It's not always just about the sound. To me, music isn't just something you listen to but something you also feel and experience. Cassette tapes, along with vinyl and other physical media, allow you to interact with the music itself. I've been recording off the radio onto tape since I was a child, and it forms this sort of connection to the music you're recording. That's why I love cassette tapes and still use them today.
"allow you to interact with the music itself" what? no it doesn't. :-O you want to feel something? hold the booklet of the CD or print the lyrics on paper and hold them. ;-)
@vaso opel The music is imprinted onto the tape, disc, or whichever medium you're using so yes, you are interacting with it. Not just through physical touch mind you, but also through the mechanism of the player/recorder.
@@BrettDarien "the mechanism of the player/recorder." ? you mean by watching the tape or the CD move?? :-O hm...if I'm watching the VU meter...am I interacting with the music? :-D look...simple stuff really...you LISTEN to music...that's it...the end. you want something more? go play an instrument or sing ;-)
@vaso opel VU meters give you visual feedback of what's playing, and are definitely helpful for recording. Others just appreciate the additional visual flare they give you. I would much rather watch a VU meter than a music video myself. Regardless, we all enjoy music in different ways. I personally think that music is the safest drug available to the public. Listening is only half of the experience
People recorded the strangest things on cassettes. I'm addicted to thrifting old home recordings, so much weird and interesting stuff. A lot of stuff worth sampling. Cassettes are often like time capsules, with moments of the past you either forgot about or never heard. Is it dead? It depends on who you ask i guess. I love the hiss, the hypnotic reels and the archeological value. 😊
I have reel-to-reel tapes of a radio station from Portland, Oregon in the early '70s that only existed for like three years, and it's the holy grail of my media collection. There is NOWHERE else to hear this stuff, and I might have the only recordings in existence of some of it. There are advertisements for a popular music store's third anniversary sale, and they've been around for like 55 years. It's unbelievable. KQED, Rockin' in Quad! They claimed to be quadrophonic, but nobody broadcasted in quad.
I am a long time engineer and recording enthusiast (since the early 70's) and a pro musician. I have kept a lot of things I have recorded over these many decades in their original form hoping to consolidate my band and related music recordings into one general format. To accomplish this I have kept my several reel-to-reel machines (Sony 4 track, Sony 1/2 track, and a Pioneer rack mount) reel to reel), a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder, a Sony DAT recorder and a Phillips DCC (Digital Compact Cassette). I have lots of recordings done over the years on each format. About a year ago I began importing these recordings into my computer. Most are live recording of various bands and studio recordings. What surprised me most was how good the 4 track cassette recording from the 80's and 90's were. I brought these recordings into my DAW and using some EQ and compression I found that the cassette media did a fairly good job recording directly from a PA/mixer. Like anything, there are low level cassette decks and higher level ones like my Tascam (3 3/4 IPS, DBX NR). My friends and fellow musicians have been quite amazed at the quality I have been able to glean from these decades old cassette recordings. One note: I totally agree with your remarks about using the right brand and type of cassette on a particular recorder was a major issue to insure the highest quality recordings and cleaning and demagnetizing tape heads before every session was a "must do". Great stuff.
Thank for sharing. I'm fairly new to the hobby and acquired an Akai X-360. Boy, at 15 ips, this thing, in my humble opinion, crushes all formats. Question: do you think a metal tape with a high end cassette deck can get close to reel to reel quality? Thank you should you respond.
@@arrya5372 You can't use metal tape on just any cassette deck. The heads of the cassette deck have to be made of special alloys to withstand the metal tape and finding a cassette deck that has those type of recording heads won't be easy. My understanding is that using a metal tape on normal cassette heads will destroy the heads on a normal deck. As good as a high end cassette deck sounds, I don't think it can come close to a good reel-to-reel deck recording at 15 IPS just from it's technical limits. A cassette tape is 1/8 inch wide and the normal speed of a cassette is 1 7/8 IPS. The fastest speed I know of on a cassette deck is 3 3/4 on many 4 track decks (Tascam, Fostex, Yamaha etc.) as opposed to the normal cassette speed of 1 78 IPS. A reel-to-reel running at 15 IPS on a standard 1/4 inch tape (twice as large as a cassette tape) will be able to record wider, louder tracks with more headroom and less low level hiss. Think in terms of pixels in digital photography. The more pixels your camera is able to do, the more color and density your pictures will be. Similarly a cassette tape being 1/8 inch moving at 1 78 or 3 34 IPS cannot get as detailed a signal as a reel to reel tape running at 15 IPS. You can still get reasonably good recordings on a cassette format but it's no match to a reel to reel at 15 IPS. Hope this helps.
@@rickpearce9239 For 24 track 2" studio source tapes, the individual tracks compare to the width of compact cassette tracks. But a whole lot more tape under the heads due to the higher speed, as you mention, and also far more robust transport mechanism and daily calibration by a studio engineer or intern.
@@editingsecrets Thanks I agree. The two studios I worked at in the late 80's early 90's both had 24 track 2" tape machines. One was an MCI and the other was an Otari. Both of those machines needed cleaning and adjusting everyday but they sounded awesome. There are also differences in the motors used to drive the tapes that will affect the quality of the recording. A cassette's motor could never compare to most reel to reel machines as far as specs like wow-and flutter and spot on speed accuracy. I have fond memories (and hundreds of tapes) from those tape/analog days but I can't say I ever want to have to do any serious work on reel-to-reel tape again. I've been a spoiled DAW user for many years. Thanks for the conversation.
I was speaking to an employee at the local music store (they stock vinyl, CDs, cassettes, even some 8 track, pretty much the last one in my town) and he said "Guardians of the Galaxy" spiked cassette and Walkman sales at his store, and then "Stranger Things" spiked them again last year, and he's been having younger people coming in buying cassettes on a pretty regular basis since then.
The biggest advantage with cassettes is there is no button called "next". That button destroys any meaningful music exploration. All systems with a next button while listening to new/unknown has an average playing time ranging between 8-12 first seconds. And, if that is all the chance you give a new track then you will reject practically every single one of my favourite tracks ever recorded. So I put down mixed tapes with a lot of progressive stuff that it isn't even easy to skip tracks on just to make it more convienient to just listen through a track rather than just skip to next more immediatly pleasing, but probably pretty soon boring track...
@@xaverlustig3581 Operating word here is "isn't easy to skip track on". And tape skip track funktions wouldn't work very well on my mixes as I do not add silence but rather draw them together, and in other cases parts of the tracks themselves is so low in some places that it skips to the middle of the track. But even if, and when, I used DAT it wasnä't really convenient to skip tracks on tape...
I’m an old timer born in 1955 and I was very much into cassettes as a teenager I mowed grass so I could purchase my first cassette recorder, and as you mentioned, I would record my records so that I did not wear them out when I listen to them, and I never once ever considered purchasing pre-recorded cassettes
After your video on cassette the other week I dug out my Yamaha KX200 and put it back in my system. The heads have been regularly cleaned and demagnetised. I recorded the CD of Space Shanty by Khan (sans Dolby) onto a CrO2 to compare the two. It sounded surprisingly good. Better than I remember in fact. I've also dug out a box of dub reggae tapes and listened to those too.
I think “Guardians of the Galaxy” had a part in the up-tick in the format. It generated nostalgia for older folks and curiosity for the kids. It’s not always about the quality of the playback. ▶️
Definitely, and maybe Stranger Things, and the Karate Kid tv show with flashbacks showing Johnny using a 1982 Walkman in 1980 :) I noticed prices on Walkmans really spiked for a couple of years, like brand-new prices for used machines that still worked.
Not completely dead, but in much the same way as (at 68) I’m not! I have a recently serviced Nakamichi 582, who’s sole purpose is transferring old cassettes into my Digital Audio system at the highest quality possible. These are either friends cassettes of sentimental value so they can listen to them or recordings that have never been (or are no longer) available on CD or streaming service.
That’s exactly what I think. Someone who loves music likes all audio formats they all hold a place in my heart. No better feeling knowing you can listen to music and experience it however you want.
Although audio quality is important, there is something about taking the effort of listening to an audio cassette, but this is also true for a CD, minidisc, vinyl, dcc or any physical audio format. It's like people nowadays in the always-connected and streaming age really don't see any value in music other than "it's there and I can turn it on whenever I want". I like the act of deciding what to listen to, go to some shelf and take it from there, in case of a cassette rewind or fast-forward it and actually sit down and listen to it.
I still have many different types of TDK tapes, which I recorded in the early 80s from LP,s they still sound good, good old times, thanks for the video.
Cassette was always a marginal format for music, requiring precise manufacturing of small mechanical parts to give stable speed and tape handling. And the advanced tape formulations were absolutely critical to getting good performance. Many machines were barely acceptable, with a few, like Nakamichi, Tandberg, Revox, etc., that performed at higher levels. But the performance only held up as long as the heads lasted and the mechanism stayed in calibration. The permalloy heads that were used early on were very soft and wore quickly on the original chrome tapes. Companies like Sony and Akai used very hard ferrite heads, but these performed poorly for saturation and distortion. Only when the Sendust material was introduced did the heads both hold up and perform well. As a technician at the time, I hated working on the small mechanisms. Most were very touchy to get just right. Today, it's hard to find a new cassette machine with performance that's any better than mediocre. I still do repair work on vintage audio components, but won't go near an old cassette deck.
I will surprise you, but I went from vinyl format (after 15 years of collections) to cassette format 3 years ago. The reason is that I rediscovered this format in a new and much better way than in my teenage memories. The reason is that today we are living in the best period for this format: I can record cassettes with better quality sources and listen to them with better designed headphones than those of the time. I record on very good quality cassettes and the result is really surprising! I also repair myself old Sony Walkmans and now the cassettes are my best way for listening analog sounds on the go.
@@vasopel you know what, I also have two high-end portable CD players and some CDs. But I prefer to use my Walkmans and my cassettes. Despite the obvious presence of noise, the sound on a good type 2 cassette is so punchy that it makes CDs sound flat to my ears. And I also prefer the cassette "object" and seeing it spinning in the player, rather than a cd usually invisible when playing. It’s not just the sound, but also the visual that makes me prefer the cassette!
@@cookinuts1923 I don't know what you mean by "punchy" ...but the DAC on your CD players is probably garbage...that is why you prefer the cassettes, and who cares about the noise...there is so much noise outside the house that it doesn't matter anyway ;-) hm..there are CD players with clear covers so that you can see the disk spin :-) and finally...you better keep your eyes on the road instead of your music player :-D
@@vasopel yes, you're right, a CD player has little chance of distracting me unlike a cassette player 😊 As for my two CD players, they are really top-of-the-range CD players (Technics and Sony) with impeccable sound. but I still have more love for the typical cassette sound (I know, I know…) 😅
@@cookinuts1923 well...in the end of the day...what really matters is having fun and enjoying yourself :-) if you're having that with cassettes...keep doing it ;-)
Cassettes clearly aren't dead as I just sold 5 x TDK Metal cassettes for £90 (and a head demagnetiser 😄). When I played them they still sounded extremely good. (streaming for me though)
@@gingernutpreacher I did use them many years ago and they were excellent. Mostly used the standard AD-90 though as they were quite pricey but on a decent deck the quality was worth it on occasion.
