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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#201

Post by inkyoto »

bayindirh wrote: post #147
cellularmitosis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! And Type I are about $2.80 on amazon. That's quite the span!

Type IV cassettes were always exorbitantly expensive both due to high cost and low demand (and rarity of the hardware which can record them well). So, if you were able to afford a Nakamichi / Technics / Akai, then you'd be able to afford them back in the day.

Type IV (also known as Metal) cassettes came in stunning industrial designs – BASF, TDK, Maxell etc.

They were worth owing even if a Nakamichi was out of reach.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#202

Post by zkmon »

Music sounded different when there were physically moving things that produced it. Live music, turn-table, cassette spindle that have a visible action. It's not fidelity. It's about connecting the sound to real world. We know tape is not producing the sound, but we know that it moves and movement causes sound.

Sound without any visible action or movement is a bit weird for our animal instincts.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#203

Post by mrob »

embedding-shape wrote: post #176
cellularmitosis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.

>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity

It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#204

Post by nottorp »

jasonjayr wrote: post #103
floatin wrote: post #94

Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-s... According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw) The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you co…

What I'm saying has nothing to do with modern DATs of course but iirc the zx spectrum tapes were like 10 kb per minute...

They did have to work with any crap tape recorder and the interface circuitry wasn't much.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#205

Post by ryandrake »

seszett wrote: post #104
jaredhallen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lo…

> there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated Nothing prevents you from doing it today, and there is more music to download than ever before.

Some of us never stopped. I never got into the whole streaming thing. My music collection today is a hard drive full of files, just as it was in 1999. No internet connection needed. No wondering if service X has song Y. I can load the whole library onto a phone, my car, wherever I want to play it. Peak music media.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#207

Post by MisterTea »

Aldipower wrote: post #179

Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/ BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production…

> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC

Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#208

Post by lb1lf »

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/…

Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)

CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.

Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#209

Post by bovermyer »

geldedus wrote: post #206

They aren't. They remain a fringe hipster staple. Like the vinyls.

That's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label.

I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.

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