I'm so sick of all this talk about "tangles tape" and "hiss". I almost ever got tangled tapes. I got more cd's that skipped than tangled cassettes. And hissing I almost never heard unless I turned up the volume way high, and also between tracks. - I like tapes. I discovered many good songs because I could not skip to the song I bought the album for. Also people forget that until mp3 you could not record audio from radio or live events easily except with tapes. Plus, the cassette tape gave us "mix tape" that you gave to friends or a sweetheart. Can't do that with mp3's. I for one am glad that there are others keeping it alive. I still listen to all my old Depeche Mode albums on cassette.
Yeah man tapes are better than mp3s!!! The only time I ever got a tangled tape was because I did not clean out my dirty tape player and that was my fault. What is cool about tapes for me was that I would design the cassette label and box label for a soundtrack tape I recorded say for an arcade game and make it look official as if it could be sold in stores. Man I have fun doing that, and people would say where did you buy that tape!!! And I would tell them that I made it!!! Thumbs up to you Vebinz for speaking out!!!
Aaaaah, good old mixtapes! Now that was fun! I don't really care if cassettes will make a comeback, it's very difficult that they do because vinyl is extremely superior in sound quality and digital files are a lot more versatile. All that is left is the warm sound you get from them (that many of us apparently like and enjoy) and the nostalgia. I managed to get some Maxell tapes from a store where I live and I decided to revive the lost art of making mixtapes. I didn't have so much fun with music for a long, long time! Sadly, very few people understand all of this, people just think about sound quality (which is important, nonetheless) but forget about the whole culture that developed around the cassette. Back then we were plagued by low fidelity tapes recorded on worn-out boomboxes and we enjoyed them anyway, now we're plagued by overly-compressed digital files that people tend to enjoy anyway, it's not that different, you know...
CoTeCiOtm I think too many people over-rate "sound quality". Much music isn't really worth such high fidelity. I understand this with Classical (and most other instrumental music), as well as the experimental electronic music, and stuff like "Pink Floyd", but otherwise does the difference between tape and gramaphone relyl mean that much when listening to Bon Jovi? It's not about it being bad music, just that the instrumentation and mixing and singing and songs' structure isn't so complex as to require high fidelity. But what do I know.
Vebinz Maybe, to be honest, there's some stuff from which I can barely tell the difference like Metallica or metal in general, which most of the time don't have very polished productions (metal producers sometimes seek that "raw" quality of non-produced sound because it makes the music sound more aggressive), but yeah, more produced, dynamic music sometimes can sound kind of dull on cassettes, specially because of the tape hiss (which can be bothering when listening to soft passages of classical music) and limited high frequencies. It surprises me, though, that nobody here has mentioned clicks and pops from vinyl records.
I still have about 200 cassettes, 5 Walkman's and 3 Stereos. Just because CD's, MP3's and Digital came out, does not mean that I have to throw away my cassettes. To this day I still collect cassettes.
Perverted .Alchemist Audio Stereo Cassette Tapes still sound Great. All you need to get the maximum Sound Music High Fidelity of your Audio Cassette Tapes is to have a "Dedicated Cassette Stereo Tape Deck like, TEAC HiFi Stereo with Dbx and Dolbly Digital Plus Noise Reduction and Type I, Type II (Chromium Dioxide Tapes of TDK or FUJI or Maxell and Sony sound better than CDs) on Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Cassette Tape Decks like, JVC, SONY and AKAI or YAMAHA Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Cassette Decks connected to your Dedicated SONY, JVC, YAMAHA, DENON or TEAC Dedicated 200 Watts RMS. Stereo High Fidelity Amplifiers to 400 Watts RMS Large 1 Meter High 4 foot high Speakers with 16 inch Bass Subwoofer Deep Bass, Mid-Bass 8 inch Speakers, and 3 inch High Frequency Twitter, 3 Speaker System Speakers. If you play "Chromium Dioxide, select Type II Tapes, on your Dedicated Cassette Stereo Decks stated above and they "Chromium Dioxide Tapes Music will sound smoother and cleaner Dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reductions (NO more hiss on Tapes.) using "dbx and Dolby Digital Plus "Noise Reductions" your Dedicated Stereo Cassette Decks listed above will sound better "Music on Chromium Dioxide ,Type II Stereo Tapes, than CDs Compact Discs Digital suffer from extreme "High Frequency Spikes" that is "NOT" authentic to the Natural Broadcast Music Recordings but "TDK, SONY and Maxell and Basf Tapes of "Chromium Dioxide" do "NOT" suffer from these "High Speaks of Audio" as CDs do. Stereo Cassette Audio Tapes of "Chromium Dioxide together with dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reductions selection on your Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Stereo Decks and Amplifiers with "also Dolby Digital Selected ON" will outperform in ALL Frequency High Fidelity Music any "Digital CDs with they well, Sound-Digitized Artificial High Spikes at High Frequencies. This makes "TDK , SONY, MAXELL and FUJI "Chromium Dioxide Stereo High Fidelity Tapes, the BEST reproductions in "High Fidelity Home Stereo Dedicated HiFi Stereo Quadraphonic Surround Sound, 5.1 Channel and 7.1 Channel Dedicated Brand name "Audio Magnetic Chromium Dioxide Noise Reduction Filtered Music the Cleanest and BEST Reproductions of Music Content over any "Digital Artificial High Frequency Speaking Peak-Watts of Distortion CDs or inferior Digital Compact Discs that have been "Computer Sampled to shown High Frequency Spikes of Peak Distortion Watts, while Chromium Dioxide Stereo Tapes with their dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reduction Selections have now "Cancelled ALL Magnetic Tapes so called "hiss" sounds from their Superb "Cobalt Amorphous Capsin Heads" and Dolby Digital Noise Reductions "ON" that reproduce true "High Fidelity 0.005% or lower High Fidelity Clean Music that NO Digital Spiking High Frequency Distortion Compact Discs can't match the "Superb Clean Sound of High Fidelity Chromium Dioxide Type II Tapes, and Cobalt Amorphous Heads and dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Dedicated Cassette Sterephonic Tape Hi-Fidelity Stereo Dedicated Tape Decks from JVC, SONY, TEAC , AKAI and YAMAHA Dedicated High Fidelity Stereo Tape Home Theater System Tape Decks. This is ALL a myth that only Digital is best in Our Hearing and Music of Our Universe is "Analog Stereo and Surround Sound Dolby Digital Plus Dbx Dedicated High Fidelity "Chromium Dioxide Tape Brand name Tape Decks and Amplifiers of the Platinum-Gold Deluxe Home Stereo High Fidelity Systems of both past and present Music Audio Analog Human Hearing Clean Music sound affairs!!!!!! P.S.= I also store "Computer Digital Programs on standard Ferric-Oxide or Iron-Oxide Standard Tapes on 8 bit Commodore and Atari Computer Programs proving the "Audio Magnetic Tapes are 50% Digital and 50% Analog. The 50% Digital is the "Storing of Computer Digital Programs on my Commodore and Atari Computers with Dedicated Cassette Decks, my Texas Instruments TI-99-4A Computer Stores "Digital Programs on Standard Audio Iron-Oxide Magnetic Tapes with a Mono-Standard Cassette Recorder/Player, this proves right here to "ALL" Electronic Experts that Magnetic Tapes, (Hard Drives in Computers are also Iron-Oxide Magnetic Surfaces that store Massive amounts of Digital Computer Softwares.) are indeed " 50% Digital not just Analog, Magnetic Tapes and Magnetic Hard Drives and Floppy Discs and 3 1/3 Plastic Shelled Hard Floppy Discs that store "Digital Computer Programs" like Magnetic Oxide Tapes are "50% Digital and 50% Analog, so you get the BEST of both Worlds, both Digital and Analog Universe Data whether it be Music or Video on "ALL Electronic Magnetic Oxide Tapes" which are by Electronic Instruments Measurements to be " 50% Digital and 50% Analog, so there you have it on the Electronic Specifications about Digital/Analog Magnetic Oxide Tapes which also store Mini-DV Tapes on DVD-Quality Digital IEEE 1394 MiniDV Magnetic Oxide Mini-Tapes Digital "Video Audio Camcorders and Video Recorders Hard Drives also of Magnetic Oxides Digital/Analog Magnetic-Oxide Media Surfaces!!!!!!
+Jules Verne still wondering how watts from your amps or model of speakers actually have an effect on the quality of the music on your tapes. The source has limitations, overamplifying it will just amplify the limitations. It's true, I agree, analog tape has nice sound. Although, all these DBX, Dolby's and chomium metal whatnots actually made tapes lose more HF content over time, and I regret having used any of them because of how the dynamics have been greatly lost 20 years + later. My best sounding tapes today are those without any kind of noise reduction, with normal bias. All my other ones have lost quite a lot of dynamics, even my best Metal type ones. And they were recorded on a Nak CR-7. they did, however, sound incredibly good at the time.
That sounds odd. I have no hassle with any position, 70uS or 120uS. I have 5 Naks, all 3 head except the 480Z The decks arc more than 15VA across the sub micron rec head gap so even on the most truculent tape they got the job done. My Alpage AL-50 is a 2 header but has the UD head with a core of depleted iridium. Rec current is high at 13.5. I use this as an example since you mention the CR-7 which I don't have. The closest I have is the 682ZX which is the classic mech and the Cassette Deck One which is the same mech as yours. Not an exact match but the 682 uses same pair of Philips OP 0453 op amps and presupply caps. I have never lost headroom, bandwidth or output on any recordings irrespective of the gulf of time. A recording of Mozarts Symph 29 off-air done in '84 on the Alpage on a Hitachi ME (same as the Maxell MX) is as detailed, extended and vibrant now as if it had been recorded yesterday. The Naks recordings are sill sublime. Check how your media was stored. Its the only thing I can suggest.
Something interesting that nobody talks about. In digital you do not own the music. You cannot pass it down to your friends. When you buy digital music you are purchasing a right to listen, a right that can be revoked at any time. It is also a non transferable right. Maybe it should be less about vinyl vs tape vs CD and more about retaining your rights and purchasing physical media of whatever flavor you prefer. I suggest you search for Richard Stallmans speech on copyright history. I think you will find it amazing at the rights we have and are continuing to give up in the name of convenience.
+Melchi Zedeq Yes but unlike a cassette tape "Copy" which you have the rights to resell or pass down to your decendants, you do not have those rights with digital media.
+bufo333 If you solely buy through services like iTunes or Google Play then you are correct. However their are several services like BandCamp that offer DRM free music downloads, not to mention the sea of DRM free music that can be acquired through piracy. Point being that if you can put it on a flash drive or a burn it to a CD its physical media. At that point i can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Taking this into consideration, i would argue the digital media also superior to CD's, cassettes and vinyl in the sense that i can can load a USB hard drive up with a ten thousand hours of high-resolution audio, and still have enough storage left over to store thousands of hours worth of HD video, and then take all of this media with me in my pocket. I don't think you have a working knowledge of the subject matter you're talking about. Your logic only holds up in a spooky twilight zone world where iTunes is the worlds only provider of digital media. If physical media gets you wet that's fine, I have a reasonably-large collection of Vinyls, and i love them. But leave it at that, you don't need to create a reason to like what you like, if you do what you like and you aren't violating anyone's consent no one cares. Labels have bigger copyright violators to go after, I don't thing that Sony Music or Universal care if you will your son/daughter a USB drive full of copyrighted music, they have more important shit to deal with.
+lilpwnige it does not matter what you do with the files or if they have drm or not. All digital music is provided with a non Transferrable license. If you burn the music to a cd or have digital copies of a cd you no longer own, you must have proof of purchase of the original cd or tape or vinyl. If you bought the music from bandcamp or any other digital store you are not protected by the same laws that protect physical media, your rights are licensed just like all digital purchases. I think you are confused.
It's not just nostalgia - I still have my cassette deck and the sound is incredible. Real hi-fi buffs still adhere to vinyl; CD and definitely MP3 loses a lot. And mix tapes done by mates were how we spread music, especially those not interested in chart stuff. It's just a different musical experience all round. Vinyl, tape, CD, MP3 - all have their good and bad.