Recently, I bought into the cassette format for some fun. I found a decent Onkyo deck for dirt cheap at a thrift store and was curious how good (or bad) the sound quality would be recording onto the normal, cheap cassettes that most people would actually buy. I serviced the deck and splurged on a set of Maxell UR-90s. These were my takeaways from the experience: - Cassettes don't sound great, but they don't sound godawful. With a decent deck in good working order they sound perfectly acceptable. They're a step down from other formats, particularly the noise floor, but if you're not being too critical they're okay. Somewhere in the neighborhood of FM radio to my ears, maybe marginally worse. - Their main advantage, all but gone in the digital age, seems to be how very easy it is to fire off your own recordings. You set the levels, press the red button, and off you go. I don't think any other mainstream format has ever invited you to record as much as a cassette tape does. - They're also handy as a portable format. I have an older MX-5 which happens to have a working tape deck (I serviced it so that I could use the adapter) and once I'd gone through with the effort to doctor up a mixtape, it was pretty nice to be able to just grab the tape and listen in the car. There's no having to worry about internet connections or battery levels and stuff, only the small issue of the stability of a fragile 30 year old tape mechanism which could go rogue any moment. The Miata tape deck is even the fancy kind which automatically detects the ends of songs for you. It's impressive in an "awww, you go little guy!" kind of way. So overall I won't be pouring money into the format. I've had my fun. But I can also see the (limited) appeal to people who never experienced it, as a novelty. I was pretty young when cassettes were in vogue and so had to confirm their performance for myself, but yeah. They're fun as long as you don't expect too much, can service electronics (almost all old cassette decks seem to have something wrong with them), and don't waste too much of your money.
Maxell UR-90 are not particularly good tapes, so your review is unsurprising, but I think the so-so performance you got was because of the tapes and not the machine. I've used quite a few UR series tapes and they're distinctly subpar to the equivalent TDK or Sony standard tapes, and I'm actually starting to purge them from my collection. Just recently I taped something on a UR60 and it just sounded mushy and unfortunate. Then I used a Sony HF and it sounded much better.
One genuine reason to buy cassettes is that a lot of low-budget music was released *only* on cassette. So if that's the music you want to listen to, cassette is the only way. DM
I bought a dennon cassette player last year. The thing works well. Serviced and parts replaced. I still have casettes that work well from my youth (yes I'm that old) that survived my Walkman days. Sales of cassettes are up. I suggest watching ITN news tonight.
I bought a Denon in 1995 and it was terrific, but only lasted about seven years before auto-reverse and dubbing functions went weird, and I foolishly didn't get it repaired, but it was the CD-burner era by that time so dubbing was no longer important.
I tend to listen to a lot of my music on youtube. Any thoughts as to the quality of youtube vs.spotify or other compressed streaming services? (still got my vestafire 4-track portastudio, btw and I'm keepin' it)!
In high school in the 80s, pretty good quality blank tapes were cheap enough to copy a few music highlights and give them to a friend. And to make an easier to use good quality backup of a vinyl record for everyday listening, limiting potential damage to the vinyl. All without concern for the expense of the blanks. Also, cassettes were good to assemble favorites to take along in the car. CD took a while to have affordable car players & changers without skipping. Even longer to have affordable recorders and blank discs. Minidisc a nice idea a few years later but expensive, hard to find, and very short recording time per disc if you wanted to stay at full CD quality. At home, I couldn't afford the ultimate, a Nakamichi cassette deck, but had a pretty good Sony deck. I always let it do its 30 second calibration run on a new blank tape. Today, I share a music playlist by emailing just the links, or parking the mp3's (good enough) on a shared drive. Lots of room for hours of mp3's on any phone, with an app that lets you enjoy a playlist without needing the cell data plan while taking a walk. I miss my Sports Walkman's waterproof feature and satisfying physical buttons, easy to use by touch to skip a song ahead or back without having to stop what I'm doing to take it out and look at it, unlike any touchscreen phone app. And I also miss the teeny tiny ingenuity of my pop-out mini Walkman, I forget the model number now, that wrapped around half of the cassette. Those gadgets randomly left my life many years ago.
Having lived through the entire history of cassettes (as have you), they went where vinyl could not, they provided budget home recording (I played musical instruments), and they allowed "favorites" mixes for parties and casual listening. There was 8 track: sonically superior, had a lot of drawbacks. I got rid of all of my vintage cassette equipment. Why would I use it? I can't remember that we went for vintage stuff the way that younger generations do today.
Yes. That's the part I don't get. Cassettes were affordable, had pretty good to really good sound quality depending on gear and careful use, were ubiquious, invited recording, and were portable. There was nothing else that compared that we were choosing to do without. CD's initially expensive and no consumer recording ability. Reel to reel and then DAT better sound quality but very expensive, rare, finicky maintenance, and a reel to reel tape is bulky. Today, vintage cassette enthusiasts are choosing to use something worse in every way except handwriting a label quickly and having a physical thing to hand off. When desktop publishing started in my high school and college years, we didn't stick with Courier and smudge the laser prints to make it look like mimeographed Selectric stencils. We immediately made use of the range of fonts and layout options and every page a high resolution clean original. I can't imagine anyone in 1990 buying a mimeo machine if they could afford a laser printer.
Still have four working cassette decks, including a very good 3-head Sony. I love using them to record. And I know a few musicians who still use cassettes in those double speed 4-track "Portastudio" recorders for working out songs and arrangements. Yeah, using one today makes little sense, but it is just fun.
There's something about the simplicity of a Portastudio that makes it useful for sketching ideas. No computer, no menus, no internet connection, just buttons, and music. DM
@@AudioMasterclass I'm surprised nobody today makes a product like the Yamaha AW series or Roland VS series: all in one box, easy to use, plug in your mics and instruments, friendly big transport controls, scrub wheel, faders, finish a mix internally (and burn a CD) or transfer to computer and remote control a DAW. No worries about OS upgrades, driver conflicts, viruses, or whether an email or chat notification could interrupt your recording. Put the whole rig under your arm to take it with you. Almost as simple as a Portastudio but CD or better quality, instant access, nonlinear editing, no degredation from multiple playbacks. Seems to me there's still nothing to dislike about all that!
@@editingsecrets Seriously, I'm totally with you on that. Despite how great computers CAN be, they CAN do a million things, but not all at once, and often not as fluidly as a dedicated machine (and as a listener, it's really sad how much music online is genuinely worse-quality than cassette tape-- but hey, 'digital' makes perfect!). Having the best recording experience on a computer usually requires making it into a dedicated recording machine with little-to-no background anything running, no internet.
Does _streaming_ include ripping my CDs to my file server then accessing the file as such, then playing it with, say Mplayer? Or is it only streaming when the same files are served by my dlna software to a client?
I think that most people understand streaming to be Spotify and the like, although streaming from a local server, maybe Jellyfin, isn't that much different. How we use language around this may evolve over time. DM
Streaming technically refers to any remote access of a media file over a computer network that delivers packets in real time playback speed. And often to that including a subscription to a service with an enormous library and recommendation engine, and compressed audio quality to serve more customers who don't mind a step down from ultimate audiophile perfection. But it doesn't have to include those additional connotations.
@@editingsecrets In the days when I began with networks in the '70s what was meant by 'network' was simple, but these days USB is a network technology (and more complicated than TCP/IP/Ethernet), so would accessing a file on a USB-connected hard drive count as streaming? I wouldn't think of it as so. I think a firmer definition is required, such as the use of a protocol designed to transfer data and timing information. I use a home dlna server for video and some audio at home, and consider that streaming.
@@frogandspanner You started a little earlier than I did with networking. I knew about the Internet but my own first hands on networking experience was setting up some Appletalk file sharing in the late 80s. "I think a firmer definition is required, such as the use of a protocol designed to transfer data and timing information." That works for me, how about we say streaming is using a computer network to transfer timestamped media packets for realtime playback from a remote computer? That would eliminate usb. Would that include what we both meant?
I have a large collection of music on cassette tape (TDK SA-X tape) half of which I recorded on my Nakamichi 600 tape deck from vinyl on a AR XA turntable using either a Stanton 681EEE or Dynavector 50X cartridge, needless to say they sounded pretty good. More importantly was the music that was mixed tapes for the car, parties and various moods from my youth. If I could find a service technician good enough to restore my old Nakamichi tape deck in Sydney Australia, I would do it in a heartbeat- just for the memories as well as the sound quality. I also use to demagnetise and clean the head’s regularly. As I was an audiophile and OCD, so my daughter pointed out to me when she was a teen.
OK, as an 80's generation kid I have a stack-load of cassettes. But I have no cassette player. The last one that worked I dropped about 10 years ago and the player broke. One area that you forgot was in education; cassettes dominated universities until the mid 90's. Needed a recording of the lecture because you missed it? It was on cassette. An audio assignment was handed to every student? You all got a cassette copy; I still have my 1993 linguistics transcription assignment cassette tape on my shelf. Need to go to the language library and learn a language? They were all on cassettes. Incredibly CDs didn't get a look in at universities for over a decade despite the CD format being invented in 1982.
The format was originally for speech transcription and information. That it was made stereo and fairly high fidelity was amazing engineering after the introduction. My family had a Norelco Cassette-Corder taken along for music lessons to hear the practice exercises. Today it would be captured on the kid's phone.
Love cassettes. Just bought a pristine Revox B215. It’s absolutely amazing. I also have two Nakamichi Dragons👍 Cassettes are alive and well in our household.
Okay, cassettes are dead for multiple reasons (and right so). But I still haven't found a new medium giving me the good mix of advantages that the cassette had. A cassette may not have the dynamic range of a CD (although with a good chrome dioxide or pure iron ("metal") tape, DOLBY C or DOLBY S and a well-adjusted bias and head position you could come very close to it), and a streaming service with more than 128 kbps mp3 may produce a better sound, a vinyl record may have nicer cover arts to display and give room to the nostalgic and meditative ceremony of unwrapping, cleaning the record and watching the stylus touch down on the beginning of the track... But until today, I haven't found a medium that gives me the following advantages simultaneously: - a physical device that I can handle myself, present to others, share with others, - easy recording and playback with the same device (no need to burn disks or use the PC to build my own collection), - easy handling, compact casing, small overall dimensions, - robust against dropping down (maybe the outer case would break, but never the cassette itself) - no need to care for scratches or fingerprints on the surface, decent robustness to dusty or dirty environment, - easy identification of its content by looking at the inlay sheet (which can be replaced/corrected anytime), - some place for cover art, even not quite as nice as on the 12" vinyl record covers - affordable price per piece... No "newer" media show all of these advantages at once. Maybe it's a sign that today's users do not need or value them, maybe it's a different way how (esp. young) people today "consume" music... I am 58 now and I want to listen to music consciously, with affection (if it is good music, not the mass products for a broad market), I would even say today I listen to it even more attentively and consciously than in my younger days, discovering more and more details in the music. Of course, I do not use cassettes anymore, too, but more because a good, affordable cassette Tape deck is hard to find (and quality cassettes as well). But I will never forget the countless nights with my earphones on in my student's apartment, listening to my recordings (some of which I copied from CD from my friends, admittedly) and diving deep into the details of the arrangements and lyrics... (Edited because I had written "record player" instead of "cassette tape deck")
I've got three cassette decks that I've refurbished and calibrated to spec. Two of them are Pioneers with auto BLE, which works a treat. My cassette tapes recorded from digital playlists on decks with HX Pro and Dolby (even Dolby B) sound absolutely fantastic on any of my three machines. It's very difficult for me to tell any difference between the HD playlists and the cassette tapes. And I love the nostalgia of the cassette as a physical medium. BUT -- it took a LOT of careful work to get my decks to this point! The casual listener who thinks "cassettes might be cool" and buys a used deck on ebay, thinking they can just start in enjoying the music? Forget it. That's the barrier today, because you can't buy a reasonably-priced, full-featured new deck -- with HX Pro, Dolby, and BLE -- to enjoy out of the box.
