Mix Tapes Rock my world

[au_dave]

Does anyone else only have cassette deck in their car.

 

[simonlewis]

Did have when i bought the car promptly got rid & spent £600 on a new car stereo a kenwood DNX-5280BT to be precice.

 

[MajorFubar]

Yep. Got a Kenwood CD changer in the boot but most times I can't be arsed to mess around swapping the CDs for new ones. Happy with the Kenwood cassette-radio head unit. Just wish it had a line-in or BT for the phone. With tapes recorded from my Nak, the SQ is easily as good as the CD multiplayer.

 

[au_dave]

Yeah

But I like making mix tapes, they are cool...

and the old school headphone to tape adapters so I can use my Sony discman.

 

[MajorFubar]

Stock-up while you can, I see TDK Europe recently killed-off the only tape they still made, the legendary TDK-D, meaning that as far as I can tell they no longer make cassettes of any description. My favourite chrome tape (TDK SA) was killed-off a couple of years ago and now NOS blanks are starting to ramp-up in price on eBay, particularly C90s. Metals have been unavailable for years and some of the prices they fetch are eye-watering.

Technolgy marches on and it doesn’t care who or what it kills, unfortunately. When I was a teen/young man in the 80s and 90s, cassettes were so ubiquitous that I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see the day when blanks were discontinued, just like 35mm film.

 

[chebby]

Pure nostalgia.

An iPod Classic can hold 160GB (almost 500 x C90's worth) of lossless files in a package no bigger than a cassette tape and (assuming a decent DAC is employed) in far better quality.

Ok, I speak as an ex Sony WM-6DC* / Yamaha KX580SE** owner (rather than someone with a Nakamichi) and, yes, recordings sounded great if decent tape stock (and a decent source) was used. But if you could have given me the option to have the lossless digital technology back then, I'd have bitten your arm off!

Still in use by a friend whom I sold it to *

Still in use by my older brother whom I gave it to **

 

[MajorFubar]

Indeed.
The final cassette stronghold to collapse was in-car entertainment. A C120 in an autoreverse deck gave you two hours of music, which a single CD couldn't compete with, and no I never ever had any cassette 'eaten'.
But cheap digital storage like ipods and USB memory sticks finally made them truly redundant.

I still enjoy actually recording stuff to tape for the car, but another reason cassettes died was that most people found that a chore. It takes seconds to upload an album to my iphone.

EDIT: it does irk me though that cassettes look like they'll be remembered as a has-been 'lo-fi' audio carrier which was regularly chewed by car stereos. It shouldn't be cassette's "fault" that most people never bought a decent cassette recorder and so they never heard how good cassettes could sound.

 

[chebby]

The majority of people never heard how good vinyl could sound on a decent TT. So that suffered the same fate of being remembered as inherently 'scratchy' and ridden with clicks and pops and jumps.

 

[MajorFubar]

Correct, but perhaps not quite as bad as cassette. A fair number of people knew at least one person with a half-decent turntable because it was the HiFi enthusiasts' primary source.

 

[Petherick]

What both Chebby and Major Fubar said up there ↑ applies also to digital files. Unfortunately most people download files which are at best a poor representation of what was intended (see elsewhere on this forum).

I still listen to cassettes occasionally, though not in the car. They may not be fashionable, but they are still functional. Like me.

 

[MUSICRAFT]

Hi au_dave

Welcome to the WHF Forum

All the best

Rick @ Musicraft