This is a great sociological study on how a user population's experiences fractalize. The people who bought blank tapes and made copies of LP's or other analog media know that Cassettes can sound quite fine. (That goes double if you own a TOTL Nak/Pioneer or something similar.) The people who NEVER recorded their own tapes and bought pre-recorded tapes never got to hear the format at its best. Most of those tapes did not have the same QC that the better blank tape manufacturers maintained for their products. Most people fall between the two endpoints in the statistical distribution. But pre-recorded Cassettes can sound better than most give them credit for if your machine is correctly aligned. Naks reign supreme in that area. Pioneer's machines are great (particularly the CT-F1250 of the pre-Elite machines) but their alignments were a bit more hit and miss. I didn't realize it until I started restoring them in the early '90's-as my long lost early type IV capable favorites finally started showing up in yard sales and thrift stores. (Pay to have it done, if you're not comfortable with DIY. The better the machine, the more hideously difficult it is to do major maintenance.) It might be a case of "Yes, we have no bananas". Cassettes were unjustly vilified (especially compared to all manner of hyper compressed digital audio) and have every reason to make a "comeback". I've never owned a tape that I could legitimately say I "wore out". Though I think that's a possibility in the abstract sense. I have seen innumerable poorly maintained/aligned (or designed) machines chew them into oblivion though. Pressure pads falling out are a real thing. Feed and take-up reels binding are a real thing. (And nearly all are repairable....) Nothing worth having is maintenance free. MP3's might be maintenance free, but then there's the "worth having' part to consider. I prefer owning physical media, but I couldn't house the amount of music I collect. My "library" is now spread across thousands of LP's and CD's hundreds of tapes (every format except for a very few outliers like Elcaset and those '60's four track carts, DCC, etc.) and a few TB's of Lossless. There's worse stuff than tape hiss, to be sure. YMMV....
Lots of memories coming back when I play my old mixed tapes. I know exactly which song is coming next. Good luck achieving that with a play list in thirty years!
mp3 is total crap. iPods junk too. Record companies dictate how we listen to music. They like to invent crap that cuts out costs, i.e. mp3, you download, you get nothing, no book, nothing. I hate the whole concept. A good quality cassette in a high quality deck and you will hear what it's all about!
Mp3's aren't the record companies' fault. They're computer nerds' fault for creating a way to store music digitally while only taking up a 10th of space. In an age of 10GB harddrives and 56k modems, MP3s were a huge deal.
Blah blah when you use low bitrate mp3 its your fault, don be dumb and make yourself high quality highbitrate mp3 . Then you dont need to moan. You can only blame yourself for what you listen.
Cassette weren't nearly as bad as people say they were...the thing is this: 1.) Most people played cassettes on cheap ass decks or boom boxes......of course you're not gonna get good sound out of those things and the biggest problem.... 2.) A lot of people had no idea that you were supposed to clean your player at least once every 20-30 hours of use. People always let the magnetic head and rubber roller get dirty, which not only made the deck sound like shit, but it also damaged the cassette tape itself by getting the old residue from other tapes on to the tape you were playing. On top of that, a dirty rubber roller is why so many tapes got "chewed up" by the machine. I have a lot of pre-recorded cassette tapes from the and 90s and early 00s and they sound really good....almost as good as vinyl on a quality cassette deck.
You are a man after my own heart ! I'm always on the hunt for cassettes ,records and mini discs and equipment to go along with. Being a bass player I appreciate live natural sound
Amen to that!!!!! I still use cassettes/ VHS tapes as well. It may not be the most "permanent" storage method, but very practical, and broken tapes can be repaired. Not scratched or busted cd's/ dvd's- I can't imagine they could have deep scratches repaired. I won't even touch Blu-rays, LOL.
@@sk8ersbus1 no blue cheese for me either. Although, having gone through hundreds of cassettes in my day I will say that it seems about 1% get messed up. I believe the culprit to be 1. Played. 2. Left in the player. 3. Heat. All the messed up tapes I've found where the cassette was actually unable to be repaired you can visibly see that the tape is warbled. So if you have any like that I want them.
How he describes the feeling of listening to an album from the beginning to the end when you put a cassette tape into the deck is exactly what keeps me going with collecting more and more tapes as I save money... I feel like the era in which cassettes were the norm of playing back music is when artists really cared about producing a cohesive and consistent album as a whole.
I'm only 12, and I love analog over digital. I prefer VHS over DVD (depends what i'm watching though), cassette over mp3 (same, it depends), and i'm sad to hear that here in Melbourne, Australia, tomorrow all analog TV stations will shut off. :(
***** I love them because analog has that "warm" feeling. Digital's audio and video quality is MUCH better than analog, but analog has that nice feel to it (exept when my VHS tape gets eaten by my VCR).
***** Yes, but there is a certain appeal to analog which some people have. You obviously don't have that appeal. Again, it depends on what i'm watching or listening to. And by the way, nice job at ruining a civilized debate by putting petty insults into the debate.
The other big shift in consumer tech, besides the near complete abandonment of analog, has been in the quality of hi-fi equipment found in the typical home. Devices are geared toward reproducing sound from inferior MP3 and digital sources and are usually designed by interior decorators, it seems, trying to cram entire systems into tiny spaces. Gone are the big hi-fi stereos with huge speakers sporting large baffles and crossovers. Audio is a complete afterthought these days. Consumers have learned to treat audio as a disposable commodity. I rescued and restored a tube amp 1959 Curtis Mathes tube console last year and my eyes completely lit up when even my crappy MP3s came alive. There is no comparison between the musicality of tubes vs. solid state amplification.
CDs do sound very good on good equipment. They lose something when playing classic rock records in particular. Vinyl is superior for some music. It feels more alive.
Every format has a limitation. If you're a stickler for fidelity to "original intent", I guess you should be sitting in the studio with the master copies on the original equipment. If we're talking about reproduction, they ALL have shortcomings. Vinyl has a more "alive" sound than CD. It sounds as if the music is being made in the room, not committed to a medium and transmitted. That, as you pointed out, is my opinion. What I do know, which is NOT opinion, is that vinyl is the more long term reliable format. Vinyl records, if kept cimate controlled and dust free, will store music indefinitely, while CDs will deteriorate after around 25 years. The film on CDs and in all magnetic digital disc drives will deteriorate or physically flake off! This is a disturbing reality if you're into music preservation. Plus, digitizing music does throw away information. How much gets thrown away and whether that is detectable by the human ear and brain is dependent upon the sampling rate, etc. But sharing digital files enough does eventually produce losses which the error correction software cannot atone for. Also, vinyl is a medium which can withstand EMPs, meaning that even after a nuclear blast or other EMP even such as a massive solar flare or comet impact, so long as the medium doesn't get exposed to heat, your music will still play,while all your digital memory will be wiped out.
+The Guitologist Tube amplifiers are actually pretty easy to make, the most complex part in the actual tube. But thankfully they still make tubes for musicians and audio pros/philes
I know it's a real hipster thing, but tape hiss wow and flutter is really something special. A lot of people dismiss it, but tapes really do have something about them I really do miss. The format, the ceremonial action of winding it back, the artefact of it as well. Music is all digital these days, and it sounds digital too - being extremely crisp and perfect. An mp3 doesn't have to sound bad, but there is something about tape I feel people haven't quite understood and are not utilising enough.
It's because tape is real sound, and CDs and mp3s are just 0 and 1s. I think people like cassette because of the process and it's more fun to use then touching play on an ipod
Yup. Analog rocks. I'm still listening to all my 70's marantz and sansui equipment, with a Lafayette reel to reel tape deck. It's even better than cassette. Cassette is only 1/8 inch, so you don't have the fidelity of wider tape.
"I know it's a real hipster thing, but tape hiss wow and flutter is really something special". Well only if you use crappy equipment you notice wow&flutter. Use proper and serviced equipment and you don't.
+Kelvin Reyes I am 19 years old and i prefer old music (70's, 80's, 90's, early 2000's) than new music so I have a portable cassette player which is not too old, it came out in the year 2000 so only fifteen years old but it looks and feels like a modern day version one, a cassette player that looks like you would find it in a store today almost lol. the cassette i have if you wanna go and search for it because i paid £18 for my cassette player on Ebay also in very good condition it is called the Sony walkman WM - EX190
What does 'modern' mean, in this context? Cheap junk? What I mean is that, as time has gone on, products are made to last for less and less time. My JVC dual cassette deck is about 35 years old. It still works flawlessly. Oddly enough, I had bought another one about 12 years or so ago, and it's messed up. I believe it's a Sony - not that the brand name matters.
I have 500 cassettes in my collection. Mostly recorded blanks. I had them since 1981 thru 1990 basically. I used cassettes as my main format til 2000 when I bought my first CD recorder. Instantly became the LAST time I used cassettes! I can definitely say that cassettes are indeed an "endangered species" LOL! They are becoming more rare. I feel my collection is becoming more "valuable" as the years go by.
Part of why some of us like cassettes or other analog is not so much about sound quality but also the equipment itself. MP3's win out for convenience but having digital files on your phone or computer just isn't as much fun. right-click and download is all there is to getting an MP3 but for recording tapes, there is a lot of set-up to make sure everything is perfect and to us, that is part of enjoying music.
I still got some 100th of Tapes, tape hiss is the result of some wrong bias and/or level settings, i never had hiss on my tapes as well on my R2R recorders... Anyway thanx for this little video, brings back memories ;)
There is a good sound quality in cassette-tapes. It is better than CDs and digital audio. And also there is a great kick in cassettes too, it is un explainable. We feel the tapes running and we feel just the same thing what the tape feels.
Tapes sound waaay better than mp3, but people are conditioned to accept mp3's as a new crappy format made for convenience, NOT for sound quality. Records are great as well, and oh so sexy! Good wine, a record and a hot lover. Ah, I love being a gen x dude!
I use metal cassettes all the time for session work, and then convert to 48kbps digital wave files. I absolutely love the sonic nuances cassettes, as a transitional medium, lend to the sound. Also, the archival attributes of cassettes are excellent. I have some that are 30 years old and still play perfectly well, while many CDs have failed and many disk drives have crashed.
Warmth, rawness- both. Cassettes are just their own thing in the evolution of music. I am very passionate about this format. I use cassettes most often now, and yes prefer VHS over DVD.
Cassette tape albums and singles were actually still being made throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. It's true that they've stopped making them now, but they still make recordable cassette tapes and tape players. I still have a double deck tape player, my CD player with a tape player (they still produce these) and a small number of tapes including a few recordable ones that I like to use to record from my CDs mostly.
i record vinyl to cassette. And im hoping to go to the next level by buying a good reel to reel tape recorder. Wish me luck :) EDIT: I Finally!! have a reel to reel.
I had so many cassettes get ruined back in the day. Granted, I didn't always take the best care of them, but looking back they were far more "high maintenance" than compact discs, and didn't sound as good. That has put a damper on any cassette nostalgia on my part.
I prefer cassettes because I can put it in my Walkman and not worry about it skipping, can't say that for a CD. There are many more reasons I prefer vinyl and cassette over CD, but thats a big factor to me. Portability. Oh yeah, 7 cassettes are $6.99, 7 CDs are $12.99. And you can re-record a cassette over and over again, can't with a CD.
Although I didn't have a problem with cassettes skipping, I did have problems with wow and flutter when listening to cassettes on the go and also a short battery life compared to that with my portable CD players (some of my players get more than 40 hours of playtime on one set of AA batteries). Due to anti-skipping on my CD players, I haven't found skipping to be much of a problem except when I'm running with my player. Some types of recordable CDs can be erased and re-recorded. CD-R (CD Recordable) discs are write-once discs, but CD-RW (CD ReWritable) discs can be erased and re-recorded a number of times though not as many times as tape. However, CD-RWs are much more expensive that CD-Rs (last time I checked they were five times more expensive).
Some people don't like warm analog record sounds, but the ones who do would by tapes if they come back and more are made by more bands and they stay in the low price range that they are. A lot of cassettes look so cool to me. With a good record player and a demagnetizer thingy you can make them sound almost as good as clean Vinyl. I really hope that if they do come back that there will be an HD quality portable tape player made.
Use a half decent deck and good tape and there is no tangling, very little hiss. Get a Nakamichi that will lay down 16KHz at 0dB even on a crappy type I tape.
+Eclectic couldn't agree more. I never had these problems with cassettes. I started out when I was 3 years old with a fisher price tape recorder! and have some decent sony and yamaha decks (and others). hiss is minimal. I could even live without dolby.
I remember fast-forwarding to specific tracks I was in the mood to hear, then realizing I either hadn't fast-forwarded enough, or to the contrary fast-forwarded too much and had to rewind. This process sometimes took a good couple minutes.
Assuming your claim has any basis, you need an analog source to record your cassettes (otherwise they will sound similar to cd, only somewhat worse). If that analog source is not some of those overpriced vinyls (or some obscure band demo), then, what else?