At a lot of music performances by relatively unknown artists at Arts Festivals etc., they often have a booth where you can buy a cassette of their music. That's another area where cassettes are not dead but thriving. Cassettes at the used lp places around me were priced at $1 for many decades; now their prices have jumped up from $1 (last year) to $4 this year. That indicates an increased demand. But perhaps the main indicator, is that there are companies coming out with new cassette players. One of the ones reviewed plays a cassette and has its own amp and speaker, with an output to power a higher quality external speaker if you wish. It also plays bluetooth. We are at the beginning of a new fad. Not the end by any means. If you think about it, a magnetic head, recording or playing back a cassette, is the exact same process as with reel to reel tapes; only at a slower speed. Many think reel tapes are the ultimate medium for sound quality. Why wouldn't cassette also be good? Since not nearly as much tape passes through the head per second as reel tape, the compromise of limiting dynamic range had to be chosen. Otherwise it would overload the tape with too much signal. The tape is not as wide either. Cassette was intended to give good sound on the go; and it succeeded at that. It was never intended to compete with the dynamics of reel tape. So nothing it intended to be in the first place, ever failed as far as sound performance. It did exactly what was expected of it within its limitations because of the lower tape speed. I am sure that a top Tandberg, Revox or Nakamichi cassette deck sounds way cleaner on factory prerecorded music than an lp on what most people play lps on. With a smoother more lush sound and much more tonal beauty than someone with a $200 turntable cartridge combination. Factory prerecorded cassettes of different artists vs. cassettes I recorded an lp on with a turntable and a fairly expensive top model Shure cartridge was a dead heat. A tie, is what I would give it. And I have ears and I listened closely to many tapes. I even had a few where I had the factory prerecorded tape and had taped the same album titles from my above mentioned turntable. So except for dynamic range, which is limited because of the slower tape speed, a factory prerecorded cassette played back on a well above average cassette deck should be looked at as roughly the same sound quality as someone playing an lp on a $300 turntable/cartridge rig. There are lower model cassette decks available used for less than $300. Sometimes less than $200. Cassettes at thrift stores and flea markets are dirt cheap. Sometimes half a dollar... Isn't that better than paying near $30 for a new lp, or $6 for a used one whose surface looks like a "maybe" or a "maybe not" Now at higher price ranges, a well chosen $400 turntable with a $300 cartridge ($700) might give you sound that is more palpable and clear than all but the best cassette decks. At that price, the scale might shift back over to vinyl. But you still might like something more in certain ways about the cassette's sound; a lush smoothmess and continuity. I prefer a faint hiss in the near silent passages to vinyl's ticks and pops. If your tonearm is great, you will hear much less ticks and pops. But your cartridge will have to be great not to hear inner groove distortion and a thinning of the sound towards the end of each side. You will also have to get up to flip the record, brush the stylus etc. Many good cassette decks have auto reverse where it plays through both side without having to get up and mess with it. So cassettes are coming back. It would surprise me if they came back as strongly as lp. On an absolute basis the lp is the higher quality medium. If you chased all around town and on the internet for the choicest pressings. Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound once compared a Living Stereo reel tape to the lp of the same title. He commented how all lps have a whitish coloration compared to tape. The reel tape also won for clarity and palpable presence Cassette is a viable medium if you don't expect the world from a format that was never intended to challenge reel tape for sound quality. If you have a good moving coil cartridge on a good tonearm/turntable, you will like lps better for clarity and dynamics. But for sumptuousness and tonal beauty, tone colors, smoothness, continuity and some other things, you just may still like the sound of tape,
Hard to talk about normal when it’s a youthful audience who want art not just music. This is about art vs audio. It’s truly not that bizarre if you frame it differently. Zegema beach does some really cool handmade pieces and releases. It’s been an evolving art form and more then just a listening experience. Personally I don’t have any cassettes but it’s not hard to understand how people romanticize physical media in general. It’s such a powerful piece of art too own when you hold a vinyl or cassette. Especially these days.
Streaming compression breaks the music more offensively than transit through a good tape mechanism. Few survive and none are being made, but a thirty year old cassette deck beats a Spotify subscription.
I listen to streaming and CDs most of the time. I went back to vinyl few years ago, but only for nostalgia and occasional listening. Never went back to cassettes, although I do miss the rituals of recording my LPs to type II tapes on my Nakamichi 582.😊
It’s about owning a physical copy of your favorite music. Most people don’t give a rats a* about sound quality (whatever that may be these days with blue tooth equipment). Btw, reel2reel should have been an option. :) To my ears, a master tape played on a Revox PR99 has sound more convincing than the same album played digitally via a Bryston BDA 3.14 DAC.
I see the cassette resurgence as just another fad. Cassettes are a novelty to those that didn't grow up with them and that's fine. There's no logic in buying new music on cassette, but I can understand the novelty in making a mixtape. Now, excuse me as I go back to listening to a mixtape I recorded off the radio (in mono) back in 1980.
When I was a kid in the 80's my local book library had an upstairs section where you could borrow cassettes. Music, audiobooks etc. Of course now there's no cassette tape to be seen.
Sure its just a hobby but I still run them. I'm able to get amazing recordings from hifi streaming and they give me a lot of pleasure how good they sound. The decks after all these years are a high maintenance item, I service them myself, and I can imagine this would be a pain if you didn't have the ability to do this. Unfortunately "collectors" got into the game and quality tapes are unaffordable now. I'm fortunate in that I've enough tapes to keep me going for quite a while.
I ever used cassettes only as "backup" of vinyl, radio and CD, longest for car, walkman and the famous '"girl friend compilations". I bought music I like most as Vinyl and/or CD. I used cassettes for "common" music and mainly for old recordings from older music lovers or musicians. In late 70s and early 80s, Jazz and Blues recordings of the 50s and 60s were hard to find. Original releases of Verve, BlueNote, Impulse etc have been suspended and the back catalogs were only available as compilations, mostly in bad quality. Only Atlantic, later WEA, as major lable was still publishing new recordings. Beginning in the early 1980s the re-releasing of old recordings was boosted by the CD and their possible profit for the lables. Unfortunately with less experience in digital audio and no effort in transfer or remastering. And there the market for used records started tiny and slow. So, the cassettes were needed until CD-burners and AD-/DA-cards for PCs get common. Beside the hybris of the music industry with streaming, there are good remasters today, also for HighRes-download, and the market for used records is strong. I'm buying older, used vinyl only, and the quality of orignal Vinly from the late 50s to the late 70s on a modern HiFi-set floors me, even if the condition of the copy ist not so good. And I buy used CDs because there are enough releases until the 2020 not avaliable as new CD today, nor as streaming or download. I recovered a lot of my Cassettes content. For the rest, I use my used Denon DRM-800, bought for 200 EUR, for playbak only until the deck or I will die. Cassettes are only sastisfying with CrO2- or Me-tape, Dolby and a maintained Cassettes-Deck, but only Fe2O3 tape is in production today, because for reel-to-reel other tape types never get real common. The development of digital audio started in the late 60s and the development of analog-tape in professional audio came to an end then. Yes, so early. Beginning in 1978 Classical music recordings were made digital, and since 1980-81 all major lables are using digital only for the production masters of all music. Good cassette-decks with noise reduction are also no more in production since 20 years. For me, Cassettes is alive only 2% in deed.
One thing to add I lived through at the time: CDs were often excessively bright for the format's first few years, as mastering engineers didn't realize they no longer needed the high frequency boost to overcome the high frequency rolloff response of an analog master tape. I understand the appeal of importing your content only available on cassettes. But what's the advantage of continuing to use it for playback, instead of capturing it all into computer for instant random access and no degradation from repeat plays?
@@editingsecrets Cassettes can last very long and their content is not so special to spend the effort in capturing as digital transfer until now, despite the fact, that I have two good Audio Interfaces and a DAW. I also replace releases of the 80's to mid 90's with digital remasters because of the harshness of the orignal release. I think, it had not only been done to overcome issues in the production chain or due to traditional workflow. The quality of control rooms acoustics and monitor speakers was not as today. Only a few studios were using LEDE-design i.e. as standard, and the monitors where no good in the higher bands because it was not needed with analog tape. My most extreme example is 'Tug Of War' by Paul McCartney. Original release as Vinyl recorded at AIR Studios. Cuts your eardrum out. The famous Dire Straits recordings from there, that time, have similar problems. The second issue was "optimization" for car audio and disco in using Exciters excessively. The US productions from that time are more friendly but same sound design.
@@ericberger6966 That all makes sense. "I think, it had not only been done to overcome issues in the production chain or due to traditional workflow." Exactly! To get high frequencies back from vinyl, you have to boost them in the master recording. Took a while for some mastering shops to realize you don't need to do that any more on digital, so some of those early digital releases were too bright.
I know Knucks but I’m not an old timer. 30s, so not the youth buying cassettes either. Perhaps Stranger Things on Netflix is responsible for the resurrecting of cassettes, it baffles me. Perhaps the desire for analog audio, and physical media, and vinyl records being too expensive. Either way if history is repeating itself, think of all the joy that’s coming when they discover CDs.
Bands doing limited release cassettes is making a comeback, just like the diy punk days of 70's & 80's, I'm involved with some bands doing this using portastudios etc, part of the appeal is the lofi diy ethic, same as back in the day, photocopied inserts etc, some amazing stuff being produced!
Reminds me of around 1990 when samplers started getting really good and could do CD-quality sampling, and acts like Beck and Cypress Hill used them to make these grainy-sounding creations which sounded awesome with basically 'bad sound quality' used strategically in the mix.
You're forgetting the huge impact of Sony's Walkman. Though inferior, the cassette was portable & the reason for my transition from reel-to-reel (still a niche) to cassette. My biggest cassette regret was BASF. Ten years after purchase, those cassettes squealed like a pig, with no possible fix, into the trash they went. Luckily I transitioned to Maxell half way thru my cassette life. The cassettes were used (car, pool side) until my transition to MP3.
Every medium has a different sound. Some people like the cassette's sound. It's warm and smooth and has great continuity, and tape is the only true analog medium which doesn't have ticks and pops. It's coming back. Welcome it.
I like tapes too but they do get static sometimes and often have lesser sound quality overall, and records don't all have "ticks and pops" but lots of people never really learned how to use records properly, like cleaning, lubricating and removing the static from them, or picking a good needle and balancing it properly, so that's why there are lots of people whose experience with records is 'lots of noise' instead of what I get, which is very smooth, rich sound quality out of records that are in good shape (because we're not comparing 'good tapes' to 'bad records' here, we're comparing the best of each format, and records win that contest). Tapes are definitely not "coming back" like they're gonna be on the shelf at Target next to the records, but they have their users.
