Are cassettes still good?

[Ar-Pharazon]

The other disadvantage of tape is the excruciatingly (relatively) long seek time.

Did you hold the FFw button down, then lightly press the Play button so you could hear the songs start & end?

I pretty much started out as a cassette user. Damn I hated those things. I was a little young to go with vinyl albums, but I had 45's back in the 70's.

I still buy CD's, but I rip them the minute I get the shrink wrap off.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Did you hold the FFw button down, then lightly press the Play button so you could hear the songs start & end?

I pretty much started out as a cassette user. Damn I hated those things. I was a little young to go with vinyl albums, but I had 45's back in the 70's.

I still buy CD's, but I rip them the minute I get the shrink wrap off.

Ripped albums, especially concept ones, I used to play from start to finish. My punk collection was mostly on vinyl so direct access of a track was easy.

Ditto with ripping CDs for stuff that's not available digitally, such as the Cosmos soundtrack album, although it is available on YouTube.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Cosmos/dp/B00004WFPW

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[Kor]

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Not sure where I stand on this. Cassettes can sound good when you use expensive brand name recording equipment but they are a technology that should by all accounts be dead still but young people today are glomming onto old stuff that we had in the 80s and 90s growing up as if it's the latest most fantastic thing.

Oh and yes reel to reel tapes do sound great, and Vinyl does sound warm and nice but technology changes. I'm not sure I want to go back to the old stuff.

I liked the video and listened to all the stuff he said but I think there's some false nostalgia going on here or am I wrong?

Reel to reel is by far the superior analog format.

In recent years, this company is releasing various classic albums in reel to reel, duplicated directly from the original masters: http://tapeproject.com/

For the true audiophile, $450 per album is well worth it. Right?

Kor

 

[JasonJ]

Reel to reel is by far the superior analog format.

In recent years, this company is releasing various classic albums in reel to reel, duplicated directly from the original masters: http://tapeproject.com/

For the true audiophile, $450 per album is well worth it. Right?

Kor

I have a plethora of items belonging to my late father who was a reel to reel enthusiast. One of the reels I have is the original soundtrack to Donner's Superman from 1978. I still remember listening to it when I was 7 or 8. Super cool stuff.

 

[Morpheus 02]

Regarding cassette tape audio quality -- oh, no doubt, it's pretty inferior. But for me, I am not so into such minute details, so my hears don't pick up on the quality too much , as long as the basics are clear (same with all this HD stuff.. not too impressed with the details).

I think my nostalgia is the making of mixes, and the quirks that are unique to cassette tape, that digital doesn't offer

 

[USS Triumphant]

I have a sealed box of nice blank cassette tapes, and I've been thinking about recording a bunch of songs from the last few years on them, hand labelling them with a tracklist, weird notes, and a date of November 5th, 1986, and then just leaving them on the shelf with the other tapes at various Goodwill stores that I pass when travelling for work.

What always amazed me was people buying music on cassette. Why not buy the album, tape it and then when the tape inevitably tangled or developed drop outs, record it again ?

I don't know much about the cost difference on albums, but I *do* recall a lot of times when I could get cassingles of songs for 69 to 99 cents, when the record single was 2 to 4 bucks. And usually a cassingle had 4 tracks to the record single's 2, also. (Not that the extra tracks were usually any good. ) And, I could take a cassette out to the car and put it straight in the deck if I wanted - which a few times I did. (Usually I would use my dual deck to make a mix tape so I could preserve the source tape, though.)

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Oh yeah 1984..... My very first CD was purchased way back then, Dire Straits Love Over Gold. I am pretty sure it came out two years earlier though. It's an amazing recording.

 

[publiusr]

Anyone have audio-DVDs?
I'd like to see an analog, platter-style laserdisk--but using blue-ray tech. Vinyl record size

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Anyone have audio-DVDs?
I'd like to see an analog, platter-style laserdisk--but using blue-ray tech. Vinyl record size

You do realize a 30cm blue ray format disk that could work like that would house a gigantic music collection. Probably more then 100 80 minute CDs.

On the other hand that would be fucking awesome.

They did make a record player that used a laser to read the grooves. It was hella expensive. I think either Sharp or Sony.

 

[MANT!]

You do realize a 30cm blue ray format disk that could work like that would house a gigantic music collection. Probably more then 100 80 minute CDs.

