Random thoughts about cassettes, and vinyl...

[MajorFubar]

Go on, laugh, I've still got a Kenwood radio-cassette unit in my car, with a CD changer in the boot. It was a standard-install when the car was new in Feb '04. And to be fair, it's not bad sounding kit, be it CD, radio or - surprisingly - tape.

Giving a lift to a work-colleague last week, he commented that 'your CD player sounds good'. When I pressed the Eject button and showed him that he was listening to a home-recorded cassette (TDK SA) he couldn't believe it, because apparently it sounded too damn good to be a cr-ppy cassette. And when I told him that not only was it a cassette, it was a recording from an LP, I thought he was going to call me a bare-faced liar. LPs just didn't ever sound that good. And as for cassette recordings of LPs...

Made me realise yet again that many (most?) people seem to think good sound didn't exist until CDs and MP3s came along. Their baseline for that judgement is their old horrible £60 midi system with a plastic turntable and ceramic cartridge, along with its twin tape-deck with crippling ALC, DC bias and a permanent-magnet for an erase-head.

Shame. Both formats deserve to be remembered as being capable of infinitely better SQ than most people ever heard, not as some kind of lo-fi compromise we had to begrudgingly tolerate until the digital Messiah arrived.

Oh, and he was listening to my recording of my Eagles Greatest Hits LP.

 

[jcarruthers]

Vinyl still has an amazing resolution — this weekend I listened to one of my favourite albums, Radiohead's Kid A, and heard more layers than ever before.

What makes no sense to me is that clearly this was all recoreded on digital — so when one day they release the 96khz 24bit version will this supersede my vinyl copy?

 

[matt49]

Recorded on your Nakamichi?

http://www.whathifi.com/forum/hi-fi/my-latest-retro-purchase-a-nakamichi-dr-1-cassette-deck

That was the piece of kit I coveted more than any other when I was a nipper. Here are some more to drool over:

http://www.oobject.com/category/8-classic-nakamichi-cassette-decks/

 

[DandyCobalt]

Had the same experience recently with a cassette in the car. One of my children found a George Michael Faith cassette (my wife's, honestly) and wanted to see how my cassette player works

My car has a hidden cassette player that folds out of the dashboard at the touch of a button, and given the manufacturer, every time it works is a wonder in itself

Anyway, the sound was so good that I got a twin cassette recorder out of the loft and hooked it up to my vinyl, for the times when they don't include a download voucher or free CD. (Yes, you Joe Bonamassa...are you a-listen' ?? ).

 

[The_Lhc]

Go on, laugh, I've still got a Kenwood radio-cassette unit in my car, with a CD changer in the boot. It was a standard-install when the car was new in Feb '04. And to be fair, it's not bad sounding kit, be it CD, radio or - surprisingly - tape. Giving a lift to a work-colleague last week, he commented that 'your CD player sounds good'. When I pressed the Eject button and showed him that he was listening to a home-recorded cassette (TDK SA) he couldn't believe it, because apparently it sounded too damn good to be a cr-ppy cassette. And when I told him that not only was it a cassette, it was a recording from an LP, I thought he was going to call me a bare-faced liar. LPs just didn't ever sound that good. And as for cassette recordings of LPs... Made me realise that many (most?) people seem to think good sound didn't exist until CDs and MP3s came along. Their baseline for that judgement is their old horrible £60 midi system with a plastic turntable and a ceramic cartridge, along with its twin tape-deck with crippling ALC, DC bias and a permanent-magnet for an erase-head. Shame. Both formats deserve to be remembered as being capable of infinitely better SQ than most people ever heard, not as some kind of lo-fi compromise we had to reluctantly tolerate until the digital Messiah arrived.

I've been buggering about with a couple of old tape decks from a charity shop that I picked up for £15 quid, I've got a few albums that I can't get anywhere on CD, not even eBay (or, surprisingly, illegal torrents, which is the only time I'd ever consider using something like that), after a little cleaning I was surprised just how good they sounded, particularly as they're only single head machines. I've just borrowed a shiny 3-head Sony machine from a colleague at work today though, so I'll be very interested to hear how that sounds.