I inherited my Dad's Ampex cassette deck which is really cool. You can stack up to six cassettes in a holder, and it will play each one individually. The changer is kind of sluggish nowdays, but once the cycle is over it still plays quite well!
Car cassette players were great in their day, and survived well into the 90s, until CD players became the norm. But it was the Sony Walkman that truly put cassettes in the forefront. Taking your selected music wherever you liked, without having to hoist a huge boom box on your shoulder, was a game changer. Then came portable CD players, and then iPods, and then smart phones, and now streaming. Streaming is certainly most convenient and I do subscribe to a service, but still, I enjoy selected a physical medium from my shelf, cleaning the LP, and playing it on my turntable/player. I have so very many classical LPs from my earliest days of collecting. I don't want to get rid of them and they still sound fine to my ears. I also have a number of prerecorded cassettes and they sound just fine on my Sony machine. If I want them on the road, I can digitize them to mp3, and stream them through iCloud on my phone, via my car receiver. By the way, I really like your demeanor and your expertise and your delivery. You sound like a person I'd like to sit down and share a pint with in the local pub.
It's worth noting that a lot of new cassette sales come with a digital download included. So when you buy the tape, and some bloke freaks out about "you could have better sound quality", you are getting a FLAC DL in the package, as I did with Wet Leg's release and others. I've bought CDs with the same deal, CD plus zip file to dl.
The tragedy is that there is no cassette deck produced today (in 2023) that can reproduce the audio quality of what was produced decades ago in the 90s. It's not like humankind has lost the knowledge to physically produce type II or IV tape stock or a cassette deck with Dolby C or S, but the borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s has reduced the majority of cassette releases to the noisiest (cheapest) type I tape with no noise reduction because that's the current lowest common denominator of available playback units. The cassette format has limitations, but currently available releases demonstrably do not reflect the state of the art, and that's tragic. Kudos to the indys still releasing with XDR and Dolby B.
@@GladeSwope it would be neat to compare current releases with decades-old DIY! It seems weird to me that could overdub existing commercial releases on my mid-80s tape deck from the digital sources and have them sound better. Is the poor quality an aesthetic choice?
I wish a company like Sony would just do 1 run of new cassette decks with all the bells & whistles. Bet you they could charge a high price and they would sell out.
Later cassette machines were really good, even consumer stuff including Pioneer's 'Digital Noise' reduction. Despite this, technically, cassette was always inferior...just like MP3 or cheaper hifi gear...but that's all irrelevant as most people listen to music on cheap radios, computer speakers or crappy headphones and still derive enjoyment from the music. The fetishistic obsession of engineers and hifi enthusiasts with gear and 'quality' invariably exceeds the capabilities of the human ear to hear it. Why cassette still rocks? 1.Extremely durable format (I play tapes I recorded in 1978..over 40 years old and they work the same as they did in 1978). Compared to CZcams's digitally remastered Dark side of the Moon, Pink Floyd the old cassette of the original vinyl was markedly better sounding...noisier but so much more dynamic. 2. With decent decks, cassette can sound very good (human ears are very forgiving; why mp3 is so popular). 3. Linear. You tend to listen to whole albums and appreciate tracks you would have initially skipped. These overlooked tracks invariably become favourites. 4. The tactile, tangible nature of the format engages you more with the music, instead of distracting with the camera work of a high production video etc.. 5. It is great fun making recordings. This is why some young people fall in love with the format. Make your own labels, J cards, mixtapes...as opposed to a dry streaming playlist on a remote web page. 6. I have recordings from 1982 and I can still play them, digitise and remaster them. I can not play/find digital stuff I did a few years ago as the latest OS/plugins/ DAW/Computer are now incompatible with it. (Why Steve Albini still uses tape). 7. Top record producer, Trevor Horn recently said; aspiring engineers and producers would do well to learn the craft by starting out on a cassette 4 track machine and with good reason.
@@jamescarter3196 I know what you mean. I also have a Harmon Kardon dual cassette deck and it is in pristine condition. The dynamic range and warmth are unreal. It's always great to meet like-minded friends.
@@jamescarter3196 Completely agree with you. Most of the online music is only good enough for portable BT boomboxes kids are carrying around. I'm now running almost daily my Pioneer Terminator, mean T-1000S, with large variety of tapes ranging from Sony CHF / TDK D at the cheap end and Sony's SMM, Maxell MV, TDK's MA-XG at the top and they sound really amazing. Well, not so sharp as SACD (or just CD), but very very enjoyable.
There was no need for a Nakamichi deck. They were excellent machines but others also knew how to get good high frequency reproduction out of the compact cassette.
I use Nakamichi as an example because I've heard them and considering the limitations of the format the sound is amazing. I've also used both Revox and Studer cassette decks and they were very good but no more than that. Of course, there may be other decks as excellent as Nakamichi but I haven't heard them (yet). DM
Overkill for people who cherish precision engineering at the top of the line, the same way that after a certain point a Swiss watch isn't about knowing what the current time is.
Well it is a good standard, they put a lot of engineers to working overtime so they could meet that standard. Thankfully many came close in the eighties. My JVC DD-7 an excellent example. Three heads. Direct drive single capstan, and good electronics to back it up. Could be bought new about 1982 for 600$. Yeah that was the draw back in 1982 for less than 300$ you had a Technics direct drive turntable and a really good cartridge. That JVC I put 15 to twenty thousand hours on since I found twenty years ago. It's also when I discovered that a cassette could sound very good and it's didn't need to be metal or so called chrome. And that the TDK D series was actually a decent cassette close to 60 Dbs dynamic range and flat out 17K with room for good bass. Everything is fine with it... well after I recap it , can't say enough about those Sendust Alloy heads,they still look new.
@@stevengagnon4777 Etsuro Nakamichi was a brilliant and visionary engineer who pioneered a lot of beneficial developments we took for granted later on. And up to the mid-eighties, I'd argue that his cassette decks were the reference. But after that, development stopped and others caught up.
I love audio cassettes and i still have lots of fun playing tapes and recording. I have a Denon 3-head deck and a fully operational Tascam 246 4-track recorder, both in excellent condition. I still buy pre-recorded tapes these days, because some artists only release their music on tapes. Maybe not everybody’s piece of cake but the audio cassette surely has not died in several underground music scenes.
It strikes me that an upcoming band might release an album on cassette because there are people who will specifically search for albums that are only available on cassette. Possibly. DM
@@AudioMasterclass The cassette artists i’m interesting in are mostly artistic, creative musicians. They experiment with loops and speed modulation, even degradation of the tape itself. I have always loved the mechanical part of cassette operation. Actually, i bought two simple but decent quality new portable Sony cassette players for my kids to experiment as well and they love it! Audio isn’t always about sound quality, it’s about interaction and excitement!
Although I'm now retired, I was an audio engineer. I was ALWAYS a critical listener and would frequently return crappy pressings when I was a kid!!! (My Dad called me "Take it back Ken") I had reel to reel machines by the time I was 8. So when cassettes became I "thing" I was highly aware of their flaws and limitations. When I finally got a 4 track reel with DBX NNR in the 70s it seemed like the best quality audio to my ears. Even 45 years later some of my old 4 track studio recordings sound AMAZING and very close to digital dynamic range, super clean. Unfortunately cassettes I recorded from that era are inferior in every way.
I find this subject painfully hilarious… The first CD I bought was U2’s “Achtung Baby” and I never bought a cassette again, except for blank ones I used for recordings. Not long after getting used to listening to CDs I realized that most cassettes already started to sound worse within the first five times playing them.
I believe that several years ago, Disney was playing mind games with people when the opening sequence of a Guardians of the Galaxy movie had ELO's Mister Blue Sky with, according to the story, it being played from a cassette tape. I suspect that on the basis of that some people may have even dusted off their old cassette decks, but only to find that the rubber capstan roller had indeed perished.
Having had cassette decks since childhood, I have never personally experienced that. I do not have the very first decks that I used to have. But the rollers in the Pioneer CT-91a, the Beocord 8000 and the Tandberg TCD-3014a that I have had for years and years, are the original ones, and they work well. In fact all 3 decks sound great. Only regular cleaning and now time for a quick belt change on the Beocord 8000, is the level of maintenance I have had to do so far. That is by far lower maintenance than I have had to do on my pc, router etc, as well as on my cd-player and LP player as well. Just my own experience. Kind regards.
I just got on ebay new old stock nakamichi bx300, paid 600.00 plus shipping and tax, love it, I got a total of 4 nakamichi cassette decks, and type 2 cassettes, anyway I'm have a lot of fun, wish I had all that in the 80's. I'm more of a vinyl record guy, love analog
I think I get it. They are doing it for the same reason that teenagers & young adults in the 1970s and 1980s bought originals on cassette rather than vinyl, even though they knew that records were patently better and also knew about dubbing from record to cassette. It's because they wanted the *original copy*, but they wanted it in a format that is more convenient to carry around (and possibly for storage purposes as well). They were prepared to accept the inferior quality in return for these benefits. Plus, a lot of people's music centres etc didn't do particularly well with the dubbing from record to cassette. I think it is much the same now, but with the added dimension that they want to be a little bit "hipster" and have their music on an analogue medium, like a record, rather than a digital one but don't want the bulkiness of vinyls. I believe just like back in the day, cassette releases also tend to be a little cheaper than the vinyl versions.
Vinyl is simple - easy for a small engineering concern to build a turntable out of more material than necessary and call it high end with a price tag to match. Cassette tapes, for the better end of the available quality of reproduction, depend on machines and blank cassettes that haven’t been manufactured for decades. Do to the extreme unlikelihood of anyone committing the development cost of putting anything comparable back in production - the format is dead in any useful sense.
New tapes are being made, type 1 never went away and have been in continuous production. Type 2 are making a comeback, although they're not up to scratch yet, the gears are in motion and new Chrome tapes can be bought..
@@Daijyobanai Yes, I meant for decent recordings the higher quality blank tapes are no longer available. If they’re going to all that bother, from a pretty much blank slate, why not revive something better like Elcaset.
Physical copies give you much stronger sense of owning something. Your copy, becomes more yours each time you play it. Especially with analogue formats with some imperfections. Neither Vinyl nor cassette can produce as perfect sound as digital formats, but they produce good enough. It's not like we only listen to perfect studio recordings either. We often pay good money for live recordings that have plenty of "flaws", but that is often what we are seeking. We don't value what comes too easily, and there is no easier way to listen to music than streaming. As easy as putting a cassette into a player is, it is still harder than pushing a button on your phone. Ordering a cassette or vinyl requires extra steps to digital download. Seeing parts moving in order to play the music, again, makes it more real and more valuable.
I record streaming radio stations with my finger near the pause button of one of a collection of pretty reasonable decks I've collected. it is a nostalgic affectation, I grant you, but it also sounds nice in my sony ex-5 while I'm commuting. I brush off the looks of 'hipster fool' from the other passengers if they even notice the old tech. getting good results from cassettes now takes time & patience, & deep pockets to do properly. I do my own maintenance (broadcast engineer with bench skills). it's also a collection of technology- some of these machines, the portables particularly- took mass produced electromechanical engineering almost to an art-form, something we have lost to pick-&-place robots building solid-state portable computers.