On the other hand that would be fucking awesome.

They did make a record player that used a laser to read the grooves. It was hella expensive. I think either Sharp or Sony.

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[Gingerbread Demon]

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Now that's what I'm talking about. They were not cheap and rare

 

[at Quark's]

Funny thing is, the inventor of the compact cassette (or at least a member of the original Philips engineering team who came up with it back in 1962-1964) is still alive. I saw a documentary just a few weeks ago in which he was confronted with the resurgence of cassettes (the only factory in our country still producing them is has tripled production since previous year). His response to that? (Translating from Dutch using memory only so it's probably a somewhat imprecise quote)

"That's just plain silly. It's completely obsolete technology. This invention has served its purpose but its era is now long past."

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Funny thing is, the inventor of the compact cassette (or at least a member of the original Philips engineering team who came up with it back in 1962-1964) is still alive. I saw a documentary just a few weeks ago in which he was confronted with the resurgence of cassettes (the only factory in our country still producing them is has tripled production since previous year). His response to that? (Translating from Dutch using memory only so it's probably a somewhat imprecise quote)

"That's just plain silly. It's completely obsolete technology. This invention has served its purpose but its era is now long past."

I blame hipsters lol

 

[publiusr]

Funny thing is, the inventor of the compact cassette (or at least a member of the original Philips engineering team who came up with it back in 1962-1964) is still alive. I saw a documentary just a few weeks ago in which he was confronted with the resurgence of cassettes (the only factory in our country still producing them is has tripled production since previous year). His response to that? (Translating from Dutch using memory only so it's probably a somewhat imprecise quote)

"That's just plain silly. It's completely obsolete technology. This invention has served its purpose but its era is now long past."

That's sad. I like keeping lots of old type equipment--just in case forgotten tapes and media are found--so we have something to play them

 

[C.E. Evans]

I still have about 80 albums on cassette today (in fact, I listened to one of the them the other day. Sure, I got CDs and MP3s, but I still like playing a cassette now and then. I think it's because I tend to listen to cassette albums in their entirety from either a boom box across a room or through my car's speaker system, so the difference in quality over digital was never that big to me (listening through headphones is another matter, though). I'd say 95% of my cassettes are still in good condition and play like brand-new, with the 5% that don't being due to my mishandling of them over the decades.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

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Now that's what I'm talking about. They were not cheap and rare

But were they any good? They didn't slow the (then) death of vinyl, nor have they turned back up with the renaissance of vinyl and standard record players.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

But were they any good? They didn't slow the (then) death of vinyl, nor have they turned back up with the renaissance of vinyl and standard record players.

I don't think they halted the death of vinyl but they were a neat idea. More a technical gimmick than anything because it's showing what we can do rather than it's being practical to do.

It's like laserdisc movies. They were quite good IMHO but DVD killed them off. I am fond of that format.

 

[Jedman67]

I have a box of kids songs on tape from my inlaws; for the rest of us, streaming or CD's are just fine.

 

[CorporalClegg]

Cassettes were excellent sound quality put on a very shitty medium.

What I mean is, if you take a brand new high-quality cassette strait out of the shrink wrap and and put it in a deck with clean heads and a new motor, the sound will be better than anything short of R2R. The problem is the cassettes are made out of low-grade materials and wear very easily. Deck heads get dirty and motors lose speed/power over time.

Vinyl is really the opposite. The actual sound quality of an LP is very mediocre (comparatively). It's just that the medium is about as perfect as anyone could ask for for high-fidelity analog audio.

As others have said, R2R is still at the top of the heap. It's really impossible to convey just how good the sound is. I was fortunate enough to grow up with it. My dad had built up a collection while he was in the service. The deck he payed full price, but the albums he could get at the commissary/BX for under $10. Unfortunately, my mom made him get rid of them all when I was in junior high because of a big house remodel.

Anyway, my point is R2R really has to be experienced. The only other thing I can think to compare it to is plugging a NES/SNES/etc. via SCART into a PVM. You can tell people how good it looks. They have to see it.

And to that end, people who say cassettes were crap probably never heard one under the conditions I described above--which is perfectly understandable.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I had both growing up. A nice tape deck which was treated with love and care till it died, and a reel to reel. The reel to reel deck was superior in every single way. It is nice to also watch the reels turn as music is playing.