Only on a cheap or badly maintained cassette deck or if poor quality tapes are used. I've not had a single chewed tape in over 25 years. This is why you hear so many conflicting arguments around cassette tape. The difference in quality and reliability between the worst and best equipment and tapes is absolutely enormous.
Tangled tapes? Happened with one faulty machine which was replaced on warranty, in about 10 years of listening to the things growing up. Respect to these guys.
I remember wishing for tape hiss to be non-existant. I never thought music quality would go backwards one day(with MP3). But like a sound engineer friend of mine said "people want convenience not quality. I've purchased a digital compact cassette player so I can break out my old tapes.
That depends how MP3 is used. If the encodings are made by an idiot who doesn't know how to use the encoder (which includes most commercial encoding companies) then they sound pretty lousy. Use the encoder properly and they're indistinguishable from CD to 99.9% of listeners in double-blind listening tests. The same applies to cassettes. I've never heard a pre-recorded cassette that comes anywhere near the quality of a cassette recording made on a professional deck using high quality tape. Very few cassette decks are capable of unleashing the full quality the format has to offer anyway. In the case of both MP3 and the audio cassette, there are just too many variables to say that either are good or bad. They're both capable of being excellent under ideal conditions.
You're welcome. They can vary hugely in both cases, cassette and MP3. Some of us are fussy enough that the quality of anything less than a professionally calibrated 3-head studio quality cassette deck with Dolby C noise reduction running at least Type-II tapes won't suffice. That can usually get you a full 20kHz bandwidth with distortion and noise levels low enough to be inaudible. Anything less almost certainly won't. I'll just add a note here that if Dolby NR muffles the sound on a cassette deck when used correctly (ie, for record and playback) then your deck is either in need of a service, is poorly designed, or is poorly calibrated. Dolby usage is transparent when it's working correctly. When it comes to MP3, far more development has been carried out in the area of VBR (variable bitrate) in recent years, whereas many 'professionals' still insist on encoding in CBR (constant bitrate) at 128 or 192kbps. CBR effectively 'strangles' the encoder at anything less than a full 320kbps. A good VBR MP3 encoding with a quality setting of 'V0' will beat a 3-head studio quality cassette deck running a good Type-II tape with Dolby C noise reduction in terms of frequency response, noise and distortion. MP3 encodings of this quality are hard to find, so it pays to make your own direct from CD. If you're interested in experimenting with MP3 to find out just how good it can sound in the right hands, foobar2000 is a great free front-end for CD audio extraction and MP3 conversion. Google is your friend. :-)
***** you are correct it is way more convenient but a lot of mp3 sounds thin. Not all mp3 it depends on your equipment and the type of music. cd sounds great but it can get trashed. good mixing is the key.
i thought metal cassettes were really good but of course if I was listen to some punk band it wouldn't matter verses Elvis Costello. This is besides the point you are correct.
Was that supposed to be derogatory? Never mind, don't answer that. I can see how someone might seem like a jerk to you. I'm a successful white guy with double your IQ. So buzz off.
Ever since I found my tapes in the master bedroom's closet, I have found a new love for cassettes. I already transferred two cassettes this week, and they sound boss. Though I could live with the tape hiss, my deck seems to produce a sound like a blown woofer during the deep bass moments of a tape. Is there any way I could fix that?
I miss driving down a country road and seeing yards upon yards of cassette tape ribbon waving in the ditch. It was easy to do. First get frustrated with the tape, then cut the tape with your fingers, throw the casette out the window while holding on to the tape until the reel reached the end. Voila, instant curb appeal. But I love cassettes. I found one of these forementioned tapes thrown out of a car in a ditch near my house when I was about 12. It was Motley Crue Shout At The Devil. I painstakingly put that tape back together. I still have it somewhere.
Picked up a nice vintage high-end deck recently just for fun, the warm glow of the VU meters, etc. And was absolutely flabbergasted how good tapes sounded on it in my AV rack. I grew up with tapes, and enthusiastically jumped on the CD bandwagon because they sounded so terrible. Now I'm discovering it wasn't the tapes that sounded bad - it was our shitty Sears-grade audio equipment.
That and when I was a kid I'd record over crappy recordings on crappy tapes on the same crappy player without erasing the recording. No way that will sound good.
Oxford English Dictionary removing the words "cassette tape" is not good. Who cares if no one uses it anymore, the oxford should keep the words just for its history.
It seems that some people would just want high quality "analog emulator" software that they want to run once against their whole digital music collection. "Warm analog sound" is actually just the original signal plus wide bandwidth noise plus lots of harmonic distortion and continuous playback speed changes (speed change cycles about every 30/65 seconds for LP, much faster for cassette tapes). If you drop the playback speed changes from such an emulater, it pretty much describes a classic tube amplifier, too.
I have 2 cassette decks left. One I recently picked up by a dumpster. A Teak. The other I bought over 20 years ago and is a Yamaha 4Track cassette recorder for multitrack recording to cassette. There are people that ask from time to time if I can digitize their old tapes, as well as VHS tapes. I would hold onto all these players as one day, someone will need them for the purpose I just mentioned. As for the tapes themselves,. I digitized all cassettes, and kept only a few high quality S-video cassette and Metal Oxide Cassettes.
I loved releasing my cassette albums back in the day. Cassettes do sound great on a good player/system. It appears that technology with motors and "moving parts" is rapidly giving way to virtual / digital experiences.
Hissing depends on the cassette player. I have an Onkyo Reference player. It was $1800 in 1985 and it has no noticable hiss at all. The problem with the cassette is that they cant retain as much musical sound as a cd which is inherent of the design. Most master copies up until the early 90s were done on reel to reel which is a giant cassette. The consumer audio industry limited what a cassette could do so they could sell $$$$ Cd Players $$$$$
No, they won't. They lack the sound quality of the vinyl and lack the versatility of digital media so we're left with no apparent reason for them to come back more than nostalgia and that particular sound tapes have. Don't get me wrong, I love tapes and I still use them to this day, I have a collection and whenever I can, I get myself some blank tapes to do mixtapes. Why? Because it's fun and I enjoy doing it, but let's be honest, they will always exist and will be there, but they will never be predominant or relevant for the general listener again because the culture that developed around it, which was what really made the tape so popular, is mostly dead and gone. The current situation is not that different if you think about it. People always complain about cassettes sounding bad, and even if that was true, we enjoyed the recordings anyway, today we have lousy-sounding, overly-compressed mp3 and a lot of people don't seem to mind about the bad quality of them. On the other hand, audiophiles has been around for all these years and they don't choose tapes or mp3s, they choose vinyl, quality-studio WAVs, FLAC, SACDs or whatever.
The cassette is still a viable medium. If you have a good-quality , properly calibrated deck (particularly one employing dbx noise reduction), using CrO2 or metal tape, you can make high-resolution tapes that will rival or exceed the sound of most other formats.
Three years later they are one of the new biggest markets in the UK, Walkman’s are even being re-distributed and artists from Muse to Morrissey to Ariana Grande to OMD to 5SOS to Erasure have been releasing their new material on tape. I myself have been making mixtapes all December. I have a pretty high quality deck so they come out very nicely. If it’s the kinda trend you wanna invest in awesome! If not I totally get that.
I talked to a group of kids of this generation once about VHS tapes and cassettes. They didn't even know what they were! I was amazed at that, considering that I was born before 2000. Now, all you have to do to watch a movie or TV is whip out your computer or phone and, with internet, THERE YOU GO! I'm amazed at that.
I'm 14 and was born in 2005 and I have 2 VHS players one I purchased the other I found in the attic after the purchased the first one 9 vhses 17 cassette tapes 2 lost cassette tapes a walk man a cd/radio/cassette player (that broke they suck) and a shoebox cassette player so there you go
1:46 "Even some music pro's are returning to tape's flat tones and fuzzy hiss". Excuse me? Flat tones and fuzzy hiss? What equipment are you using? My cassettedeck (using proper cassettes) has no flat tones, great dynamics and no hiss.
I am pleased that there are quite a few people that actually remember the technical maintenance of a tape player. Tape head cleaning and alignment, pinch roller cleaning. Testing of the tape clutches, and belts are what makes a good tape player tick. And yes, analog is superior most of the time. Remember that MP3's sacrifice sounds that they THINK are not heard by humans in order to compress the format. And I too agree that if you were a digital purist, you would go to a .wav . Not mp3.
Hardly bought commercial cassette tape releases from any artist, but blank tapes were a must to record my own mix tapes to carry on in my sony walkman (I'm 41); hundred of tapes recorded directly from the Lp Vinyl record source were made with custom sleeve designs using color felt pen markers and fine point pen too...many, many, were give-away hooks to get to know girls (a classic mix tape with lovesongs).
Cassette tapes were a good idea when they first came out because prior to that we hadreel to reel tape machines which were cumbersome and had to be threaded through likea movie projector. The cassette was self contained, and compact, and for quite some time, served its purpose well. However, over time, sound quality deteriorated, and tapeswould often tighten up and jam. I'm glad we have cd's now, they remain sound perfect,and if handled and stored correctly will last a lot longer than any tape will.
+Gary Dunn The problem is that no matter how well you try to take care of a CD, eventually it develops scratches. Besides that, by the time any physical media wears out, one is often tired of listening to it anyways. I would go as far as to say the tape/CD would wear out it's welcome before it wears out it's playability.
+Lesrevesdhiver Nah, if you handle a cd or dvd correctly by avoidingtouching the silver surface, or allowing it to come into contact withother discs. Then in theory, you should not get any scratches. I haveliterally hundreds of discs, and none of them are damaged, and willremain so. Cassettes, on the other hand just deteriorate with age,especially if stored either in places that are too damp, or wheredirect sunlight can get at them. Another no no with cassettes is toconstantly wind them back and forth, this caused the spools totighten up, the result? the capstan roller pulls the tape out of thecassette and it all gets tangled. I ditched loads of tapes becauseof this. So, I guess I will be sticking to optical media from now on.
I have a few cassettes that are prior to 1976 and still play. However,more have been discarded over the years than those I have kept,mainly because of deterioration in sound, or because they simplyself destructed.
Well pin holes in cd's, that's a new one on me. Incidently, I have LP'sthat are over 45 years old and still play very well. However, those oldshellac 78's, they may be 100 years old, and still play. Just don't dropone, not even on a carpet as they are very brittle and just shatter likeglass.
Actually, what needs to "come back" are boomboxes. And I don't mean some silly-looking JBL or Beats bluetooth speaker. I mean a big, square box with lots of knobs, lights, and chrome.
"...said goodbye to noisy tapes and poor audio quality" sorry - WHAT THE F**K are you on about!? Do you even know what cassettes sound like when used correctly on good machines with noise reduction?! Seriously #WSJ - STOP IT! Just STOP IT!
I was driving by a small car show a number of years ago and stopped by to check things out. One of the guys whose car I was admiring noticed my stereo was playing and inquired about the stereo and what I was playing in it. He was astonished when I told him it was the stock stereo (1997 Camry) and that I was playing a chrome (Maxell XL-II) tape that I'd 'built'.
"Will cassettes make a comeback?" Nope. Hardly anyone still has a tape player. So those artists making tape recordings are going to lose out on a lot of publicity selling their music on a format almost no one can play. Also, the tapes cost $2.50 to produce, while you can record your music directly to the computer and sell it digitally for next to nothing outside of the cost of your equipment.
I have, lets see, a Optimums Pro Series (PIONEER), Teac V3000 PRO (professional cassette deck), Teac (I forget the model) a couple boombox cassette deck. A cassette deck in my home made boombox. A cassette deck in my Panasonic SA-PM19. I may have more. I do not use them that much though. I mostly use MP3s and CDs.
jmaeshawn A lot of people I know buy tapes despite not having a tape deck to play them with, it's a tangible format, so people have more icnentive to buy something that they can physically touch and interact with. I've seen some people make both CD and tape runs of their records and the tape almost always sells out.
Matt-Bass Witchclan Digital music sounds better than tapes though. It has a better frequency response and I have listened without knowing what is playing and have had other people listen. Digital won out.
My ranking goes like this ; 1. Vinyl 2. CD 3. Spotify/Download 4. Cassette I don't see a reason to buy any records on cassettes if i can get it on vinyl or CD. They're hissy, don't last long and generally they might have bad quality. But, if you're an independent artist then i'll get your tape, if that's the format that you prefer.
