I regret to inform you that CDs are still here.
Are cassettes still good?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
I regret to inform you that CDs are still here.
I still buy them, internet conncections can fail, cloud providers can go bust, DRM can suddenly and without warning make all your music files worthless and harddrives/SSD's can die within seconds, CD's also have a few disadvantages but they can be ripped to MP3 and when stored properly they do last very long, I have a few CD's from the late 80's and they still work as a charm, I ripped them to MP3 when I had a Pentium 166MMX and reripped them last year to a much better quality.
I still have my Dire Straits stuff from 1984 and it plays as good as it did when I purchased it. CDs will if looked after last a long, long time.
Now DVDs on the other hand...... There's a thing called DVD rot which is erosion of the foil layer under the plastic. It can happen at any time.
Some of these "leaders" are living in the past, man...Cassettes are the future......
Like how some leaders are saying "coal is the future"
Hey at first I thought it was some weird anomally with Tony Abbott saying it a lot before his party dumped him as PM, then a little while ago Trump said it too.
I think Trump is stuck in the 1950s somewhere trying to reclaim his lost youth...
+1^10
Cassettes are nothing more than scaled down R2R, though at a relatively slow 1-7/8ips speed and narrow tape/track width.
However, due to continuous tech improvements and refinements through the 70's, 80's and into the 90's, better tape formulations with ever smaller magnetic particle size, and Dolby C/S and especially Dolby HX Pro on the record side, an average consumer could easily record vinyl or a CD to a cassette on a Pioneer/JVC/Denon/Nakamichi deck and be hard pressed to tell the difference in an A-B comparison.
As mentioned, tape head wear, belt wear, and other mechanical issues degraded decks over time. Plus, most consumers bought the cheapest blank tapes they could get and usually poor quality lesser branded playback decks.
Coupled with the general poor quality of pre-recorded cassettes at music stores (though they steadily improved from the mid 80's onwards with Chrome/Type II and/or HX Pro and Digilog mastering).
I have been playing tapes I made from the late 80's and they still sound great on cleaned Denon and Pioneer decks.
Simple, they don't use portable devices, audiophiles usually have a room set up entirely for music listening.
As for your remark about consumers buying the cheapest blank tape, here in the Netherlands people usually bought the high end tapes even for use in walkmans, in my area BASF was very popular.
According to a recent news item cassettes are on the rise, a Dutch firm went from two to twenty thousand units within a year, so the comeback is there.
As for your remark about consumers buying the cheapest blank tape, here in the Netherlands people usually bought the high end tapes even for use in walkmans, in my area BASF was very popular.
According to a recent news item cassettes are on the rise, a Dutch firm went from two to twenty thousand units within a year, so the comeback is there.
I used to by Maxell, Sony, and BASF cassettes. The Metal format ones were the best but they had somewhat a harsh tone to them on playback but they were the ones for me that gave the best recordings.
I always used TDK as they never seemed to foul up - just standard ferric oxide; not chromium dioxide or more expensive "metal" tapes. I also made sure that I cleaned and degaussed the tape machine heads regularly.
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Did you ever buy those tapes with the spools inside the case that looked like miniature reel to reel spools? I always liked those because the full sized reels seemed to keep the tape even .
Reel to reel was designed to keep the tape tension constant, wasn't it? I'm not sure cassette mechanisms ever really achieved that. The tape seemed to get more tightly wound and you had to resort to a couple of passes of fast forwarding and rewinding to fix the tension. Didn't seem to be a problem with TDK tapes though.
TDK made the ones I was talking about, they had a clear case and what looked like two reels inside.
Could be - however, I got rid of my last tape something like 20 years ago and no longer remember much about them. I moved onto burning MP3s onto CDs and eventually memory sticks. The build quality and robustness of TDK cassettes did seem a lot better than Sony, Maxell, Philips, and even BASF but I don't remember the transport mechanism being any better perticularly. I mostly bough the SA (Super Avilyn) variety IIRC, which was a cobolt-ferric mix rather than chromium. TDK SF tapes were supposedly better but they were too late to the game for me.
Oh that's OK,. Anyway here's a picture lol
I kept using these even after CDs became a common thing. This was the kind of thing I was using in different brands.
I eventually went digital.
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