I was a big cassette fan, for the same reasons as above, the car. Even when I started buying CDs they invariably got copied to tape for the car, mate used to swear blind that his cassette copies of his CDs sounded better than the original CDs, he had some decent kit though (well, decent as far as a pair of 19 year olds were concerned).

Oh, and he was listening to my recording of my Eagles Greatest Hits LP.

And it was all going so well...

 

[MajorFubar]

Recorded on your Nakamichi?

http://www.whathifi.com/forum/hi-fi/my-latest-retro-purchase-a-nakamichi-dr-1-cassette-deck

That was the piece of kit I coveted more than any other when I was a nipper. Here are some more to drool over:

http://www.oobject.com/category/8-classic-nakamichi-cassette-decks/

Yep it was

 

[stevebrock]

Well vinyl is high resolution init!

A well set up decent TT will outperfom and CDP £ for £

 

[MajorFubar]

And it was all going so well...

lol!

 

[GMK]

As a child tapes were all I had. Great sound quality, bulletproof design and the ability to record yourself easily. Magic. The hassle of forwarding tracks on a Walkman meant you listened to whole albums rather than simply songs. How Minidiscs didn't replace inferior CD's really surprised me

 

[MajorFubar]

Must admit I do still enjoy putting tapes together for the car. I can live with the fact it makes me a quaint curiosity.

 

[CnoEvil]

I would laugh, but I happen to agree.

Those Kenwood jobbies sounded very good.........I know, as I bought one back a lifetime ago. I also used TDK SA / SA-X.

 

[GSB]

Must admit I do still enjoy putting tapes together for the car.

My fondest memories that...bet you put some together for your girlfriends too?

 

[GMK]

Shhhhhhh. None of us ever did that :silenced:

 

[stevebrock]

Vinyl still has an amazing resolution — this weekend I listened to one of my favourite albums, Radiohead's Kid A, and heard more layers than ever before.

What makes no sense to me is that clearly this was all recoreded on digital — so when one day they release the 96khz 24bit version will this supersede my vinyl copy?

yeah recorded in digital - albeit a higher resolution than CD

and yes vinyl has always been hi resolution

Digital can sound as good as vinyl yes - I have Eagles - Hotel California on 24/96 - through my Rega DAC I cant tell the difference between it and my vinyl copy

 

[Ravey Gravey Davy]

And when I told him that not only was it a cassette, it was a recording from an LP, I thought he was going to call me a bare-faced liar. LPs just didn't ever sound that good. And as for cassette recordings of LPs... Made me realise yet again that many (most?) people seem to think good sound didn't exist until CDs and MP3s came along. Their baseline for that judgement is their old horrible £60 midi system with a plastic turntable and ceramic cartridge, along with its twin tape-deck with crippling ALC, DC bias and a permanent-magnet for an erase-head. Shame. Both formats deserve to be remembered as being capable of infinitely better SQ than most people ever heard, not as some kind of lo-fi compromise we had to begrudgingly tolerate until the digital Messiah arrived. Oh, and he was listening to my recording of my Eagles Greatest Hits LP.

When I bought my TEAC all-in one 3 years ago I also rediscovered a box of cassettes from 77-81 university days.I plugged in my old 80's Pioneer twin tape deck and played stuff recorded on an old crappy Sanyo music centre.The difference between those recordings and the cd equivalents I had were quite staggering .I'm with you on this one.

 

[MajorFubar]

Must admit I do still enjoy putting tapes together for the car.

My fondest memories that...bet you put some together for your girlfriends too?

I admit to nothing til I've seen my lawyer...

:rofl:

 

[andyjm]

yeah recorded in digital - albeit a higher resolution than CD

and yes vinyl has always been hi resolution

Vinyl may be a lot of things, but it certainly isn't high resolution.

The mechanical nature of the cutting and playback approach limit the effective real world dynamic range of vinyl to about 80dB. To put this in perspective:

Vinyl 80dB (13 bits equivalent)

CD 96dB (16 bits)

Hi res 144dB (24 bits)

Now there may be other things going on that cause listeners to prefer vinyl, but it isn't 'resolution'

 

[Anonymous]

The mix tape, memories...

Just not the same putting a playlist together.