Why is that? I genuinely don't see a reason to go cassette-only, and i don't own a cassette-deck to begin with. I do got an ATLP120-turntable, that's why i usually go with vinyl.
Hints the name! Im cool with mp3 But I convert my Own Mp3... I have to have it on hardcopy. wax...tape..Cd..they become valuable and COLLECTORS ITEMS!!! ESPECIALLY WHEN THEIR ARE LIMITED EDITION. FROM COLOR VINYL... TOO 100 PRESSED. SAME AS TAPES.... CDs are cool to if its the only format its on. But if its on wax thats my to go hands down. It tends to bigger in the UNDERGROUND HIP HOP CULTURE AND INDIE ROCK BANDS.....I WILL NEVER BUY A DOWN LOAD...SMH!!! I find it impersonal
"Tangled tape and poor audio quality" That's bullshit! The only way tapes get eaten is if you don't clean your player and as for "poor quality" I guess you've never used a Sony CD-IT, TDK SA-X, or Maxell XLII. Those tapes could easily give CD's a run For their money.
Why do you need a Cassette when you got Cd's I know it's all about nostalgia. But if people really had to go back to fast-fowarding & rewinding. Or tapes being ate & destroyed by tape decks (remember that?) People would start bitching & complaining. They wouldn't be able to handle it. You can't ever go back to the past. So I say embrace the future technologies. That's why they were created in the 1st place. Because of the drawbacks of Cassettes, 8-tracks, Vinyl, etc. Yes, they do have pros & cons like everything else. People always wanna shit on cd's because, sombody mastered an album badly. Mp3s have acceptable quality, I know it's compressed. But thanx to mp3's I can carry my whole music library in my pocket. So you gotta the good with the bad.
My cass collection dates back to the seventies. Tape jam problems are rare if decks and tapes are maintained properly. Every medium has their advantages.
Zz Greg The 70s! Wow, you should update to the 21 century. Why worry about tape jam if you do't have to. You analog junkies make somthing that should be convenient & make it a chore. I remember Fast-foward, I remember rewinding. I remember not wanting to go back either. I'm a CD man myself. If mastered properly, a CD will sound better than anything Besides, (SACD or DVD-Audio or the original Master)
Have yet to embrace digital since the need for compactness/portability hasn't arisen. other than storing a thousand tunes in a peanut size device what are the advantages of digital. I can see that being handy when jogging or biking but still using auto reverse cassette, which I prefer to CD. 30 years ago I was creating several 90 minute cassettes weekly grabbing FM signals. Those cassettes will be around for another 20 years. What happens when/if a digital device fails with a 1,000 tune inventory.
Zz Greg put it to you like this. If analog was so great. If analog was good enough. There wouldn't have been a need & want, to invent digital audio. Clearly people in the industry said. "you know what? This Analog stuff is unreliable. You got the wow & Flutter, hiss, drop-outs, etc. " "How are we gonna preserve our Masters 30 yrs from now? I know, digital audio" Trust me digital is just as reliable & probably more than analog. Long as you got the right compatible technology you'll be able to recover audio digital files. Honestly if your dumb enough not to back-up 1000 songs onto a data mp3-cd. Then I would say you deserve to lose ur music when the digital device fails. You can lose music on a tape if it gets eaten. All tech has it's pro & cons. I just hate when people don't acknowledge analogs cons & digital's pros, also. I guess because analog has way more cons than digital.
and for the technical standpoint. I'm fascinated about the technology itself and the way it works. I use both analog and digital equally emancipated when it comes to working with the technology. I would never rely on only one of both mediums.
Tapes sound quality is pretty equal to an mp3. Make sure you don't have a shit tape deck, have the correct version of dolby, and have actual speakers. The biggest problem with tapes are that people generally listen to them on far inferior equipment than what they would listen to other formats on.
tightlypackedcoil Uhh... sure. The difference is that a chrome tape has objectively solid sound quality (approximately on par with an mp3) If i put a cd into a 20 dollar player with built in speakers from target and it sounds like shit, that does not mean cds sound like shit, it means my player was shitty.
tightlypackedcoil Not it doesn't. You put it in a tape deck and hit play.There is no extra effort. A lot of people remember tapes being bad because when they were kids they coudn't afford to play them on a real sound system, like they are able to afford to play their cds and mp3s on now.
Yep I love them VHS cassettes. Hearing the warmth of the distorted sound track is character of its own. And the screen flutter with shifting colors is how video is meant to be. Who needs Blu-ray ?
Awesome video!, I'm not only obsessed with collecting(the older the better)vintage audio,(tapes etc), I too also have VERY awesome looking and interesting odd and old audio and video(electronics themselves)of any kind. I however was like WOW!! when you said in your video that you have 600+cassettes. Well I have who knows how close to that amount, plus the very endangered species of some 1st vcrs such as the Quasar VR-1000 and tapes. Alot of wealthy people where I live, just "kick it to the curb", things such as that medium size 2 boxes full of mostly very old and 1st cassettes made. The "Compact Cassette" logo on them too like I remember seeing when I was young. I used to find mostly old and well cared for stuff at the curb like stereo's/huge vcrs and round tube tv sets. Sadly I sold alot of the stuff in the late 90's. However since the "gravy train" of this awesome endangered species of electronics left my area at least. I not only will be keeping any and all of this stuff until I'm dead LOL!. I also sadly lost half my collection back in 1987 when I had to move with my family to another town. I am really "kicking myself" now off and on when seeing these cool videos on YT, when I think about "#$%^, I wish I NEVER had got rid of this stereo,tape deck,reel to reel etc and on and on. However the positive side is, I still have at least half of what I used to have. This video however made me glad that I at least still have my huge collection of media(mostly old cassettes and 8 tracks),but old video tapes, reel tapes, etc as well.
The bad thing about cassette tapes is that they are very fragile. That was a really a problem when I was a kid. But the good thing is that you can record on them (from a lossless source, obviously) and have that tape sound with every piece of music you want. If only you'd find blank cassettes to buy.
+Bogdan Serban CDs were a lot more fragile than cassettes...records even more so. As a matter of fact, cassettes were pretty robust as it was the true mobile format of the time. They took a beating and kept on playing. So, I'm not sure where you get the idea that they were fragile.
Cassette is about how people really appreciate and enjoy the music. It's not just about sound quality and free music access. Cassette has shown that people do not need to share their high quality music through media social platform because back then artist could get high profits of their records selling even though there is no viral or trending through media social platform. But nowadys people always get bored with new song within just 1 month or several months. Because of what? No appreciation for the music itself...
Totally remember being 12 years old and waiting for a special song to show up on the radio to record on my blank cassettes. CDs taking over was heartbreaking because if I wanted a full album I had to try to convince my mom to get me a CD player running over $50 at the time. Then no added factor of recording off radio onto blanks. I went to a friends house with requests to download off Napster onto a blank CD at 17 when I scored a CD player. Doing Spotify now.
It's cool that they interviewed the owner of Sanity Muffin. They put out some pretty good ambient/drone/noise tapes. If you're into that kinda thing check em out!
Don't worry. In the age of the CD cassettes will continue to be around, and I'm afraid vinyl has gotten too expensive. Cassettes fill a particular need that CDs can't fill, particularly in older cars and trucks. So enjoy your cassettes.
I wish cassettes could make a comeback, but I don't see how that would happen. There are collectors, yes, but with comeback I'm talking about brands developping and producing new cassettedecks for a wide audience. Why should these brands do that? And even if they would go back in production, why would people now switch to cassettes? We live in a digital world and cassettes are an old analog format. I really don't see how this would happen.
what I like about tape, be it digital or analog, if the recorder loses power for whatever reason, the recording is saved to that point and not lost in flash memory heaven. And, I had one as a child and will always like the mechanics of watching the tape move, cleaning and demagnetizing heads and such. Not like an mp3 player (all though I like them too) where nothing is moving, a little more boring.
i was born in 89. I played in the streets. I recorded songs from the radio. I watched tom and jerry. i didn't have flat screens or cell phones or twitter growing up either. we still used console video games, and rented vhs tapes from blockbuster. we're the generation of doug, hey arnold, and the amanda show. we are the generation of discmans, walkmans, furbys, beanie babies, and pogs. BUT I ADMIT WE HAD GREAT TIMES
I'm so sick of all this talk about "tangles tape" and "hiss".
I almost ever got tangled tapes. I got more cd's that skipped than tangled cassettes.
And hissing I almost never heard unless I turned up the volume way high, and also between tracks.
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I like tapes. I discovered many good songs because I could not skip to the song I bought the album for.
Also people forget that until mp3 you could not record audio from radio or live events easily except with tapes.
Plus, the cassette tape gave us "mix tape" that you gave to friends or a sweetheart. Can't do that with mp3's.
I for one am glad that there are others keeping it alive. I still listen to all my old Depeche Mode albums on cassette.
Great read!!! All so true.
Yeah man tapes are better than mp3s!!! The only time I ever got a tangled tape was because I did not clean out my dirty tape player and that was my fault. What is cool about tapes for me was that I would design the cassette label and box label for a soundtrack tape I recorded say for an arcade game and make it look official as if it could be sold in stores. Man I have fun doing that, and people would say where did you buy that tape!!! And I would tell them that I made it!!! Thumbs up to you Vebinz for speaking out!!!
Aaaaah, good old mixtapes! Now that was fun! I don't really care if cassettes will make a comeback, it's very difficult that they do because vinyl is extremely superior in sound quality and digital files are a lot more versatile. All that is left is the warm sound you get from them (that many of us apparently like and enjoy) and the nostalgia. I managed to get some Maxell tapes from a store where I live and I decided to revive the lost art of making mixtapes. I didn't have so much fun with music for a long, long time! Sadly, very few people understand all of this, people just think about sound quality (which is important, nonetheless) but forget about the whole culture that developed around the cassette. Back then we were plagued by low fidelity tapes recorded on worn-out boomboxes and we enjoyed them anyway, now we're plagued by overly-compressed digital files that people tend to enjoy anyway, it's not that different, you know...
CoTeCiOtm
I think too many people over-rate "sound quality".
Much music isn't really worth such high fidelity. I understand this with Classical (and most other instrumental music), as well as the experimental electronic music, and stuff like "Pink Floyd", but otherwise does the difference between tape and gramaphone relyl mean that much when listening to Bon Jovi?
It's not about it being bad music, just that the instrumentation and mixing and singing and songs' structure isn't so complex as to require high fidelity.
But what do I know.
Vebinz Maybe, to be honest, there's some stuff from which I can barely tell the difference like Metallica or metal in general, which most of the time don't have very polished productions (metal producers sometimes seek that "raw" quality of non-produced sound because it makes the music sound more aggressive), but yeah, more produced, dynamic music sometimes can sound kind of dull on cassettes, specially because of the tape hiss (which can be bothering when listening to soft passages of classical music) and limited high frequencies.
It surprises me, though, that nobody here has mentioned clicks and pops from vinyl records.
I still have about 200 cassettes, 5 Walkman's and 3 Stereos. Just because CD's, MP3's and Digital came out, does not mean that I have to throw away my cassettes. To this day I still collect cassettes.
