyone remembers the K-Mart diners and cafes. This
| image search[0] shows various styles. Some or all of them were
| branded as K-Cafe.
|
| The one that I and my older brother remember from our local
| K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and
| tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister.
| (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store
| before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They
| thought we were trolling when we brought it up.
|
| [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=k-mart+diner&udm=2
| matteason wrote:
| If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or
| whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth
| checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic
|
| It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at
| 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day
|
| I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an
| ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone:
| https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80
| smoothbenny wrote:
| It's giving CVS Bangers[0]
|
| [0]https://www.mixcloud.com/TOLKIENBLACK/cvs-bangers/
| DadBase wrote:
| The old Kmart tapes had a frequency that kept teens from
| loitering and summoned exact change. Scientists don't talk about
| it because they're scared. I played one backwards once and the
| parking lot stripes repainted themselves. That's how you know
| it's good audio.
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