Are cassettes still good?

[Asbo Zaprudder]

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.

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.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

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

 

[rgb1701]

8 tracks are even better!

 

[rgb1701]

T

Now we have digital, and lossless digital at that. And I am VERY pleased we got there.

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

 

[rgb1701]

They are shit. They always have been shit. What is this thread.

<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.

 

[rgb1701]

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

 

[rgb1701]

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.

 

[publiusr]

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

 

[psCargile]

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."

 

[Kor]

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

Kor

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

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.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

internet conncections can fail, providers can go bust, DRM can suddenly and without warning make all your music files worthless

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.

harddrives/SSD's can die within seconds

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

 

[Santaman]

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.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

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

 

[Santaman]

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.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

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

 

[publiusr]

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

 

[Santaman]

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..

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

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?

 

[publiusr]

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