Perverted .Alchemist Audio Stereo Cassette Tapes still sound Great. All you need to get the maximum Sound Music High Fidelity of your Audio Cassette Tapes is to have a "Dedicated Cassette Stereo Tape Deck like, TEAC HiFi Stereo with Dbx and Dolbly Digital Plus Noise Reduction and Type I, Type II (Chromium Dioxide Tapes of TDK or FUJI or Maxell and Sony sound better than CDs) on Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Cassette Tape Decks like, JVC, SONY and AKAI or YAMAHA Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Cassette Decks connected to your Dedicated SONY, JVC, YAMAHA, DENON or TEAC Dedicated 200 Watts RMS. Stereo High Fidelity Amplifiers to 400 Watts RMS Large 1 Meter High 4 foot high Speakers with 16 inch Bass Subwoofer Deep Bass, Mid-Bass 8 inch Speakers, and 3 inch High Frequency Twitter, 3 Speaker System Speakers. If you play "Chromium Dioxide, select Type II Tapes, on your Dedicated Cassette Stereo Decks stated above and they "Chromium Dioxide Tapes Music will sound smoother and cleaner Dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reductions (NO more hiss on Tapes.) using "dbx and Dolby Digital Plus "Noise Reductions" your Dedicated Stereo Cassette Decks listed above will sound better "Music on Chromium Dioxide ,Type II Stereo Tapes, than CDs Compact Discs Digital suffer from extreme "High Frequency Spikes" that is "NOT" authentic to the Natural Broadcast Music Recordings but "TDK, SONY and Maxell and Basf Tapes of "Chromium Dioxide" do "NOT" suffer from these "High Speaks of Audio" as CDs do. Stereo Cassette Audio Tapes of "Chromium Dioxide together with dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reductions selection on your Dedicated Stereo High Fidelity Stereo Decks and Amplifiers with "also Dolby Digital Selected ON" will outperform in ALL Frequency High Fidelity Music any "Digital CDs with they well, Sound-Digitized Artificial High Spikes at High Frequencies. This makes "TDK , SONY, MAXELL and FUJI "Chromium Dioxide Stereo High Fidelity Tapes, the BEST reproductions in "High Fidelity Home Stereo Dedicated HiFi Stereo Quadraphonic Surround Sound, 5.1 Channel and 7.1 Channel Dedicated Brand name "Audio Magnetic Chromium Dioxide Noise Reduction Filtered Music the Cleanest and BEST Reproductions of Music Content over any "Digital Artificial High Frequency Speaking Peak-Watts of Distortion CDs or inferior Digital Compact Discs that have been "Computer Sampled to shown High Frequency Spikes of Peak Distortion Watts, while Chromium Dioxide Stereo Tapes with their dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Noise Reduction Selections have now "Cancelled ALL Magnetic Tapes so called "hiss" sounds from their Superb "Cobalt Amorphous Capsin Heads" and Dolby Digital Noise Reductions "ON" that reproduce true "High Fidelity 0.005% or lower High Fidelity Clean Music that NO Digital Spiking High Frequency Distortion Compact Discs can't match the "Superb Clean Sound of High Fidelity Chromium Dioxide Type II Tapes, and Cobalt Amorphous Heads and dbx and Dolby Digital Plus Dedicated Cassette Sterephonic Tape Hi-Fidelity Stereo Dedicated Tape Decks from JVC, SONY, TEAC , AKAI and YAMAHA Dedicated High Fidelity Stereo Tape Home Theater System Tape Decks. This is ALL a myth that only Digital is best in Our Hearing and Music of Our Universe is "Analog Stereo and Surround Sound Dolby Digital Plus Dbx Dedicated High Fidelity "Chromium Dioxide Tape Brand name Tape Decks and Amplifiers of the Platinum-Gold Deluxe Home Stereo High Fidelity Systems of both past and present Music Audio Analog Human Hearing Clean Music sound affairs!!!!!! P.S.= I also store "Computer Digital Programs on standard Ferric-Oxide or Iron-Oxide Standard Tapes on 8 bit Commodore and Atari Computer Programs proving the "Audio Magnetic Tapes are 50% Digital and 50% Analog. The 50% Digital is the "Storing of Computer Digital Programs on my Commodore and Atari Computers with Dedicated Cassette Decks, my Texas Instruments TI-99-4A Computer Stores "Digital Programs on Standard Audio Iron-Oxide Magnetic Tapes with a Mono-Standard Cassette Recorder/Player, this proves right here to "ALL" Electronic Experts that Magnetic Tapes, (Hard Drives in Computers are also Iron-Oxide Magnetic Surfaces that store Massive amounts of Digital Computer Softwares.) are indeed " 50% Digital not just Analog, Magnetic Tapes and Magnetic Hard Drives and Floppy Discs and 3 1/3 Plastic Shelled Hard Floppy Discs that store "Digital Computer Programs" like Magnetic Oxide Tapes are "50% Digital and 50% Analog, so you get the BEST of both Worlds, both Digital and Analog Universe Data whether it be Music or Video on "ALL Electronic Magnetic Oxide Tapes" which are by Electronic Instruments Measurements to be " 50% Digital and 50% Analog, so there you have it on the Electronic Specifications about Digital/Analog Magnetic Oxide Tapes which also store Mini-DV Tapes on DVD-Quality Digital IEEE 1394 MiniDV Magnetic Oxide Mini-Tapes Digital "Video Audio Camcorders and Video Recorders Hard Drives also of Magnetic Oxides Digital/Analog Magnetic-Oxide Media Surfaces!!!!!!
+Jules Verne still wondering how watts from your amps or model of speakers actually have an effect on the quality of the music on your tapes. The source has limitations, overamplifying it will just amplify the limitations. It's true, I agree, analog tape has nice sound. Although, all these DBX, Dolby's and chomium metal whatnots actually made tapes lose more HF content over time, and I regret having used any of them because of how the dynamics have been greatly lost 20 years + later. My best sounding tapes today are those without any kind of noise reduction, with normal bias. All my other ones have lost quite a lot of dynamics, even my best Metal type ones. And they were recorded on a Nak CR-7. they did, however, sound incredibly good at the time.
That sounds odd. I have no hassle with any position, 70uS or 120uS. I have 5 Naks, all 3 head except the 480Z The decks arc more than 15VA across the sub micron rec head gap so even on the most truculent tape they got the job done. My Alpage AL-50 is a 2 header but has the UD head with a core of depleted iridium. Rec current is high at 13.5. I use this as an example since you mention the CR-7 which I don't have. The closest I have is the 682ZX which is the classic mech and the Cassette Deck One which is the same mech as yours. Not an exact match but the 682 uses same pair of Philips OP 0453 op amps and presupply caps. I have never lost headroom, bandwidth or output on any recordings irrespective of the gulf of time. A recording of Mozarts Symph 29 off-air done in '84 on the Alpage on a Hitachi ME (same as the Maxell MX) is as detailed, extended and vibrant now as if it had been recorded yesterday. The Naks recordings are sill sublime. Check how your media was stored. Its the only thing I can suggest.
Drums and bass sound so much better when recorded to tape!
hi when I saw your name you remind of some one who moved to Denver Colorado I think now he is six or seven years old.
Hi when I saw your name Tanner you remind me of some one who is Six or Seven years old now.. moved to Denver Colorado..
+Nusrat Jamia
Pues, muy bien por mi!!
+tanner122772 What do you mean by that???????
Nusrat Jamia good for me!!
Something interesting that nobody talks about. In digital you do not own the music. You cannot pass it down to your friends. When you buy digital music you are purchasing a right to listen, a right that can be revoked at any time. It is also a non transferable right. Maybe it should be less about vinyl vs tape vs CD and more about retaining your rights and purchasing physical media of whatever flavor you prefer. I suggest you search for Richard Stallmans speech on copyright history. I think you will find it amazing at the rights we have and are continuing to give up in the name of convenience.
+bufo333 same with anything else, isnt? You are buying a copy, but you do not own the right to copy and sell it...that's why it's called copy rights.
+Melchi Zedeq Yes but unlike a cassette tape "Copy" which you have the rights to resell or pass down to your decendants, you do not have those rights with digital media.
bufo333 you mean digital files 'legally' buyed...yeah.
Piracy doesnt exists, right? ;)
+bufo333 If you solely buy through services like iTunes or Google Play then you are correct. However their are several services like BandCamp that offer DRM free music downloads, not to mention the sea of DRM free music that can be acquired through piracy.
Point being that if you can put it on a flash drive or a burn it to a CD its physical media. At that point i can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Taking this into consideration, i would argue the digital media also superior to CD's, cassettes and vinyl in the sense that i can can load a USB hard drive up with a ten thousand hours of high-resolution audio, and still have enough storage left over to store thousands of hours worth of HD video, and then take all of this media with me in my pocket.
I don't think you have a working knowledge of the subject matter you're talking about. Your logic only holds up in a spooky twilight zone world where iTunes is the worlds only provider of digital media.
If physical media gets you wet that's fine, I have a reasonably-large collection of Vinyls, and i love them. But leave it at that, you don't need to create a reason to like what you like, if you do what you like and you aren't violating anyone's consent no one cares.
Labels have bigger copyright violators to go after, I don't thing that Sony Music or Universal care if you will your son/daughter a USB drive full of copyrighted music, they have more important shit to deal with.
+lilpwnige it does not matter what you do with the files or if they have drm or not. All digital music is provided with a non Transferrable license. If you burn the music to a cd or have digital copies of a cd you no longer own, you must have proof of purchase of the original cd or tape or vinyl. If you bought the music from bandcamp or any other digital store you are not protected by the same laws that protect physical media, your rights are licensed just like all digital purchases. I think you are confused.
Cassettes are coming back! Huray!
yes it is
Are u sure,, how,
It's not just nostalgia - I still have my cassette deck and the sound is incredible. Real hi-fi buffs still adhere to vinyl; CD and definitely MP3 loses a lot. And mix tapes done by mates were how we spread music, especially those not interested in chart stuff. It's just a different musical experience all round. Vinyl, tape, CD, MP3 - all have their good and bad.
This is a great sociological study on how a user population's experiences fractalize. The people who bought blank tapes and made copies of LP's or other analog media know that Cassettes can sound quite fine. (That goes double if you own a TOTL Nak/Pioneer or something similar.) The people who NEVER recorded their own tapes and bought pre-recorded tapes never got to hear the format at its best. Most of those tapes did not have the same QC that the better blank tape manufacturers maintained for their products. Most people fall between the two endpoints in the statistical distribution. But pre-recorded Cassettes can sound better than most give them credit for if your machine is correctly aligned. Naks reign supreme in that area. Pioneer's machines are great (particularly the CT-F1250 of the pre-Elite machines) but their alignments were a bit more hit and miss. I didn't realize it until I started restoring them in the early '90's-as my long lost early type IV capable favorites finally started showing up in yard sales and thrift stores. (Pay to have it done, if you're not comfortable with DIY. The better the machine, the more hideously difficult it is to do major maintenance.) It might be a case of "Yes, we have no bananas". Cassettes were unjustly vilified (especially compared to all manner of hyper compressed digital audio) and have every reason to make a "comeback". I've never owned a tape that I could legitimately say I "wore out". Though I think that's a possibility in the abstract sense. I have seen innumerable poorly maintained/aligned (or designed) machines chew them into oblivion though. Pressure pads falling out are a real thing. Feed and take-up reels binding are a real thing. (And nearly all are repairable....) Nothing worth having is maintenance free. MP3's might be maintenance free, but then there's the "worth having' part to consider. I prefer owning physical media, but I couldn't house the amount of music I collect. My "library" is now spread across thousands of LP's and CD's hundreds of tapes (every format except for a very few outliers like Elcaset and those '60's four track carts, DCC, etc.) and a few TB's of Lossless. There's worse stuff than tape hiss, to be sure. YMMV....
Lots of memories coming back when I play my old mixed tapes. I know exactly which song is coming next. Good luck achieving that with a play list in thirty years!
mp3 is total crap. iPods junk too. Record companies dictate how we listen to music. They like to invent crap that cuts out costs, i.e. mp3, you download, you get nothing, no book, nothing. I hate the whole concept. A good quality cassette in a high quality deck and you will hear what it's all about!
Mp3's aren't the record companies' fault. They're computer nerds' fault for creating a way to store music digitally while only taking up a 10th of space. In an age of 10GB harddrives and 56k modems, MP3s were a huge deal.
The sound is pretty bad. Just like a low resolution photograph!
Blah blah when you use low bitrate mp3 its your fault, don be dumb and make yourself high quality highbitrate mp3 . Then you dont need to moan. You can only blame yourself for what you listen.
Bit rate equals shitrate sonny boy!
Agreed. Some people will tell you audio quality doesn't matter. That's their loss!
Cassette weren't nearly as bad as people say they were...the thing is this:
1.) Most people played cassettes on cheap ass decks or boom boxes......of course you're not gonna get good sound out of those things
and the biggest problem....
2.) A lot of people had no idea that you were supposed to clean your player at least once every 20-30 hours of use. People always let the magnetic head and rubber roller get dirty, which not only made the deck sound like shit, but it also damaged the cassette tape itself by getting the old residue from other tapes on to the tape you were playing. On top of that, a dirty rubber roller is why so many tapes got "chewed up" by the machine.
I have a lot of pre-recorded cassette tapes from the and 90s and early 00s and they sound really good....almost as good as vinyl on a quality cassette deck.
John Long Another reason to not bring Cassettes back. Who wants to deal with something that gets dirty so easily.
John Long #1 is the equivalent of playing a classic Mobile Fidelity vinyl release on a Crosley. You are so right!
+WarthogRacer Well, never buy a car then or a computer, you'll need to clean/repair them at a point or an other.
No. They were brilliant, better than LPs. But it doesn't matter anymore. Both format has been obsolete for good.
