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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#121

Post by georgefrowny »

ceuk wrote: post #7
finaard wrote: post #5

I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clu…

Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like. It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish. And of course there's the heady dose of nos…

> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them

For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).

Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.

There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#123

Post by yourusername »

jackdoe wrote: post #105

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…

>but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).

All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#124

Post by cellularmitosis »

jackdoe wrote: post #105

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…

> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette

It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:

The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.

Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.

The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.

My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.

Edit: according to gemini AI:

* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)

* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)

So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#125

Post by jjav »

Gravityloss wrote: post #122

Tapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.

Just a couple months ago I converted to mp3 some cassettes I recorded in the very early 80s of a local band. Not perfect audio, but sounded quite good still. Not bad for a ~45 year old tape.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#126

Post by yourusername »

kh_hk wrote: post #117

My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?

A common point of failure is the belt that drives the mechanism, it will deteriorate with time. You can buy the belts off aliexpress for a few cents.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#127

Post by ares623 »

jackdoe wrote: post #105

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…

The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#128

Post by jackdoe »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #124
jackdoe wrote: post #105

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…

> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious: The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape. Dolby B/…

> Type IV

also they are 20$ per cassette :)

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#129

Post by Supernaut »

MengerSponge wrote: post #97
tom_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff. (I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)

Depends on what you mean by fragile. CDs are really susceptible to bitrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot Archival discs are made with gold backing, which is much more robust than the aluminum reflector used in mass-pressed discs.

> CDs are really susceptible to bitrot

Define "really susceptible"? I've bought hundreds of albums on CD over the last four decades, and only one of them has ever gone bad on me.

The first CD I ever purchased, manufactured in 1990, still sounds as good as the day I bought it.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#130

Post by ares623 »

Touche wrote: post #57
dfe wrote: post #56

Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked. Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement. All of this still works, if you have a CD drive. If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses a…

CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.

Cassettes get distorted too when moving (.e.g running). There’s very cool tech in some models that prevent this distortion but they are more expensive.
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