Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off

The "inaudible" low frequencies are absolutely removed during mixing, or by the mastering engineer. There's probably no content below 50hz on anything you listen to. Few speakers can reproduce such low sounds (and fewer still do it with any sort of fidelity, and fewer of those are in rooms that won't freak out at the low frequencies). But the amp and speaker use enormous power trying to reproduce them! It seriously injures the sounds we can actually hear to reproduce the sounds we can't hear.

Amps and speakers are the real limiting factors, not the recording medium. They distort very easily (and never read the distortion figures of amps - they're not anything like real world conditions). Mixing is done to make the speakers work well, not to be "accurate".

edit: When tracking and mixing records, I routinely put a high-pass filter on every single track, specifically to prevent subsonic rumble. I often low-pass tracks as well, to limit noise, hiss, and distortion artifacts. This is so routine that even many microphones have a built-in high-pass switch. In mixing, I might high-pass guitars as high as 300hz, throwing away whole octaves of low-frequency information. This is to keep it from conflicting with kick drums, bass guitar, and other instruments that need that space. Solo the guitar in the mix, and it sounds weird. In context, you can't hear the difference in the guitar, and the mix itself sounds better.

>All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment.

This I agree fully with. However, this is also (IMHO) part of vinyl's challenge - the entry cost for getting blow-me-away-results is much, much higher than for a digital system.

Now, assuming we use the same speakers (Which, if anything, is the one link in the chain where one should put the most of one's budget!) and amps and are left only with the source part:

You can get an excellent DAC for a couple of hundred dollars. If you want something top-of-the-line, inarguably reference-grade, that'll set you back a couple of kilobucks. (There are lots of more expensive DACs; however, at $2k or thereabouts, the Benchmark DAC2 hardly leaves any room for improvement in other factors than user interface and bragging rights.)

As for source - with the DAC sorted, you can use just about anything. Laptop. Old CD-player with a digital output. Anything will do. Total cost (excluding amps/speakers) for a reference-grade system: $2,100 or so. For a system which gets you 99% of the way there - $300 or so. (Obviously, these are very rough ballpark figures, intended to stress the point more than anything else.)

So, how does the analog side of things look?

Good LP players cannot by their very nature be very cheap; there's simply too much precision mechanics about. So, let us say that a 'very good' LP player is the Linn LP12 with no upgrades. That alone appears to set you back in excess of $3k, luckily including what I assume to be a decent, though not stellar pickup.

Adding to that, you need a RIAA preamp; disregard the cheapest ones - look inside, and all you'll find is an op-amp, a voltage regulator and a simple second-order filter. Say, (I am just guessing here, having built my own RIAA preamp years ago) - $500-1,000 will get you up from the basic designs and into the realm of things which can do the LP12 justice. Grand total - $3,500-4,000.

So, twice the cost of the digital reference - and this is still a -by audiophile standards- very basic analog system with lots of room for improvement. Also, chances are the $300 digital system will run circles around it - even more so if you buy some cheap DSP plugins which can emulate the characteristics of LP playback, giving you an experience closer to what vinyl would sound like.

That being said, I fully understand the people who appreciate the tinkering potential of analog systems; you can mix and match accessories and components to a much larger degree than in digital systems, adjust various properties (needle weight; tracking force &c) all influencing the sound; however, when you do that (I do!) you are not necessarily doing it for the sake of faithful reproduction, but rather as a very expensive, very limited way of doing EQ. (Best investment I ever made to my hifi-system: A four-band parametric EQ unit. Sorry, all hardcore audiophiles.)

No, it's always been the practice, since the 1950s at least. Microphones and media that could reproduce far more accurately than amps/speakers have been around since at least the 1940s. Modern mixing developed in the mid/late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Mixing any sort of multitracked pop music is extremely artificial. Consider any record where an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar are roughly the same volume. In practice, you can't even hear an acoustic guitar next to a raging guitar amp! In the stereo field, things are panned hard left, hard right, or center (there's even a word for it - LCR. Off-center panning sounds weird). Radical eq alterations, compression, multi-miking techniques... heck, move a microphone an inch relative to an acoustic guitar, and it can sound completely different. I have started using two mics on acoustic guitars - one about a foot away, and the other six or more feet away, and blending them. The blend sounds better than either mic by itself. And then there are synths, drum machines, and other direct electronic instruments...

Yeah, "naked sound" in recording doesn't exist. I've been playing acoustic guitar for over 30 years, and play drums and sing and do a lot of live folk music. Recorded/amplified music sounds VERY different. And it should.

Thank you so much!

$5 gets you a gadget that will stream music from a headphone jack into a tape player in a car. I had one for my last car; it worked great. Or are these folks so poor they don't even have a smart phone? "Free with plan" Android phones can easily play tons of music. Yes they fill up, but many do have an SD card option.

Or you can spend $15 on an MP3 player (or pick one up at a thrift store for less). Considering tapes cost more than digital tracks, you'd save enough by buying digital to pay for the MP3 player and the cassette adapter by just forgoing a couple of tapes.

As to "cost effective": Blank tapes cost way more than blank CD-Rs. A quick search finds 30 name-brand discs for six bucks [0], and I've seen them less than $0.01 each in bulk. [0b] Tapes cost nearly a dollar each.

Almost everyone, in college or otherwise, needs to have a computer, or has access to one (libraries!), and most inexpensive computers have CD-Rs. If you don't have a CD burner in your computer, one costs less than a decent cassette recorder. $11.99 on Amazon will get you one, in fact. [1]

And it will be faster to make copies onto CDs, and the copies will be strictly better, than using tape.

Tapes are simply a retro "style" thing. They're not cheaper, and they suck. Trying to justify them in any way just doesn't work.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Branded-Recordable-30-Disc-9...

[0b] https://www.amazon.com/Smartbuy-700mb-80min-Recordable-1000-...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-XuBlack-External-Supports-Co...