+A Cool Name no I think there coming back there is a place that is making type 1 taps again
You are a man after my own heart ! I'm always on the hunt for cassettes ,records
and mini discs and equipment to go along with. Being a bass player I appreciate live
natural sound
Oh.. I forgot to say..cassettes does not have to make a comeback...they have never disapeared...
Amen to that!!!!! I still use cassettes/ VHS tapes as well. It may not be the most "permanent" storage method, but very practical, and broken tapes can be repaired. Not scratched or busted cd's/ dvd's- I can't imagine they could have deep scratches repaired. I won't even touch Blu-rays, LOL.
@@sk8ersbus1 no blue cheese for me either. Although, having gone through hundreds of cassettes in my day I will say that it seems about 1% get messed up. I believe the culprit to be 1. Played. 2. Left in the player. 3. Heat.
All the messed up tapes I've found where the cassette was actually unable to be repaired you can visibly see that the tape is warbled. So if you have any like that I want them.
How he describes the feeling of listening to an album from the beginning to the end when you put a cassette tape into the deck is exactly what keeps me going with collecting more and more tapes as I save money... I feel like the era in which cassettes were the norm of playing back music is when artists really cared about producing a cohesive and consistent album as a whole.
Well… now cassettes are back HARD
My projects so far have only made cassettes and 7” records. I don’t think we’ll be touching CDs lol!!
I'm only 12, and I love analog over digital. I prefer VHS over DVD (depends what i'm watching though), cassette over mp3 (same, it depends), and i'm sad to hear that here in Melbourne, Australia, tomorrow all analog TV stations will shut off. :(
***** I love them because analog has that "warm" feeling. Digital's audio and video quality is MUCH better than analog, but analog has that nice feel to it (exept when my VHS tape gets eaten by my VCR).
***** Yes, but there is a certain appeal to analog which some people have. You obviously don't have that appeal. Again, it depends on what i'm watching or listening to. And by the way, nice job at ruining a civilized debate by putting petty insults into the debate.
***** Obviously you don't like analog. Let's end this debate before it gets ugly. Deal?
vhs is 240p or something like that its garbage lmao
Whatupdawg 240i, to be exact. Read my above comments. I'm not going to bother to type them again. I'm sleepy xD
The other big shift in consumer tech, besides the near complete abandonment of analog, has been in the quality of hi-fi equipment found in the typical home. Devices are geared toward reproducing sound from inferior MP3 and digital sources and are usually designed by interior decorators, it seems, trying to cram entire systems into tiny spaces. Gone are the big hi-fi stereos with huge speakers sporting large baffles and crossovers. Audio is a complete afterthought these days. Consumers have learned to treat audio as a disposable commodity. I rescued and restored a tube amp 1959 Curtis Mathes tube console last year and my eyes completely lit up when even my crappy MP3s came alive. There is no comparison between the musicality of tubes vs. solid state amplification.
CDs do sound very good on good equipment. They lose something when playing classic rock records in particular. Vinyl is superior for some music. It feels more alive.
Yes, that IS my opinion. I am a musician as well.
Every format has a limitation. If you're a stickler for fidelity to "original intent", I guess you should be sitting in the studio with the master copies on the original equipment. If we're talking about reproduction, they ALL have shortcomings. Vinyl has a more "alive" sound than CD. It sounds as if the music is being made in the room, not committed to a medium and transmitted. That, as you pointed out, is my opinion. What I do know, which is NOT opinion, is that vinyl is the more long term reliable format. Vinyl records, if kept cimate controlled and dust free, will store music indefinitely, while CDs will deteriorate after around 25 years. The film on CDs and in all magnetic digital disc drives will deteriorate or physically flake off! This is a disturbing reality if you're into music preservation. Plus, digitizing music does throw away information. How much gets thrown away and whether that is detectable by the human ear and brain is dependent upon the sampling rate, etc. But sharing digital files enough does eventually produce losses which the error correction software cannot atone for. Also, vinyl is a medium which can withstand EMPs, meaning that even after a nuclear blast or other EMP even such as a massive solar flare or comet impact, so long as the medium doesn't get exposed to heat, your music will still play,while all your digital memory will be wiped out.
+The Guitologist Tube amplifiers are actually pretty easy to make, the most complex part in the actual tube. But thankfully they still make tubes for musicians and audio pros/philes
I know, I build them. :)
They still make cassette tapes
+Mehdi Saad For obscure artists, Vaporwave artists have a lot of cassettes out.
TheGuyWithTheBratzDollz they're better than CDs and mp3s
+TheGuyWithTheBratzDollz well you see they put music on the CDs using analog tapes so your out of excuses pal
TheGuyWithTheBratzDollz Dude at least I don't play with Bratz you little girl
+TheGuyWithTheBratzDollz please stop playing with Bratz Dolls alright Herbert the pervert
People don't seem content with enjoying what they prefer; they also have to piss on what they don't prefer. Why?
Fernie Canto
This is because some people invent ridiculous lies to explain why something they enjoy is better
I know it's a real hipster thing, but tape hiss wow and flutter is really something special. A lot of people dismiss it, but tapes really do have something about them I really do miss. The format, the ceremonial action of winding it back, the artefact of it as well. Music is all digital these days, and it sounds digital too - being extremely crisp and perfect. An mp3 doesn't have to sound bad, but there is something about tape I feel people haven't quite understood and are not utilising enough.
It's because tape is real sound, and CDs and mp3s are just 0 and 1s. I think people like cassette because of the process and it's more fun to use then touching play on an ipod
Yup. Analog rocks. I'm still listening to all my 70's marantz and sansui equipment, with a Lafayette reel to reel tape deck. It's even better than cassette. Cassette is only 1/8 inch, so you don't have the fidelity of wider tape.
Steven King I agree
"I know it's a real hipster thing, but tape hiss wow and flutter is really something special".
Well only if you use crappy equipment you notice wow&flutter.
Use proper and serviced equipment and you don't.
If someone makes a modern cassette player i would go analog
+Kelvin Reyes you can find high quality decks from the late 90's fairly cheaply, why does it need to be modern
+Kelvin Reyes I am 19 years old and i prefer old music (70's, 80's, 90's, early 2000's) than new music so I have a portable cassette player which is not too old, it came out in the year 2000 so only fifteen years old but it looks and feels like a modern day version one, a cassette player that looks like you would find it in a store today almost lol. the cassette i have if you wanna go and search for it because i paid £18 for my cassette player on Ebay also in very good condition it is called the Sony walkman WM - EX190
Sony makes a cassette,cd, radio boom box. You can buy it at Walmart for $50.
What does 'modern' mean, in this context?
Cheap junk?
What I mean is that, as time has gone on, products are made to last for less and less time.
My JVC dual cassette deck is about 35 years old. It still works flawlessly.
Oddly enough, I had bought another one about 12 years or so ago, and it's messed up. I believe it's a Sony - not that the brand name matters.
400 bucks tho
I have 500 cassettes in my collection. Mostly recorded blanks. I had them since 1981 thru 1990 basically. I used cassettes as my main format til 2000 when I bought my first CD recorder. Instantly became the LAST time I used cassettes! I can definitely say that cassettes are indeed an "endangered species" LOL! They are becoming more rare. I feel my collection is becoming more "valuable" as the years go by.
A good standard for the tape is the Fe type 1 which can be recorded an 19 Khz and it will sound like the source!
Part of why some of us like cassettes or other analog is not so much about sound quality but also the equipment itself. MP3's win out for convenience but having digital files on your phone or computer just isn't as much fun. right-click and download is all there is to getting an MP3 but for recording tapes, there is a lot of set-up to make sure everything is perfect and to us, that is part of enjoying music.
vinyl + tapes >>>>>>>>>>>>> mp3
I still got some 100th of Tapes, tape hiss is the result of some wrong bias and/or level settings, i never had hiss on my tapes as well on my R2R recorders...
Anyway thanx for this little video, brings back memories ;)
This cracked me up (warm analog sound, with the hiss in the background)
Was not any damn good when it came out the first time!!!
It would be nice to have a modern analog recording medium to go along with that sweet tube amp.
Vinyls and Cassettes forever. VINYLS and CASSETTES until the end of time. :) :)
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
:) :)
? ?
There is a good sound quality in cassette-tapes. It is better than CDs and digital audio. And also there is a great kick in cassettes too, it is un explainable. We feel the tapes running and we feel just the same thing what the tape feels.
Tapes never left me. I still used them and own several high quality cassette decks.
I still have all of mind
olaniyi570 l still have lots of TDK MA-XG and Marantz SD60 deck. I think it's passion.
Cassette tapes for that warm nostalgic sound, CD for clear sound and digital..........because its free. >.>
+Mr Eighty CDs are digital, I really hope you know that.
Yep. I still use cassette tapes. I have a NOS Realistic cassette deck installed in my VW. I find nothing wrong with cassettes.
thanks brother .i love old school
Cool film!!! Thanks WSJ.
Tapes sound waaay better than mp3, but people are conditioned to accept mp3's as a new crappy format made for convenience, NOT for sound quality. Records are great as well, and oh so sexy! Good wine, a record and a hot lover. Ah, I love being a gen x dude!
I use metal cassettes all the time for session work, and then convert to 48kbps digital wave files. I absolutely love the sonic nuances cassettes, as a transitional medium, lend to the sound. Also, the archival attributes of cassettes are excellent. I have some that are 30 years old and still play perfectly well, while many CDs have failed and many disk drives have crashed.
Warmth, rawness- both. Cassettes are just their own thing in the evolution of music. I am very passionate about this format. I use cassettes most often now, and yes prefer VHS over DVD.
***** I didn't say it is "better," I said it is my preference.
*****
Blu-Ray you said? I think you meant Gay-Ray!!!!!! VHS FOREVER!!!!
*****
HD looks UGLY!!!! 240p-480p are superior to HD and I also hate 16:9! I still prefer 4:3 as it looks better. I still use VHS I SHIT ON GAY-RAY!!!
Cassette tape albums and singles were actually still being made throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. It's true that they've stopped making them now, but they still make recordable cassette tapes and tape players. I still have a double deck tape player, my CD player with a tape player (they still produce these) and a small number of tapes including a few recordable ones that I like to use to record from my CDs mostly.
They weren't really being made in the US actually mostly in Indonesia.
i record vinyl to cassette. And im hoping to go to the next level by buying a good reel to reel tape recorder. Wish me luck :)
EDIT: I Finally!! have a reel to reel.
Good.
I had so many cassettes get ruined back in the day. Granted, I didn't always take the best care of them, but looking back they were far more "high maintenance" than compact discs, and didn't sound as good. That has put a damper on any cassette nostalgia on my part.
I prefer cassettes because I can put it in my Walkman and not worry about it skipping, can't say that for a CD. There are many more reasons I prefer vinyl and cassette over CD, but thats a big factor to me. Portability.
Oh yeah, 7 cassettes are $6.99, 7 CDs are $12.99. And you can re-record a cassette over and over again, can't with a CD.
Although I didn't have a problem with cassettes skipping, I did have problems with wow and flutter when listening to cassettes on the go and also a short battery life compared to that with my portable CD players (some of my players get more than 40 hours of playtime on one set of AA batteries). Due to anti-skipping on my CD players, I haven't found skipping to be much of a problem except when I'm running with my player.
Some types of recordable CDs can be erased and re-recorded. CD-R (CD Recordable) discs are write-once discs, but CD-RW (CD ReWritable) discs can be erased and re-recorded a number of times though not as many times as tape. However, CD-RWs are much more expensive that CD-Rs (last time I checked they were five times more expensive).
Cassettes are awesome.Still today,they are coming back more and more.
Poor audio quality? That's what Cr02 and metal tapes are for.
Some people don't like warm analog record sounds, but the ones who do would by tapes if they come back and more are made by more bands and they stay in the low price range that they are. A lot of cassettes look so cool to me. With a good record player and a demagnetizer thingy you can make them sound almost as good as clean Vinyl. I really hope that if they do come back that there will be an HD quality portable tape player made.
Still waiting on that comeback.
i hope you will always have great times mate , thx :)
Use a half decent deck and good tape and there is no tangling, very little hiss. Get a Nakamichi that will lay down 16KHz at 0dB even on a crappy type I tape.
+Eclectic couldn't agree more. I never had these problems with cassettes. I started out when I was 3 years old with a fisher price tape recorder! and have some decent sony and yamaha decks (and others). hiss is minimal. I could even live without dolby.
I remember fast-forwarding to specific tracks I was in the mood to hear, then realizing I either hadn't fast-forwarded enough, or to the contrary fast-forwarded too much and had to rewind. This process sometimes took a good couple minutes.