Just yesterday I bought a cassette from a band I love. I was lucky to happen on it because they make such small runs of 50 or 100, rarely 500. Since I have a cassette player from long ago, bought one of the last Sony music systems that came with it before it disappeared along with the cd-tray, now that bluetooth is so popular. I thought, I have the player for it, why not use it. Listening to music is such a personal experience, from compiling your listening systems to finding the music to play on it. The digital age is very convenient but the soul has been lost somewhere.
4:00 I disagree, vinyl records can reach only 60DB of SNR they are wobbly, there is rumble, click's, pops... Ewww.. . 72 DB of signal to noise ratio is feasible with Dolby B only (on many Akaï decks). 94DB is possible with DBX. My Harman Kardon CD 491 vith a Metal tape has a 20Herts to 26 Kiloherts bandwidth. I stopped buying new vinyls! To expensive, poor pressings... One of my hobby is to make a recording on cassettes that actually has better sound quality than CD. To acheive this, i use Super Audio CD as a source and record it to a good cassette. This is my favorite prank on my studio partner. Every time i make a blind test between an original CD and a recorded cassette made with Dolby B, he chooses the copy and not the original: "Why does this copy has a better sound than the original? Why the bass is warmer and the highs are more delicate? I have the impression of listening to the original reel of the album in the studio and not a copy". It must be said that to achieve this result, the deck's are restored, calibrated and of course, these processes require time, money and effort... Just like the original reels of the majority of classic recordings! I'm not talking about the specifications of reel-to-reel tape recorders, which are disastrous to say the least at the W&F level... Apart from the Nagra. :-) Sometimes, i don't use noise reduction and i use a double layer super ferric cassette ( TDK-AR X ) to restore the background noise removed from digitaly re-mastered CD'S; i don't like to hear the pumping effect of the noise gate to remove hiss in quiet passages. I prefer my copy with a constant background noise ( the brain is dealing with) and a clear sound. It's like a time machine to go back in the 60's studio recording console! I hear every detail with the original noise restored. Nature is analog. Long live to analog cassette tape!
Well reasoned but as a greying old music (or sound) fan here's my perspective. I disliked the high speed duplicated cassettes and the 'Dolby out' trick compensated for the losses even on a well maintained deck. But I also had some non dolby cassettes (tubular bells being one) and despite the hiss, sounded very good. My prime use of cassettes was RECORDING, one off radio programmes, field recordings (the sound of a JT9D engine as a rear passenger in a BAC 1-11), personal life moments, concert bootlegs, Tony Blackburn unable to pronounce "Duran Duran". The only medium available to me. I even blocked off the permanent magnet erase head from engaging on blank tapes on portable recorders. Eventually I bought a Sony D6C. We cannot rewind those times, so the cassette is all I have, to the best recording at the time, no Dolby, an Altai electret one point stereo mic powered by a 1.5V button cell. It definitely is not about the quality, it is not even the nostalgia for the medium, it is the only thing I have, and the original source is just that, and it is cassette. You'll not be surprised to learn I also have DAT recorded in the field as well as later solid state recorder balanced mics with phantom power, but they hadn't been invented when the JT9D jet engine was making its classic sound taking holidaymakers to far off destinations. I've boxes and boxes of the things, and a lot I have 'ripped' to compressed digital format for ease of access cataloguing and listening convenience. Those old ILR commercial - LOCAL - radio stations (remember those?) had some unique output and adverts. Even the BBC local stations, even national output. Preserved (in part) on cassette. You mentioned demo tapes, which were on cassette, never made it to vinyl or CD. Unique, and highly valued by the artists most dedicated fan base and essential inclusion on CD box sets, hiss and all. CZcams, Mixcloud and Soundcloud are sources for others' recordings of rare and unique material, personal recordings when radio really was national or local with character we do not hear today, so I would cite any of those as a source, because it is all we had, all we have, unless I went along to the provider of the material to listen with them, but I am eternally grateful, and humbled that someone else took the time to make a recording, no matter how poor the quality (many of medium wave!) available to a wider audience. If we had waited around for "something better" and simply not used the medium we had, those sounds would have been lost forever, hiss, HF loss and all.
I must be a odd man out. For now, I discover lots of music on CZcams. I’m relooking at my cassettes again. Back then, cassettes were the most convenient way to play music in cars and other “mobile” devices.
If you mean enjoying music recorded to cassettes many years ago, I can see the point of revisiting old cassettes. I can't imagine any benefit today to recording a cassette mixtape, instead of transferring mp3's to a phone to take with you.
Modern cassette duplication sounds better than modern vinyl, point blank. It's a mine field finding a pressing of an album on Vinyl that won't throw your needle to the next song when the bass hits. So if you want a physical album thats actually going to be listenable that's not a boring CD, tape is the way to go. Also, I've got a rip of a The Weeknd album released in 2015 on cassette that 100% has a higher audio quality to a very noticeable extent compared to the CD release. I'd love to share it but, ya know. I have shared it before and have seriously impressed some audiophile guys with it though. You can get Hifi Vinyl level quality recordings on modern cassette tape, especially if you're The Weeknd and somehow manage to get Dolby B HX Pro on your release. Also, a $60 at most tape deck from 1995 that still works or just needs new belts is going to run circles around any modern turntable for that price.
Cassettes need more love ❤️ I don't care what anybody says about Cassettes and Cassette players.😅I enjoy playing all my cassettes and I take very good care of all my cassettes. I love recording and making mix tapes still in 2023 # It's all about choice ! I say like what you like.Streaming sucks !
Just like model railroads are a very inefficient way to move stuff around the room, there will always be people who find it a joy to have a tinkering hobby.
Cassettes are fine. They get a bad rap. I’ve mastered releases from cassette. Nobody complained or noticed. Well recorded and well maintained decks can sound excellent. My bigger problem is the quality of what people are listening to music on these days.
I understand that streaming is commonplace and convenient, but why not rip music from compact disc to flac if a person is into quality sound. I also understand that space is at a premium, but so is data. I loved cassette tapes, except the rewinding and fast forwarding to search for a favorite song. I like the small form factor too. 🎶
I didn’t see the poll but it would have been interesting for me as I probably listen to vinyl, CD and download in equal measure. When I want to really get into my music it’s vinyl every time. I have however got a substantial cassette collection, probably a couple of thousand which I used to buy to play in the car or on a Walkman back in the 70’s and early 80’s. I recently got my cassette decks out of the loft, a Nachamichi and 2 Yamaha’s and all 3 would not play. The drive belts had all melted into black goo and 2 out of the 3 would not even power up. A repair guy advised me to not bother getting them mended and to buy a serviced one off eBay which I did. I have played a total of one cassette since I bought it. It’s nice to have the option though as my kids buy special edition vinyls that sometimes come with a cassette tape version in the collection. A plus point is I will be able to easily record a radio show that I am involved in. The price of blank tapes shocked me though as a bog standard ferric C120 is now £10!
Sounds mad but I record from a streaming service on to cassette using a Denon 3 head deck , so nothing fancy but I find the result more pleasing to the ear.
Audio cassettes are far from dead. Check out successful cassette artists such as Amulets and Hainbach and initiatives such as Cassette Store Day. You would be surprised of the number of specialised cassette labels worldwide with a wide and eclectic range of music styles only available on cassette!
Considering it costs next to nothing to release on Spotify and the other digital services, I have to think that cassette releases are a marketing gimmick. There's nothing wrong with that if people enjoy it and I might look into it in a future video. DM
@@AudioMasterclass Do it yerselfers might make a lot more money from just a few cassette or vinyl sales than from a million plays on Spotify, if they can even get them.
I would love to get back to cassettes, the only reason I don’t is because they’re not easily available be it the players or the tapes and the troubles of maintaining and repairs. But I would love that it catched on again and anyone could buy a new casette deck or walkman.
@@editingsecrets You're right but I've got a box full of recordings I made during the 90s that I just can't give up. It's nostalgia as well. I just love the format.
as minidisc is a proprietary format and you need Sony's licensing to sync via a PC, it isn't coming back. Just get a decent used player off of Yahoo auctions Japan.
Cassettes are just perfect. I have acquired quite a stack of new blank ones and use them to record music from my vinyl collection on it to listen in the car or Walkman when I’m out of the house. Yes I could stream via my phone or even use an old iPod, but it’s not just about the music.
Long ago, I used to catch music from FM radio to K7, and also recorded various other things on the same K7 (voice, music, ambients). Listening to these medias now is a wonderful "life slice"
Bought a mid-range Kenwood deck with an external DAC to record Bluetooth audio. Run the bluetooth through DAC to cassette and use dolby C. Recordings come out amazing!! Actually shocking how good they come out as long as you watch your levels. Edit: Forgot to mention the negative. To get good recordings I use good quality chrome tapes. Occasional metal tape as well. Prices on new old stock are getting insane. People want $50 for a metal tape!
For sure CD and streaming for quality and clarity. Tape though satisfies something else for me, I love making new mix tapes. A streamed playlist that I’ve created just doesn’t do it for me. I also love minidisc for the same reason.
I think that this video is a good summary. As it pretty much said, there isn't a single performance attribute of cassettes that isn't beaten by some other format. Well, I can't think of one.
I expect that your channel will have heaps of participation bias surrounding your survey, because your expertise is 'excellence in audio' and not convenience in audio (and those pesky cassettes are fun as you aptly pointed out in another vlog). Most of the cassettes I have bought in recent years have been new old stock from Sony, TDK, Maxell, BASF et al and (pseudo) chrome prices have been silly for some time. None of the major manufacturers are in a hurry to mass produce cassettes anymore. Junior doesn't own a cassette deck, player or Walkman and she recently purchased a cassette from Fall Out Boy, not because she intended to listen to it, because she wanted to support the artist. She said it was like buying a tour poster, just another form of merch that was tactile, that she could pick up and look at and read the J card. I love my cassettes. I know that they aren't the best format for fidelity, however, you can get some excellent results if you set up your deck properly. I also use MD, vinyl, digital downloads from Bandcamp and CDs and enjoy all as each has its merits and shortcomings. I gravitate towards the older formats because they are tactile in nature. Downloads are not cuddly. If cassettes aren't dead, thay are gravely ill in hospital, much to my disappointment.
Let me give you an example. I bought a recently released album from the viagra boys on cassette. I played the album on an old cassette recorder I repaired myself. It's far from perfect but more decent than the new ones you can buy these days. Listening to that particular album on cassette felt like enhancing the experience in the right direction. It has to do with the attitude of the band. I would not want to listen to the Sex Pistols like a classical masterpiece. Cassettes are more than people give it credit for. It's the rebel of the physical medium. The spray paint on the walls of musical history. Pirates of the Hi-Fies. It's not for audiophiles, it's for the kids on the streets. And as such it is as important as Vinyl and CD, no matter the quality. And I hope it never goes away. It will, but still...
