Are cassettes still good?

Yeah, I think I remember those. I guess they might have been marginally better at keeping the tape spooled correctly but the couple of BASF tapes I did buy early on let me down by jamming and wrapping the tape around the transport mechanism. I never looked back after MP3s and Winamp came along in 1997 - also people at where I worked uploaded gigabytes worth of albums onto "test" RAID arrays.

 

OMG don't tell me about tape jams...... They happened to me too on occasion and it was a pain in the ass.

 

8 tracks are even better!

 

Of course CD's ARE digital, lossless digital at that!

 

<sigh>

An audiophile coworker made me a Rippingtons cassette from vinyl or CD (don't recall which) around 1990 give or take a year.

I still have that tape.

I will be glad to play it on some modest decks I have through a Pioneer Elite grade 2004 receiver and current model PSB T2 speakers if you want to hear what cassettes can do

Even a decent quality name brand walkman cassette player with recent vintage earbuds or Koss PortaPros will make your jaw drop from this tape.

 

That said, no, it's not worth making cassettes from CD's or other digital sources- use a good music player or your smartphone to play the rips/files

But if you want that "analog" sound, then recording analog sources (vinyl, r2r, 8 tracks, other analog cassettes) to cassette makes sense, such as rare expensive vinyl pressings you own or borrow. I would still make a 24-96 or 24/192 recording of that vinyl, too

 

I wasn't kidding about 8 tracks, either.

8 tracks run at twice the speeds of cassettes, making pre-recorded 8 tracks often sound better than pre-recorded cassettes of similar vintage.

Mouths dropped when I played some period vintage classic rock and jazz 8 tracks on a reconditioned Pioneer late 70's 8 track deck during an audiophile meet a year or so ago through a mid 2000's Pioneer Elite grade receiver and B&W 6x series speakers.

You get that authentic "tape sound" of the 70's/early 80's this way, i.e. sound that stayed in the tape domain, since most recordings were made to tape in the studio/live. Yes, with generational loss, but still in the tape domain.

The principle is- don't change domains, i.e. if an recording was released on an analog format originally, listen to it on that native format without conversions- vinyl to tape or digital, or cassette/8track to digital or another tape format.

 

I like the feel of 8-tacks in the hand.

 

Yesterday my 12 year old son found a cassette in the center console of my truck and exclaimed, "It's a DVD from the 19th century."

 

I just loved it when the tape would get all tangled and caught up in the machinery in my little Sony portable stereo.

Kor

 

I had various boomboxes do the same thing. It's the reason I finally moved to CD's.

That, and the little felt "pressure pad" falling out of older cassetts. If I could find it, I could glue it back in there.

 

That's why I like iTunes. It: 1) isn't going to go bust, 2) doesn't use DRM, 3) doesn't require an Internet connection to play.

With a decent backup system, this shouldn't be a problem.

 

Non techs do not backup.. trust me on this one, over the years I've had to try and fix a lot of broken machines, some just had software problems, some total harddrive failures, there never is a backup.

As for iTunes, never used it, I tend to stay away from Apple products.

 

I have my ripped CD files on my laptop, on 2 spare/external HDD's and possibly a 3rd spare/external laptop HDD.

 

Amateur..

Every file I deem important is stored on 9 linux machines two of them laptop, two win7 machines one Win2K machine, also on an external HDD, that external HDD is NOT a backup device, it is a transfer device, also two full archives on two HDD's which are in storage.
On top of having all files backed up, all Linux machines are also a backup for when the main machine fails, plug in and go where I was.

 

Well, if I had that many machines.....

 

Tape isn't going anywhere
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/...-density-165-million-times-over-60-years.html

it enables the potential to record up to about 330 terabytes (TB) of uncompressed data* on a single tape cartridge that would fit in the palm of your hand. 330 terabytes of data are comparable to the text of 330 million books, which would fill a bookshelf that stretches slightly beyond the northeastern to the southwestern most tips of Japan.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/03/european-superconducting-tape-achieves.html

 

True, I still have a DAT drive in one of my old PC's as a backup device that is, while Digital Audio Tape was designed for audio it wasn't a bad backup drive either, according to wiki it could store 80 Gb on one casette, later it developed into DDS.
I also still have some QiC drives around..

 

I found this on FB. Old style Bic pens worked great too.

Did anyone else ever find that tightening the tape up at either end helped it not do this?

 

Now--tell me when a pencil ever fixed a bum thumbdrive...