Yeah, that shows just why cd's are much better. You can either skip forwardor backwards to a track very quickly.
+MSH3005 records tapes can't get scratched either.
+MSH3005 records tapes can't get scratched, either
Assuming your claim has any basis, you need an analog source to record your cassettes (otherwise they will sound similar to cd, only somewhat worse). If that analog source is not some of those overpriced vinyls (or some obscure band demo), then, what else?
Only on a cheap or badly maintained cassette deck or if poor quality tapes are used. I've not had a single chewed tape in over 25 years.
This is why you hear so many conflicting arguments around cassette tape. The difference in quality and reliability between the worst and best equipment and tapes is absolutely enormous.
Tangled tapes? Happened with one faulty machine which was replaced on warranty, in about 10 years of listening to the things growing up. Respect to these guys.
I remember wishing for tape hiss to be non-existant. I never thought music quality would go backwards one day(with MP3). But like a sound engineer friend of mine said "people want convenience not quality. I've purchased a digital compact cassette player so I can break out my old tapes.
That depends how MP3 is used. If the encodings are made by an idiot who doesn't know how to use the encoder (which includes most commercial encoding companies) then they sound pretty lousy. Use the encoder properly and they're indistinguishable from CD to 99.9% of listeners in double-blind listening tests.
The same applies to cassettes. I've never heard a pre-recorded cassette that comes anywhere near the quality of a cassette recording made on a professional deck using high quality tape. Very few cassette decks are capable of unleashing the full quality the format has to offer anyway.
In the case of both MP3 and the audio cassette, there are just too many variables to say that either are good or bad. They're both capable of being excellent under ideal conditions.
Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea a recording could vary so much.
You're welcome. They can vary hugely in both cases, cassette and MP3.
Some of us are fussy enough that the quality of anything less than a professionally calibrated 3-head studio quality cassette deck with Dolby C noise reduction running at least Type-II tapes won't suffice. That can usually get you a full 20kHz bandwidth with distortion and noise levels low enough to be inaudible. Anything less almost certainly won't.
I'll just add a note here that if Dolby NR muffles the sound on a cassette deck when used correctly (ie, for record and playback) then your deck is either in need of a service, is poorly designed, or is poorly calibrated. Dolby usage is transparent when it's working correctly.
When it comes to MP3, far more development has been carried out in the area of VBR (variable bitrate) in recent years, whereas many 'professionals' still insist on encoding in CBR (constant bitrate) at 128 or 192kbps. CBR effectively 'strangles' the encoder at anything less than a full 320kbps.
A good VBR MP3 encoding with a quality setting of 'V0' will beat a 3-head studio quality cassette deck running a good Type-II tape with Dolby C noise reduction in terms of frequency response, noise and distortion. MP3 encodings of this quality are hard to find, so it pays to make your own direct from CD.
If you're interested in experimenting with MP3 to find out just how good it can sound in the right hands, foobar2000 is a great free front-end for CD audio extraction and MP3 conversion. Google is your friend. :-)
*****
you are correct it is way more convenient but a lot of mp3 sounds thin. Not all mp3 it depends on your equipment and the type of music. cd sounds great but it can get trashed. good mixing is the key.
i thought metal cassettes were really good but of course if I was listen to some punk band it wouldn't matter verses Elvis Costello. This is besides the point you are correct.
I still have hundreds of cassettes, and open reel tape to. Analog has been around for a while I hope. Long live analog tapes!
Damn it, digital sounds flatter than analog!
It does not sound better than vinyl.
Flatter yes. Digi is crap.
Steven King None of that changes the fact that you're a jerk.
Was that supposed to be derogatory? Never mind, don't answer that. I can see how someone might seem like a jerk to you. I'm a successful white guy with double your IQ. So buzz off.
You can't bitch about videos unless you make some. Good bye enjoy!
One of my favorite videos on RUclips! Mostly due to nostalgia...
Ever since I found my tapes in the master bedroom's closet, I have found a new love for cassettes. I already transferred two cassettes this week, and they sound boss. Though I could live with the tape hiss, my deck seems to produce a sound like a blown woofer during the deep bass moments of a tape. Is there any way I could fix that?
RkivUnderground yes, buy a CD player
+RkivUnderground need a metal tape for greater dynamic range
I miss driving down a country road and seeing yards upon yards of cassette tape ribbon waving in the ditch. It was easy to do. First get frustrated with the tape, then cut the tape with your fingers, throw the casette out the window while holding on to the tape until the reel reached the end. Voila, instant curb appeal. But I love cassettes. I found one of these forementioned tapes thrown out of a car in a ditch near my house when I was about 12. It was Motley Crue Shout At The Devil. I painstakingly put that tape back together. I still have it somewhere.
I still use casstes and VCRs today. I have an old vintage TV that still works. do you?
+Andrew Anderson Me 2
me 3. And i wish they still made vhs tapes.
had a vhs player handed down, still works and has never "chewed" any tapes according to the previous owner.
Picked up a nice vintage high-end deck recently just for fun, the warm glow of the VU meters, etc. And was absolutely flabbergasted how good tapes sounded on it in my AV rack. I grew up with tapes, and enthusiastically jumped on the CD bandwagon because they sounded so terrible. Now I'm discovering it wasn't the tapes that sounded bad - it was our shitty Sears-grade audio equipment.
That and when I was a kid I'd record over crappy recordings on crappy tapes on the same crappy player without erasing the recording. No way that will sound good.
Will rotary phones and betamax tapes make a comeback? Only time will tell.
I still have 1,000 cassettes with classic songs on them. And still play all 'til this day...love it.
Oxford English Dictionary removing the words "cassette tape" is not good. Who cares if no one uses it anymore, the oxford should keep the words just for its history.
They just got money from Gaagle and Ispunes...
It seems that some people would just want high quality "analog emulator" software that they want to run once against their whole digital music collection.
"Warm analog sound" is actually just the original signal plus wide bandwidth noise plus lots of harmonic distortion and continuous playback speed changes (speed change cycles about every 30/65 seconds for LP, much faster for cassette tapes).
If you drop the playback speed changes from such an emulater, it pretty much describes a classic tube amplifier, too.
did that hipster just try and convince me that worse sound is better sound? lol
oh the irony.
I have 2 cassette decks left. One I recently picked up by a dumpster. A Teak. The other I bought over 20 years ago and is a Yamaha 4Track cassette recorder for multitrack recording to cassette. There are people that ask from time to time if I can digitize their old tapes, as well as VHS tapes. I would hold onto all these players as one day, someone will need them for the purpose I just mentioned. As for the tapes themselves,. I digitized all cassettes, and kept only a few high quality S-video cassette and Metal Oxide Cassettes.
Bravo to Dsters and Sidewalk finds !! Neighbor tossed out minty JVC KD-65 last year. Expensive, vintage beast. Someday I'll have the belt replaced.
Steven King haha,. funny moron. Geez I typed a K instead of a c,.Fuck you.
I like tapes , we used to trade tapes with buddies. How do you trade mp3s? Email? Flash drives? Boring and no style!
I loved releasing my cassette albums back in the day. Cassettes do sound great on a good player/system. It appears that technology with motors and "moving parts" is rapidly giving way to virtual / digital experiences.
Hissing depends on the cassette player. I have an Onkyo Reference player. It was $1800 in 1985 and it has no noticable hiss at all. The problem with the cassette is that they cant retain as much musical sound as a cd which is inherent of the design. Most master copies up until the early 90s were done on reel to reel which is a giant cassette. The consumer audio industry limited what a cassette could do so they could sell $$$$ Cd Players $$$$$
***** For fidelity yes to limit hissing no. Most of the cassettes you could buy in the 80s were some of the worst quality tapes you could have.
I've recently got back into cassette ghetto blasters, there is something special about analogue sounds.
No, they won't. They lack the sound quality of the vinyl and lack the versatility of digital media so we're left with no apparent reason for them to come back more than nostalgia and that particular sound tapes have. Don't get me wrong, I love tapes and I still use them to this day, I have a collection and whenever I can, I get myself some blank tapes to do mixtapes. Why? Because it's fun and I enjoy doing it, but let's be honest, they will always exist and will be there, but they will never be predominant or relevant for the general listener again because the culture that developed around it, which was what really made the tape so popular, is mostly dead and gone.
The current situation is not that different if you think about it. People always complain about cassettes sounding bad, and even if that was true, we enjoyed the recordings anyway, today we have lousy-sounding, overly-compressed mp3 and a lot of people don't seem to mind about the bad quality of them. On the other hand, audiophiles has been around for all these years and they don't choose tapes or mp3s, they choose vinyl, quality-studio WAVs, FLAC, SACDs or whatever.
yeah flac is the way to go
well it really doesnt matter the format these days cuz all the best music is pre 1985
***** Absolute rubbish, there's loads of good music still released.
Yup. There's ZERO good music released today. None of the crap on the radio is stomachable.
Steven King *implying 1%< of music gets on the radio*
The cassette is still a viable medium. If you have a good-quality , properly calibrated deck (particularly one employing dbx noise reduction), using CrO2 or metal tape, you can make high-resolution tapes that will rival or exceed the sound of most other formats.
"Will Cassette-Tapes Make a Comeback ?"
In one word , NO
In two , HELL NO
Three years later they are one of the new biggest markets in the UK, Walkman’s are even being re-distributed and artists from Muse to Morrissey to Ariana Grande to OMD to 5SOS to Erasure have been releasing their new material on tape. I myself have been making mixtapes all December. I have a pretty high quality deck so they come out very nicely. If it’s the kinda trend you wanna invest in awesome! If not I totally get that.
I talked to a group of kids of this generation once about VHS tapes and cassettes. They didn't even know what they were! I was amazed at that, considering that I was born before 2000. Now, all you have to do to watch a movie or TV is whip out your computer or phone and, with internet, THERE YOU GO! I'm amazed at that.
I'm 14 and was born in 2005 and I have 2 VHS players one I purchased the other I found in the attic after the purchased the first one 9 vhses 17 cassette tapes 2 lost cassette tapes a walk man a cd/radio/cassette player (that broke they suck) and a shoebox cassette player so there you go
1:46 "Even some music pro's are returning to tape's flat tones and fuzzy hiss".
Excuse me? Flat tones and fuzzy hiss? What equipment are you using?
My cassettedeck (using proper cassettes) has no flat tones, great dynamics and no hiss.
Yeah bit did you see that zombie they were referring too? Guy was clueless. Just an actor for their show.
I am pleased that there are quite a few people that actually remember the technical maintenance of a tape player. Tape head cleaning and alignment, pinch roller cleaning. Testing of the tape clutches, and belts are what makes a good tape player tick. And yes, analog is superior most of the time. Remember that MP3's sacrifice sounds that they THINK are not heard by humans in order to compress the format. And I too agree that if you were a digital purist, you would go to a .wav . Not mp3.
I get no hiss on my tapes I use a pro tape deck
Hardly bought commercial cassette tape releases from any artist, but blank tapes were a must to record my own mix tapes to carry on in my sony walkman (I'm 41); hundred of tapes recorded directly from the Lp Vinyl record source were made with custom sleeve designs using color felt pen markers and fine point pen too...many, many, were give-away hooks to get to know girls (a classic mix tape with lovesongs).
Cassette tapes were a good idea when they first came out because prior to that we hadreel to reel tape machines which were cumbersome and had to be threaded through likea movie projector. The cassette was self contained, and compact, and for quite some time, served its purpose well. However, over time, sound quality deteriorated, and tapeswould often tighten up and jam. I'm glad we have cd's now, they remain sound perfect,and if handled and stored correctly will last a lot longer than any tape will.
+Gary Dunn The problem is that no matter how well you try to take care of a CD, eventually it develops scratches. Besides that, by the time any physical media wears out, one is often tired of listening to it anyways. I would go as far as to say the tape/CD would wear out it's welcome before it wears out it's playability.
+Lesrevesdhiver Nah, if you handle a cd or dvd correctly by avoidingtouching the silver surface, or allowing it to come into contact withother discs. Then in theory, you should not get any scratches. I haveliterally hundreds of discs, and none of them are damaged, and willremain so. Cassettes, on the other hand just deteriorate with age,especially if stored either in places that are too damp, or wheredirect sunlight can get at them. Another no no with cassettes is toconstantly wind them back and forth, this caused the spools totighten up, the result? the capstan roller pulls the tape out of thecassette and it all gets tangled. I ditched loads of tapes becauseof this. So, I guess I will be sticking to optical media from now on.