Yes, cassettes are a "dead" medium. What that means however, is where we may disagree. For me, it means that all of the time I'm putting into "fiddling" with cassettes, is actually worthwhile. I'm extending the life of some really excellent recordings. I'm listening to mixes and releases that aren't available in other formats. Every form of storage has it's achilles heel. Even the ultimate winner, digital. Hard drives fail, and sometimes it doesn't take much, or give any warning! I'm buying old commercial cassette releases and transferring them to newer tapes. I'm not bothering to import them into the computer as there's not going to be any gain in quality. I do also record digital sources to tape. That works amazingly well. As far as robust longevity, you'll be hard pressed to beat tape. I've got commercial CDs from the 80' and 90's that are rotting right away. They're dying, and there's no way to restore them. The foil is flaking right off. Cassettes ten years older than that, often play just fine. They can also be repaired pretty easily. A 40 year old HDD? You probably won't be able to read it, if it still functions at all.
I adored the solenoid controls and precise tape handling of the best made machines. Some of the finest Japanese engineering went into the higher end cassette decks like Nakamichi. For the home recording enthusiast, it was a way of connecting with the music that was different to vinyl. Still is.
Cassettes have been in my life since my first tape player around 12 years old, I am 56 now and still love cassettes. Store bought music tapes were always junk, I would buy high bias tapes usually 90min length and fill them up with recording records or recordings taken off the radio and then from cd and even tape to tape because whats better then a mixed tape of your own creation and set levels from your personal collection of music, mixed tapes rock and was great making mixed tapes for friends. Sure they cant compare to records or cd and beyond but they were personal, it took time and care to make a good one. Tape decks need a good back bone, need some stereo watts and jack the bass and treb and the mids if you have too. Not many could tell if they did not see the little guy spinning with a good deck and tape combo.
There are twenty or so CD player models from the mid-eighties that have the option to record and play back at twice the standard speed, bringing a very noticeable improvement in sound quality. I use a couple of these machines to copy my records and move them between my house in Australia and my flat in Spain. So cassettes still have some niche uses.
The Dual C844 is a double speed cassette deck. One would expect the higher speed to be better. Info at www.hifi-classic.net/review/dual-c844-281.html DM
I have an amplifier made by a company called MVL the real music company,the amp is called MVL A2+Integra,it came with an add on called SS option pack(£354 at the time in 1999)sound sentinal ,the tailor the sound to each input phono,cd , Mini disc cassette,Dat ,vcr ,the instructions for cassette were to leave Dolby off as the SS sound sentinel reduced hiss ? Unfortunately the company dont exist any more .have you Heard of SS sound sentinel systems?
Cassettes are hobby for me. I like collecting and restoring them. It can be quite challenging with all the little parts. Very rewarding when you pop in a cassette in and it plays and rewinds. That's not always the case. lots of redos but that's part of the fun. Just received my lot of 35 southern rock cassettes from ebay. looking forward to checking them out.
Biggest problem with compact cassette is that they aren't making any quality transports anymore. I think only one company is making transports for all cassette machine and they're pretty much crap. I got a used Sony 3 Head cassette deck a few years ago to tinker around with (only cassette device I've ever seen in person, with Dolby S NR) and while it produces the best sound from a cassette I've ever heard, when you've got DVD-Audio, blu-ray Audio, SACD, DSD, Hi-Res FLAC, etc., there's really no point in it for me. Unless I come across some super rare album on cassette that isn't available anywhere else, I don't really plan on using it much again.
To me, playing vinyl records is a bit like driving a classic 60s muscle car. And playing tapes is like driving a Ford model a. They both have their charms, and the former is the only way I listen to music when I'm just listening to music. That said, I'm completely with you on cassettes. I have several hundred if not over 1,000. However, the way I acquired them was at garage sales and estate sales were people were just giving them away because they were so done with cassettes. I also have a nice pioneer CT f1250 cassette deck that's quite frankly, just fun to watch. But I think you and I are on the exactly the same page with the cassettes in the cassette resurgence. For what it's worth, I sold Hi-Fi back in the 70s and early 80s. Back in the seventies cassette did have an advantage but all the advantages were completely destroyed when the recordable CD came out.
Younger people buying these cassettes are typically getting them as collectables. Affordable merch from artists they like (where vinyl would be way more pricey). For listening it is still primarily streaming
In theory, CD would be a useless media today because we have computers that can hold 500+ CDs in storage but we didn't abandon them completely because of the experience that physical media can provide us The only problem is the price, here in Brazil is a elitist hobby collecting any type of physical media, but we still collect because of the unique experience it can provide For me, Cassette is a cheaper way to listen to analog media, I have found various rare vinyl albums in Cassette because nobody here care about cassette It's a good time to look at cassettes bins in thrift shops
"but we didn't abandon them completely because of the experience that physical media can provide us" ??? actually CDs are not abandoned because it's the cheapest way to have a good sounding physical copy of the music, and what experience physical media can provide us? the music right? maybe reading the booklet too?
I like cassettes. I put a compilation into by cassette deck and voilà, one hour and a half of music. I like the pleasure of making complications. I like the physical device. It's not for hifi listening purpose, CDs are better, it's just for background music
It's fascinating to me. I have found that some of my genze friends and the younger millennials prefer video cassette because of the way it looks they like the imperfections I believe this might be why cassette is popular amongst these people
It's not always just about the sound. To me, music isn't just something you listen to but something you also feel and experience. Cassette tapes, along with vinyl and other physical media, allow you to interact with the music itself. I've been recording off the radio onto tape since I was a child, and it forms this sort of connection to the music you're recording. That's why I love cassette tapes and still use them today.
"allow you to interact with the music itself" what? no it doesn't. :-O
you want to feel something? hold the booklet of the CD or print the lyrics on paper and hold them. ;-)
@vaso opel The music is imprinted onto the tape, disc, or whichever medium you're using so yes, you are interacting with it. Not just through physical touch mind you, but also through the mechanism of the player/recorder.
@@BrettDarien "the mechanism of the player/recorder." ?
you mean by watching the tape or the CD move?? :-O
hm...if I'm watching the VU meter...am I interacting with the music? :-D
look...simple stuff really...you LISTEN to music...that's it...the end.
you want something more? go play an instrument or sing ;-)
@vaso opel VU meters give you visual feedback of what's playing, and are definitely helpful for recording. Others just appreciate the additional visual flare they give you. I would much rather watch a VU meter than a music video myself.
Regardless, we all enjoy music in different ways. I personally think that music is the safest drug available to the public. Listening is only half of the experience
@@BrettDarien "we all enjoy music in different ways" true :-) have a nice day ;-)
People recorded the strangest things on cassettes. I'm addicted to thrifting old home recordings, so much weird and interesting stuff. A lot of stuff worth sampling. Cassettes are often like time capsules, with moments of the past you either forgot about or never heard. Is it dead? It depends on who you ask i guess. I love the hiss, the hypnotic reels and the archeological value. 😊
There is definitely a good kick in finding some music etc that you haven't heard before that *didn't* come off the internet! :)
I have reel-to-reel tapes of a radio station from Portland, Oregon in the early '70s that only existed for like three years, and it's the holy grail of my media collection. There is NOWHERE else to hear this stuff, and I might have the only recordings in existence of some of it. There are advertisements for a popular music store's third anniversary sale, and they've been around for like 55 years. It's unbelievable. KQED, Rockin' in Quad! They claimed to be quadrophonic, but nobody broadcasted in quad.
Absolutely the same experience over here.
"People recorded the strangest things" on social medias including CZcams. No need for cassettes.😁
Love CDs and vinyl, but a well recorded cassette played back on a Nakamichi deck still sounds amazing in 2023.
I am a long time engineer and recording enthusiast (since the early 70's) and a pro musician. I have kept a lot of things I have recorded over these many decades in their original form hoping to consolidate my band and related music recordings into one general format. To accomplish this I have kept my several reel-to-reel machines (Sony 4 track, Sony 1/2 track, and a Pioneer rack mount) reel to reel), a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder, a Sony DAT recorder and a Phillips DCC (Digital Compact Cassette). I have lots of recordings done over the years on each format. About a year ago I began importing these recordings into my computer. Most are live recording of various bands and studio recordings. What surprised me most was how good the 4 track cassette recording from the 80's and 90's were. I brought these recordings into my DAW and using some EQ and compression I found that the cassette media did a fairly good job recording directly from a PA/mixer. Like anything, there are low level cassette decks and higher level ones like my Tascam (3 3/4 IPS, DBX NR). My friends and fellow musicians have been quite amazed at the quality I have been able to glean from these decades old cassette recordings. One note: I totally agree with your remarks about using the right brand and type of cassette on a particular recorder was a major issue to insure the highest quality recordings and cleaning and demagnetizing tape heads before every session was a "must do". Great stuff.
Thank for sharing. I'm fairly new to the hobby and acquired an Akai X-360. Boy, at 15 ips, this thing, in my humble opinion, crushes all formats. Question: do you think a metal tape with a high end cassette deck can get close to reel to reel quality? Thank you should you respond.
I still have my Tascam MFP01 4 track cassette "portastudio". It can give surprisingly good results.
@@arrya5372 You can't use metal tape on just any cassette deck. The heads of the cassette deck have to be made of special alloys to withstand the metal tape and finding a cassette deck that has those type of recording heads won't be easy. My understanding is that using a metal tape on normal cassette heads will destroy the heads on a normal deck. As good as a high end cassette deck sounds, I don't think it can come close to a good reel-to-reel deck recording at 15 IPS just from it's technical limits. A cassette tape is 1/8 inch wide and the normal speed of a cassette is 1 7/8 IPS. The fastest speed I know of on a cassette deck is 3 3/4 on many 4 track decks (Tascam, Fostex, Yamaha etc.) as opposed to the normal cassette speed of 1 78 IPS. A reel-to-reel running at 15 IPS on a standard 1/4 inch tape (twice as large as a cassette tape) will be able to record wider, louder tracks with more headroom and less low level hiss. Think in terms of pixels in digital photography. The more pixels your camera is able to do, the more color and density your pictures will be. Similarly a cassette tape being 1/8 inch moving at 1 78 or 3 34 IPS cannot get as detailed a signal as a reel to reel tape running at 15 IPS. You can still get reasonably good recordings on a cassette format but it's no match to a reel to reel at 15 IPS. Hope this helps.
@@rickpearce9239 For 24 track 2" studio source tapes, the individual tracks compare to the width of compact cassette tracks. But a whole lot more tape under the heads due to the higher speed, as you mention, and also far more robust transport mechanism and daily calibration by a studio engineer or intern.
@@editingsecrets Thanks I agree. The two studios I worked at in the late 80's early 90's both had 24 track 2" tape machines. One was an MCI and the other was an Otari. Both of those machines needed cleaning and adjusting everyday but they sounded awesome. There are also differences in the motors used to drive the tapes that will affect the quality of the recording. A cassette's motor could never compare to most reel to reel machines as far as specs like wow-and flutter and spot on speed accuracy. I have fond memories (and hundreds of tapes) from those tape/analog days but I can't say I ever want to have to do any serious work on reel-to-reel tape again. I've been a spoiled DAW user for many years. Thanks for the conversation.