(Ref. 'Hi Fidelity' by Nick Hornby fantastic book good film great sound track)

 

[jonathanRD]

Oh dear! - I still have my tape recordings from Robbie Vincent's BBC radio friday night broadcasts back in the 80's. This got us into the likes of Freddie Jackson and Alexander O'Neil and many others. Freddie Jackson songs were the soundtrack to our wedding video.

Although rarely used, I still have my Technics RS B405 cassette deck and SL QD2 TT on the bottom shelf of my hifi unit.

Also have Geroge Michael's Faith on vinyl (probably my wife's).

Best memories were opening both doors of my Datsun Violet 1600SSS parked in the pub car park and playing (on tape) Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes. And my graphic equaliser in the glove box is legendary

 

[ID.]

yeah recorded in digital - albeit a higher resolution than CD

and yes vinyl has always been hi resolution

Vinyl may be a lot of things, but it certainly isn't high resolution.

The mechanical nature of the cutting and playback approach limit the effective real world dynamic range of vinyl to about 80dB. To put this in perspective:

Vinyl 80dB (13 bits equivalent)

CD 96dB (16 bits)

Hi res 144dB (24 bits)

Now there may be other things going on that cause listeners to prefer vinyl, but it isn't 'resolution'

I always thought there is more to something being high resolution than dynamic range and volume.

Shows how much I know...

 

[landzw]

Just out of interest how would the cassette stand to todays to 256 & 320kps digital downloads what would a cassette be?

I remember the days of my £100 panansonic walkman it use to go everywhere with me

 

[MajorFubar]

Just out of interest how would the cassette stand to todays to 256 & 320kps digital downloads what would a cassette be?

They're not directly comparable, so there's not an easy answer to that. The sound of my Nak is 'HiFi' in a way that is alien to the cheapest MP3 players, which (should) have all the advantages of flat frequency responses and 'black backgrounds' but can sound lifeless, uninvolving, narrow, undynamic and plain boring.

But with cassette, once you've perfected the electronics and the mechanics and got all the 'hi-fi' things right, the limiting-factor becomes the medium itself, with four tracks of audio crammed on 1/8" of tape crawling past at 4.76cm/sec.

Multitrack cassette recorders aimed at home studios often ran at double speed, like the Yamaha MT4x I used to use. Providing their electronics were top-drawer as well, the opportunity was there for them to sound absolutely superb. I understand there were also a handful of 'half-track' cassette decks made too, though I've never seen one. These allocated half the tape width to each channel, making a cassette unidirectional, but with sonic benefits afforded by doubling the track width.

 

[jcarruthers]

Well there can't be anything that wrong with tape as a medium — everything before "digital" was recoreded on it

Though if you read around how recording engineers hated tape and the way it sounded nothing like the live version without a ton of EQ perhaps it's not quite so simple…

 

[andyjm]

Just out of interest how would the cassette stand to todays to 256 & 320kps digital downloads what would a cassette be?

I remember the days of my £100 panansonic walkman it use to go everywhere with me

Cassette players would (apparently - I had to check) manage somewhere between 55 and 60dB of dynamic range. Thats about 10 bits in modern money.

As mentioned above, not directly comparable with MP3 which uses all sorts of clever acoustic tricks to lower bit rate.

 

[MajorFubar]

Well there can't be anything that wrong with tape as a medium — everything before "digital" was recoreded on it

Though if you read around how recording engineers hated tape and the way it sounded nothing like the live version without a ton of EQ perhaps it's not quite so simple…

I think the problems were just different. When I started learning to be a recording engineer as a teenager in the mid 80s at a small local studio, one of the most laborious tasks I was tought to learn was how to set-up a machine using test-tones. Then when they brought in new stock, all the bias, level and EQ had to be recalibrated because it could vary, even if you were using the same brand and type of tape. All that's redundant skills now, and I can't imagine there will be one recording-engineer who will miss them.

But equally, we'd never heard of digital problems like latency and jitter, and we never had to make three billion backups of a customer's mults and masters in case of unpredictable catastrophies like HDD failure, memory-stick corruption or disc-rot. We made one security back-up of the master (to Betamax tape, iirc) and that was it.