Uh huh sure. Tell that to my cassette tape from 1976 that still plays fine.
I have a few cassettes that are prior to 1976 and still play. However,more have been discarded over the years than those I have kept,mainly because of deterioration in sound, or because they simplyself destructed.
Well pin holes in cd's, that's a new one on me. Incidently, I have LP'sthat are over 45 years old and still play very well. However, those oldshellac 78's, they may be 100 years old, and still play. Just don't dropone, not even on a carpet as they are very brittle and just shatter likeglass.
Actually, what needs to "come back" are boomboxes. And I don't mean some silly-looking JBL or Beats bluetooth speaker. I mean a big, square box with lots of knobs, lights, and chrome.
"...said goodbye to noisy tapes and poor audio quality" sorry - WHAT THE F**K are you on about!? Do you even know what cassettes sound like when used correctly on good machines with noise reduction?! Seriously #WSJ - STOP IT! Just STOP IT!
I was driving by a small car show a number of years ago and stopped by to check things out. One of the guys whose car I was admiring noticed my stereo was playing and inquired about the stereo and what I was playing in it. He was astonished when I told him it was the stock stereo (1997 Camry) and that I was playing a chrome (Maxell XL-II) tape that I'd 'built'.
"Will cassettes make a comeback?" Nope. Hardly anyone still has a tape player. So those artists making tape recordings are going to lose out on a lot of publicity selling their music on a format almost no one can play. Also, the tapes cost $2.50 to produce, while you can record your music directly to the computer and sell it digitally for next to nothing outside of the cost of your equipment.
I have, lets see, a Optimums Pro Series (PIONEER), Teac V3000 PRO (professional cassette deck), Teac (I forget the model) a couple boombox cassette deck. A cassette deck in my home made boombox. A cassette deck in my Panasonic SA-PM19. I may have more. I do not use them that much though. I mostly use MP3s and CDs.
jmaeshawn A lot of people I know buy tapes despite not having a tape deck to play them with, it's a tangible format, so people have more icnentive to buy something that they can physically touch and interact with. I've seen some people make both CD and tape runs of their records and the tape almost always sells out.
Matt-Bass Witchclan Digital music sounds better than tapes though. It has a better frequency response and I have listened without knowing what is playing and have had other people listen. Digital won out.
Cassette decks can be had for 50-100 bucks and sound AMAZING!
Joshua's Recordings cd won’t beat a well recorded cassette. It’s just a fact.
Oh I wish they'd come back!!!!
tapes never went away and in 30 years ive never had a tape deck eat a tape, because i never played them on cheap shit recorders,
My ranking goes like this ; 1. Vinyl 2. CD 3. Spotify/Download 4. Cassette
I don't see a reason to buy any records on cassettes if i can get it on vinyl or CD. They're hissy, don't last long and generally they might have bad quality. But, if you're an independent artist then i'll get your tape, if that's the format that you prefer.
Download, cd, cassete, 8 track and vinyl
Your argument is invalid in so many ways it's laughable.
Why is that? I genuinely don't see a reason to go cassette-only, and i don't own a cassette-deck to begin with. I do got an ATLP120-turntable, that's why i usually go with vinyl.
Hints the name!
Im cool with mp3 But I convert my Own Mp3...
I have to have it on hardcopy.
wax...tape..Cd..they become
valuable and COLLECTORS ITEMS!!! ESPECIALLY WHEN
THEIR ARE LIMITED EDITION.
FROM COLOR VINYL...
TOO 100 PRESSED.
SAME AS TAPES....
CDs are cool to if its the only format its on. But if its on wax
thats my to go hands down.
It tends to bigger in the UNDERGROUND HIP HOP CULTURE AND INDIE ROCK BANDS.....I WILL NEVER BUY A DOWN LOAD...SMH!!!
I find it impersonal
Get an album made in the 80s on cassette. Its like your listening to the real thing.
"Tangled tape and poor audio quality"
That's bullshit! The only way tapes get eaten is if you don't clean your player and as for "poor quality" I guess you've never used a Sony CD-IT, TDK SA-X, or Maxell XLII. Those tapes could easily give CD's a run For their money.
Cassette tape in no way is on par to CD quality, However Reel to Reel tape surpasses CD's by far with 7 ips and of course 15 ips tapes. That is fact..
cds were mastered from tape up until 1995
"That is fact.."
No it isn't.
bought a Broksonic Walkman on amazon - Love it works great and looks so retro
Why do you need a Cassette when you got Cd's
I know it's all about nostalgia.
But if people really had to go back to fast-fowarding & rewinding.
Or tapes being ate & destroyed by tape decks (remember that?)
People would start bitching & complaining.
They wouldn't be able to handle it.
You can't ever go back to the past.
So I say embrace the future technologies.
That's why they were created in the 1st place.
Because of the drawbacks of Cassettes, 8-tracks, Vinyl, etc.
Yes, they do have pros & cons like everything else.
People always wanna shit on cd's because, sombody mastered an album badly.
Mp3s have acceptable quality, I know it's compressed.
But thanx to mp3's I can carry my whole music library in my pocket.
So you gotta the good with the bad.
My cass collection dates back to the seventies. Tape jam problems are rare if decks and tapes are maintained properly. Every medium has their advantages.
Zz Greg
The 70s!
Wow, you should update to the 21 century.
Why worry about tape jam if you do't have to.
You analog junkies make somthing that should be convenient & make it a chore.
I remember Fast-foward, I remember rewinding.
I remember not wanting to go back either.
I'm a CD man myself.
If mastered properly, a CD will sound better than anything Besides, (SACD or DVD-Audio or the original Master)
Zz Greg
Everybody wanna point the advantages.
But don't wanna point 'Em out when it comes to digital.
Have yet to embrace digital since the need for compactness/portability hasn't arisen. other than storing a thousand tunes in a peanut size device what are the advantages of digital. I can see that being handy when jogging or biking but still using auto reverse cassette, which I prefer to CD.
30 years ago I was creating several 90 minute cassettes weekly grabbing FM signals. Those cassettes will be around for another 20 years. What happens when/if a digital device fails with a 1,000 tune inventory.
Zz Greg
put it to you like this.
If analog was so great.
If analog was good enough.
There wouldn't have been a need & want,
to invent digital audio.
Clearly people in the industry said.
"you know what?
This Analog stuff is unreliable.
You got the wow & Flutter, hiss, drop-outs, etc. "
"How are we gonna preserve our Masters 30 yrs from now?
I know, digital audio"
Trust me digital is just as reliable & probably more than analog.
Long as you got the right compatible technology you'll be able to recover audio digital files.
Honestly if your dumb enough not to back-up 1000 songs onto a data mp3-cd.
Then I would say you deserve to lose ur music when the digital device fails.
You can lose music on a tape if it gets eaten.
All tech has it's pro & cons.
I just hate when people don't acknowledge
analogs cons & digital's pros, also.
I guess because analog has way more cons than digital.
and for the technical standpoint. I'm fascinated about the technology itself and the way it works. I use both analog and digital equally emancipated when it comes to working with the technology. I would never rely on only one of both mediums.
Vinyl sounds good...tapes sound like shit.
Tapes sound quality is pretty equal to an mp3. Make sure you don't have a shit tape deck, have the correct version of dolby, and have actual speakers. The biggest problem with tapes are that people generally listen to them on far inferior equipment than what they would listen to other formats on.
+hippyslovepot you can say that about any medium then.
tightlypackedcoil Uhh... sure. The difference is that a chrome tape has objectively solid sound quality (approximately on par with an mp3) If i put a cd into a 20 dollar player with built in speakers from target and it sounds like shit, that does not mean cds sound like shit, it means my player was shitty.
+hippyslovepot it takes a lot less effort to get a cd to sound good
tightlypackedcoil Not it doesn't. You put it in a tape deck and hit play.There is no extra effort. A lot of people remember tapes being bad because when they were kids they coudn't afford to play them on a real sound system, like they are able to afford to play their cds and mp3s on now.
Yep I love them VHS cassettes. Hearing the warmth of the distorted sound track is character of its own. And the screen flutter with shifting colors is how video is meant to be. Who needs Blu-ray ?
Awesome video!, I'm not only obsessed with collecting(the older the better)vintage audio,(tapes etc), I too also have VERY awesome looking and interesting odd and old audio and video(electronics themselves)of any kind. I however was like WOW!! when you said in your video that you have 600+cassettes. Well I have who knows how close to that amount, plus the very endangered species of some 1st vcrs such as the Quasar VR-1000 and tapes. Alot of wealthy people where I live, just "kick it to the curb", things such as that medium size 2 boxes full of mostly very old and 1st cassettes made. The "Compact Cassette" logo on them too like I remember seeing when I was young. I used to find mostly old and well cared for stuff at the curb like stereo's/huge vcrs and round tube tv sets. Sadly I sold alot of the stuff in the late 90's. However since the "gravy train" of this awesome endangered species of electronics left my area at least. I not only will be keeping any and all of this stuff until I'm dead LOL!. I also sadly lost half my collection back in 1987 when I had to move with my family to another town. I am really "kicking myself" now off and on when seeing these cool videos on YT, when I think about "#$%^, I wish I NEVER had got rid of this stereo,tape deck,reel to reel etc and on and on. However the positive side is, I still have at least half of what I used to have. This video however made me glad that I at least still have my huge collection of media(mostly old cassettes and 8 tracks),but old video tapes, reel tapes, etc as well.
The bad thing about cassette tapes is that they are very fragile. That was a really a problem when I was a kid. But the good thing is that you can record on them (from a lossless source, obviously) and have that tape sound with every piece of music you want. If only you'd find blank cassettes to buy.
+Bogdan Serban cds are pretty fragile too though
+Bogdan Serban CDs were a lot more fragile than cassettes...records even more so. As a matter of fact, cassettes were pretty robust as it was the true mobile format of the time. They took a beating and kept on playing. So, I'm not sure where you get the idea that they were fragile.
To me CDs are a lot more fragile, some scratch and that's it, tapes instead are sturdy
+ZYC cassettes are very sensitive to magnetic interference
No. They really weren't.
Cassette is about how people really appreciate and enjoy the music. It's not just about sound quality and free music access. Cassette has shown that people do not need to share their high quality music through media social platform because back then artist could get high profits of their records selling even though there is no viral or trending through media social platform. But nowadys people always get bored with new song within just 1 month or several months. Because of what? No appreciation for the music itself...
8 years later.
They are back and hitting hard again.
2020-2021 Cassette Comeback!
Rise Records also released all their bands on Cassette. : D
Totally remember being 12 years old and waiting for a special song to show up on the radio to record on my blank cassettes. CDs taking over was heartbreaking because if I wanted a full album I had to try to convince my mom to get me a CD player running over $50 at the time. Then no added factor of recording off radio onto blanks. I went to a friends house with requests to download off Napster onto a blank CD at 17 when I scored a CD player. Doing Spotify now.
Great memories Sir !!!!
It's cool that they interviewed the owner of Sanity Muffin. They put out some pretty good ambient/drone/noise tapes. If you're into that kinda thing check em out!
Don't worry. In the age of the CD cassettes will continue to be around, and I'm afraid vinyl has gotten too expensive. Cassettes fill a particular need that CDs can't fill, particularly in older cars and trucks. So enjoy your cassettes.
I remember when downloading music was playing the radio and recording onto a cassette tape. I miss the 90s!
I still have all my cassette tapes , records, and 8 tracks . They go back as far as the late 60's .
I wish cassettes could make a comeback, but I don't see how that would happen. There are collectors, yes, but with comeback I'm talking about brands developping and producing new cassettedecks for a wide audience. Why should these brands do that? And even if they would go back in production, why would people now switch to cassettes?
We live in a digital world and cassettes are an old analog format. I really don't see how this would happen.
what I like about tape, be it digital or analog, if the recorder loses power for whatever reason, the recording is saved to that point and not lost in flash memory heaven. And, I had one as a child and will always like the mechanics of watching the tape move, cleaning and demagnetizing heads and such. Not like an mp3 player (all though I like them too) where nothing is moving, a little more boring.
i was born in 89. I played in the streets. I recorded songs from the radio. I watched tom and jerry. i didn't have flat screens or cell phones or twitter growing up either. we still used console video games, and rented vhs tapes from blockbuster. we're the generation of doug, hey arnold, and the amanda show. we are the generation of discmans, walkmans, furbys, beanie babies, and pogs. BUT I ADMIT WE HAD GREAT TIMES