I was speaking to an employee at the local music store (they stock vinyl, CDs, cassettes, even some 8 track, pretty much the last one in my town) and he said "Guardians of the Galaxy" spiked cassette and Walkman sales at his store, and then "Stranger Things" spiked them again last year, and he's been having younger people coming in buying cassettes on a pretty regular basis since then.
The biggest advantage with cassettes is there is no button called "next". That button destroys any meaningful music exploration. All systems with a next button while listening to new/unknown has an average playing time ranging between 8-12 first seconds. And, if that is all the chance you give a new track then you will reject practically every single one of my favourite tracks ever recorded. So I put down mixed tapes with a lot of progressive stuff that it isn't even easy to skip tracks on just to make it more convienient to just listen through a track rather than just skip to next more immediatly pleasing, but probably pretty soon boring track...
Cassette decks and walkmen with a track skip button existed.
@@xaverlustig3581 Operating word here is "isn't easy to skip track on". And tape skip track funktions wouldn't work very well on my mixes as I do not add silence but rather draw them together, and in other cases parts of the tracks themselves is so low in some places that it skips to the middle of the track. But even if, and when, I used DAT it wasnä't really convenient to skip tracks on tape...
Excellent point!
You wouldnt skip a mix anyway@@runetech
I’m an old timer born in 1955 and I was very much into cassettes as a teenager I mowed grass so I could purchase my first cassette recorder, and as you mentioned, I would record my records so that I did not wear them out when I listen to them, and I never once ever considered purchasing pre-recorded cassettes
After your video on cassette the other week I dug out my Yamaha KX200 and put it back in my system. The heads have been regularly cleaned and demagnetised. I recorded the CD of Space Shanty by Khan (sans Dolby) onto a CrO2 to compare the two. It sounded surprisingly good. Better than I remember in fact. I've also dug out a box of dub reggae tapes and listened to those too.
I think “Guardians of the Galaxy” had a part in the up-tick in the format. It generated nostalgia for older folks and curiosity for the kids. It’s not always about the quality of the playback. ▶️
Definitely, and maybe Stranger Things, and the Karate Kid tv show with flashbacks showing Johnny using a 1982 Walkman in 1980 :) I noticed prices on Walkmans really spiked for a couple of years, like brand-new prices for used machines that still worked.
Not completely dead, but in much the same way as (at 68) I’m not!
I have a recently serviced Nakamichi 582, who’s sole purpose is transferring old cassettes into my Digital Audio system at the highest quality possible. These are either friends cassettes of sentimental value so they can listen to them or recordings that have never been (or are no longer) available on CD or streaming service.
That’s exactly what I think. Someone who loves music likes all audio formats they all hold a place in my heart. No better feeling knowing you can listen to music and experience it however you want.
Although audio quality is important, there is something about taking the effort of listening to an audio cassette, but this is also true for a CD, minidisc, vinyl, dcc or any physical audio format. It's like people nowadays in the always-connected and streaming age really don't see any value in music other than "it's there and I can turn it on whenever I want". I like the act of deciding what to listen to, go to some shelf and take it from there, in case of a cassette rewind or fast-forward it and actually sit down and listen to it.
Minidisc! Now you're talking - I have hundreds of them .... so much better than cassettes.
I still have many different types of TDK tapes, which I recorded in the early 80s from LP,s they still sound good, good old times, thanks for the video.
Cassette was always a marginal format for music, requiring precise manufacturing of small mechanical parts to give stable speed and tape handling. And the advanced tape formulations were absolutely critical to getting good performance. Many machines were barely acceptable, with a few, like Nakamichi, Tandberg, Revox, etc., that performed at higher levels. But the performance only held up as long as the heads lasted and the mechanism stayed in calibration. The permalloy heads that were used early on were very soft and wore quickly on the original chrome tapes. Companies like Sony and Akai used very hard ferrite heads, but these performed poorly for saturation and distortion. Only when the Sendust material was introduced did the heads both hold up and perform well. As a technician at the time, I hated working on the small mechanisms. Most were very touchy to get just right. Today, it's hard to find a new cassette machine with performance that's any better than mediocre. I still do repair work on vintage audio components, but won't go near an old cassette deck.
I will surprise you, but I went from vinyl format (after 15 years of collections) to cassette format 3 years ago. The reason is that I rediscovered this format in a new and much better way than in my teenage memories. The reason is that today we are living in the best period for this format: I can record cassettes with better quality sources and listen to them with better designed headphones than those of the time. I record on very good quality cassettes and the result is really surprising!
I also repair myself old Sony Walkmans and now the cassettes are my best way for listening analog sounds on the go.
what is surprising is that you didn't skip cassettes,you should have went for CDs (and CD-Rs)
@@vasopel you know what, I also have two high-end portable CD players and some CDs. But I prefer to use my Walkmans and my cassettes. Despite the obvious presence of noise, the sound on a good type 2 cassette is so punchy that it makes CDs sound flat to my ears. And I also prefer the cassette "object" and seeing it spinning in the player, rather than a cd usually invisible when playing. It’s not just the sound, but also the visual that makes me prefer the cassette!
@@cookinuts1923 I don't know what you mean by "punchy" ...but the DAC on your CD players is probably garbage...that is why you prefer the cassettes, and who cares about the noise...there is so much noise outside the house that it doesn't matter anyway ;-)
hm..there are CD players with clear covers so that you can see the disk spin :-)
and finally...you better keep your eyes on the road instead of your music player :-D
@@vasopel yes, you're right, a CD player has little chance of distracting me unlike a cassette player 😊 As for my two CD players, they are really top-of-the-range CD players (Technics and Sony) with impeccable sound. but I still have more love for the typical cassette sound (I know, I know…) 😅
@@cookinuts1923 well...in the end of the day...what really matters is having fun and enjoying yourself :-) if you're having that with cassettes...keep doing it ;-)
Cassettes clearly aren't dead as I just sold 5 x TDK Metal cassettes for £90 (and a head demagnetiser 😄). When I played them they still sounded extremely good. (streaming for me though)
Did you use them much? If you put the price of metal tapes in the inflation calculator they were about £18 in today's money
Metal tapes are all making their way to ebay where they will spend the rest of their days circulating between greater fools.
@@gingernutpreacher I did use them many years ago and they were excellent. Mostly used the standard AD-90 though as they were quite pricey but on a decent deck the quality was worth it on occasion.
wow...really? what idiot bought them? :-O
Recently, I bought into the cassette format for some fun. I found a decent Onkyo deck for dirt cheap at a thrift store and was curious how good (or bad) the sound quality would be recording onto the normal, cheap cassettes that most people would actually buy. I serviced the deck and splurged on a set of Maxell UR-90s.
These were my takeaways from the experience:
- Cassettes don't sound great, but they don't sound godawful. With a decent deck in good working order they sound perfectly acceptable. They're a step down from other formats, particularly the noise floor, but if you're not being too critical they're okay. Somewhere in the neighborhood of FM radio to my ears, maybe marginally worse.
- Their main advantage, all but gone in the digital age, seems to be how very easy it is to fire off your own recordings. You set the levels, press the red button, and off you go. I don't think any other mainstream format has ever invited you to record as much as a cassette tape does.
- They're also handy as a portable format. I have an older MX-5 which happens to have a working tape deck (I serviced it so that I could use the adapter) and once I'd gone through with the effort to doctor up a mixtape, it was pretty nice to be able to just grab the tape and listen in the car. There's no having to worry about internet connections or battery levels and stuff, only the small issue of the stability of a fragile 30 year old tape mechanism which could go rogue any moment. The Miata tape deck is even the fancy kind which automatically detects the ends of songs for you. It's impressive in an "awww, you go little guy!" kind of way.
So overall I won't be pouring money into the format. I've had my fun. But I can also see the (limited) appeal to people who never experienced it, as a novelty. I was pretty young when cassettes were in vogue and so had to confirm their performance for myself, but yeah. They're fun as long as you don't expect too much, can service electronics (almost all old cassette decks seem to have something wrong with them), and don't waste too much of your money.
Maxell UR-90 are not particularly good tapes, so your review is unsurprising, but I think the so-so performance you got was because of the tapes and not the machine. I've used quite a few UR series tapes and they're distinctly subpar to the equivalent TDK or Sony standard tapes, and I'm actually starting to purge them from my collection. Just recently I taped something on a UR60 and it just sounded mushy and unfortunate. Then I used a Sony HF and it sounded much better.
There are still plenty of young people who are interested in cassette tapes and buy them in thrift stores
One genuine reason to buy cassettes is that a lot of low-budget music was released *only* on cassette. So if that's the music you want to listen to, cassette is the only way. DM
I bought a dennon cassette player last year. The thing works well. Serviced and parts replaced. I still have casettes that work well from my youth (yes I'm that old) that survived my Walkman days. Sales of cassettes are up.
I suggest watching ITN news tonight.
I bought a Denon in 1995 and it was terrific, but only lasted about seven years before auto-reverse and dubbing functions went weird, and I foolishly didn't get it repaired, but it was the CD-burner era by that time so dubbing was no longer important.
I tend to listen to a lot of my music on youtube. Any thoughts as to the quality of youtube vs.spotify or other compressed streaming services? (still got my vestafire 4-track portastudio, btw and I'm keepin' it)!
In high school in the 80s, pretty good quality blank tapes were cheap enough to copy a few music highlights and give them to a friend. And to make an easier to use good quality backup of a vinyl record for everyday listening, limiting potential damage to the vinyl. All without concern for the expense of the blanks. Also, cassettes were good to assemble favorites to take along in the car.
CD took a while to have affordable car players & changers without skipping. Even longer to have affordable recorders and blank discs.
Minidisc a nice idea a few years later but expensive, hard to find, and very short recording time per disc if you wanted to stay at full CD quality.
At home, I couldn't afford the ultimate, a Nakamichi cassette deck, but had a pretty good Sony deck. I always let it do its 30 second calibration run on a new blank tape.
Today, I share a music playlist by emailing just the links, or parking the mp3's (good enough) on a shared drive.
Lots of room for hours of mp3's on any phone, with an app that lets you enjoy a playlist without needing the cell data plan while taking a walk. I miss my Sports Walkman's waterproof feature and satisfying physical buttons, easy to use by touch to skip a song ahead or back without having to stop what I'm doing to take it out and look at it, unlike any touchscreen phone app. And I also miss the teeny tiny ingenuity of my pop-out mini Walkman, I forget the model number now, that wrapped around half of the cassette. Those gadgets randomly left my life many years ago.
Having lived through the entire history of cassettes (as have you), they went where vinyl could not, they provided budget home recording (I played musical instruments), and they allowed "favorites" mixes for parties and casual listening. There was 8 track: sonically superior, had a lot of drawbacks. I got rid of all of my vintage cassette equipment. Why would I use it? I can't remember that we went for vintage stuff the way that younger generations do today.
Yes. That's the part I don't get. Cassettes were affordable, had pretty good to really good sound quality depending on gear and careful use, were ubiquious, invited recording, and were portable. There was nothing else that compared that we were choosing to do without. CD's initially expensive and no consumer recording ability. Reel to reel and then DAT better sound quality but very expensive, rare, finicky maintenance, and a reel to reel tape is bulky.
Today, vintage cassette enthusiasts are choosing to use something worse in every way except handwriting a label quickly and having a physical thing to hand off. When desktop publishing started in my high school and college years, we didn't stick with Courier and smudge the laser prints to make it look like mimeographed Selectric stencils. We immediately made use of the range of fonts and layout options and every page a high resolution clean original. I can't imagine anyone in 1990 buying a mimeo machine if they could afford a laser printer.
Still have four working cassette decks, including a very good 3-head Sony. I love using them to record. And I know a few musicians who still use cassettes in those double speed 4-track "Portastudio" recorders for working out songs and arrangements. Yeah, using one today makes little sense, but it is just fun.
There's something about the simplicity of a Portastudio that makes it useful for sketching ideas. No computer, no menus, no internet connection, just buttons, and music. DM
@@AudioMasterclass I'm surprised nobody today makes a product like the Yamaha AW series or Roland VS series: all in one box, easy to use, plug in your mics and instruments, friendly big transport controls, scrub wheel, faders, finish a mix internally (and burn a CD) or transfer to computer and remote control a DAW. No worries about OS upgrades, driver conflicts, viruses, or whether an email or chat notification could interrupt your recording. Put the whole rig under your arm to take it with you. Almost as simple as a Portastudio but CD or better quality, instant access, nonlinear editing, no degredation from multiple playbacks. Seems to me there's still nothing to dislike about all that!
@@editingsecrets Seriously, I'm totally with you on that. Despite how great computers CAN be, they CAN do a million things, but not all at once, and often not as fluidly as a dedicated machine (and as a listener, it's really sad how much music online is genuinely worse-quality than cassette tape-- but hey, 'digital' makes perfect!). Having the best recording experience on a computer usually requires making it into a dedicated recording machine with little-to-no background anything running, no internet.
Man your slo-mo face during Betty's part always cracks me up
I aim to please. DM
Does _streaming_ include ripping my CDs to my file server then accessing the file as such, then playing it with, say Mplayer? Or is it only streaming when the same files are served by my dlna software to a client?
I think that most people understand streaming to be Spotify and the like, although streaming from a local server, maybe Jellyfin, isn't that much different. How we use language around this may evolve over time. DM
Streaming technically refers to any remote access of a media file over a computer network that delivers packets in real time playback speed. And often to that including a subscription to a service with an enormous library and recommendation engine, and compressed audio quality to serve more customers who don't mind a step down from ultimate audiophile perfection. But it doesn't have to include those additional connotations.
@@editingsecrets In the days when I began with networks in the '70s what was meant by 'network' was simple, but these days USB is a network technology (and more complicated than TCP/IP/Ethernet), so would accessing a file on a USB-connected hard drive count as streaming? I wouldn't think of it as so.
I think a firmer definition is required, such as the use of a protocol designed to transfer data and timing information. I use a home dlna server for video and some audio at home, and consider that streaming.
@@frogandspanner You started a little earlier than I did with networking. I knew about the Internet but my own first hands on networking experience was setting up some Appletalk file sharing in the late 80s.
"I think a firmer definition is required, such as the use of a protocol designed to transfer data and timing information." That works for me, how about we say streaming is using a computer network to transfer timestamped media packets for realtime playback from a remote computer? That would eliminate usb. Would that include what we both meant?
I have a large collection of music on cassette tape (TDK SA-X tape) half of which I recorded on my Nakamichi 600 tape deck from vinyl on a AR XA turntable using either a Stanton 681EEE or Dynavector 50X cartridge, needless to say they sounded pretty good. More importantly was the music that was mixed tapes for the car, parties and various moods from my youth. If I could find a service technician good enough to restore my old Nakamichi tape deck in Sydney Australia, I would do it in a heartbeat- just for the memories as well as the sound quality. I also use to demagnetise and clean the head’s regularly. As I was an audiophile and OCD, so my daughter pointed out to me when she was a teen.
OK, as an 80's generation kid I have a stack-load of cassettes. But I have no cassette player. The last one that worked I dropped about 10 years ago and the player broke. One area that you forgot was in education; cassettes dominated universities until the mid 90's. Needed a recording of the lecture because you missed it? It was on cassette. An audio assignment was handed to every student? You all got a cassette copy; I still have my 1993 linguistics transcription assignment cassette tape on my shelf. Need to go to the language library and learn a language? They were all on cassettes. Incredibly CDs didn't get a look in at universities for over a decade despite the CD format being invented in 1982.
The format was originally for speech transcription and information. That it was made stereo and fairly high fidelity was amazing engineering after the introduction. My family had a Norelco Cassette-Corder taken along for music lessons to hear the practice exercises. Today it would be captured on the kid's phone.
Love cassettes. Just bought a pristine Revox B215. It’s absolutely amazing. I also have two Nakamichi Dragons👍
Cassettes are alive and well in our household.
Okay, cassettes are dead for multiple reasons (and right so). But I still haven't found a new medium giving me the good mix of advantages that the cassette had. A cassette may not have the dynamic range of a CD (although with a good chrome dioxide or pure iron ("metal") tape, DOLBY C or DOLBY S and a well-adjusted bias and head position you could come very close to it), and a streaming service with more than 128 kbps mp3 may produce a better sound, a vinyl record may have nicer cover arts to display and give room to the nostalgic and meditative ceremony of unwrapping, cleaning the record and watching the stylus touch down on the beginning of the track... But until today, I haven't found a medium that gives me the following advantages simultaneously:
- a physical device that I can handle myself, present to others, share with others,
- easy recording and playback with the same device (no need to burn disks or use the PC to build my own collection),
- easy handling, compact casing, small overall dimensions,
- robust against dropping down (maybe the outer case would break, but never the cassette itself)
- no need to care for scratches or fingerprints on the surface, decent robustness to dusty or dirty environment,
- easy identification of its content by looking at the inlay sheet (which can be replaced/corrected anytime),
- some place for cover art, even not quite as nice as on the 12" vinyl record covers
- affordable price per piece...
No "newer" media show all of these advantages at once. Maybe it's a sign that today's users do not need or value them, maybe it's a different way how (esp. young) people today "consume" music... I am 58 now and I want to listen to music consciously, with affection (if it is good music, not the mass products for a broad market), I would even say today I listen to it even more attentively and consciously than in my younger days, discovering more and more details in the music. Of course, I do not use cassettes anymore, too, but more because a good, affordable cassette Tape deck is hard to find (and quality cassettes as well). But I will never forget the countless nights with my earphones on in my student's apartment, listening to my recordings (some of which I copied from CD from my friends, admittedly) and diving deep into the details of the arrangements and lyrics...
(Edited because I had written "record player" instead of "cassette tape deck")
I've got three cassette decks that I've refurbished and calibrated to spec. Two of them are Pioneers with auto BLE, which works a treat. My cassette tapes recorded from digital playlists on decks with HX Pro and Dolby (even Dolby B) sound absolutely fantastic on any of my three machines. It's very difficult for me to tell any difference between the HD playlists and the cassette tapes. And I love the nostalgia of the cassette as a physical medium. BUT -- it took a LOT of careful work to get my decks to this point! The casual listener who thinks "cassettes might be cool" and buys a used deck on ebay, thinking they can just start in enjoying the music? Forget it. That's the barrier today, because you can't buy a reasonably-priced, full-featured new deck -- with HX Pro, Dolby, and BLE -- to enjoy out of the box.
At a lot of music performances by relatively unknown artists at Arts Festivals etc., they often have a booth where you can buy a cassette of their music. That's another area where cassettes are not dead but thriving. Cassettes at the used lp places around me were priced at $1 for many decades; now their prices have jumped up from $1 (last year) to $4 this year. That indicates an increased demand. But perhaps the main indicator, is that there are companies coming out with new cassette players. One of the ones reviewed plays a cassette and has its own amp and speaker, with an output to power a higher quality external speaker if you wish. It also plays bluetooth. We are at the beginning of a new fad. Not the end by any means. If you think about it, a magnetic head, recording or playing back a cassette, is the exact same process as with reel to reel tapes; only at a slower speed. Many think reel tapes are the ultimate medium for sound quality. Why wouldn't cassette also be good? Since not nearly as much tape passes through the head per second as reel tape, the compromise of limiting dynamic range had to be chosen. Otherwise it would overload the tape with too much signal. The tape is not as wide either. Cassette was intended to give good sound on the go; and it succeeded at that. It was never intended to compete with the dynamics of reel tape. So nothing it intended to be in the first place, ever failed as far as sound performance. It did exactly what was expected of it within its limitations because of the lower tape speed. I am sure that a top Tandberg, Revox or Nakamichi cassette deck sounds way cleaner on factory prerecorded music than an lp on what most people play lps on. With a smoother more lush sound and much more tonal beauty than someone with a $200 turntable cartridge combination.
Factory prerecorded cassettes of different artists vs. cassettes I recorded an lp on with a turntable and a fairly expensive top model Shure cartridge was a dead heat. A tie, is what I would give it. And I have ears and I listened closely to many tapes. I even had a few where I had the factory prerecorded tape and had taped the same album titles from my above mentioned turntable. So except for dynamic range, which is limited because of the slower tape speed, a factory prerecorded cassette played back on a well above average cassette deck should be looked at as roughly the same sound quality as someone playing an lp on a $300 turntable/cartridge rig. There are lower model cassette decks available used for less than $300. Sometimes less than $200. Cassettes at thrift stores and flea markets are dirt cheap. Sometimes half a dollar... Isn't that better than paying near $30 for a new lp, or $6 for a used one whose surface looks like a "maybe" or a "maybe not"
Now at higher price ranges, a well chosen $400 turntable with a $300 cartridge ($700) might give you sound that is more palpable and clear than all but the best cassette decks. At that price, the scale might shift back over to vinyl. But you still might like something more in certain ways about the cassette's sound; a lush smoothmess and continuity. I prefer a faint hiss in the near silent passages to vinyl's ticks and pops. If your tonearm is great, you will hear much less ticks and pops. But your cartridge will have to be great not to hear inner groove distortion and a thinning of the sound towards the end of each side. You will also have to get up to flip the record, brush the stylus etc. Many good cassette decks have auto reverse where it plays through both side without having to get up and mess with it. So cassettes are coming back. It would surprise me if they came back as strongly as lp. On an absolute basis the lp is the higher quality medium. If you chased all around town and on the internet for the choicest pressings. Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound once compared a Living Stereo reel tape to the lp of the same title. He commented how all lps have a whitish coloration compared to tape. The reel tape also won for clarity and palpable presence Cassette is a viable medium if you don't expect the world from a format that was never intended to challenge reel tape for sound quality. If you have a good moving coil cartridge on a good tonearm/turntable, you will like lps better for clarity and dynamics. But for sumptuousness and tonal beauty, tone colors, smoothness, continuity and some other things, you just may still like the sound of tape,
Hard to talk about normal when it’s a youthful audience who want art not just music. This is about art vs audio. It’s truly not that bizarre if you frame it differently. Zegema beach does some really cool handmade pieces and releases. It’s been an evolving art form and more then just a listening experience. Personally I don’t have any cassettes but it’s not hard to understand how people romanticize physical media in general. It’s such a powerful piece of art too own when you hold a vinyl or cassette. Especially these days.
Streaming compression breaks the music more offensively than transit through a good tape mechanism. Few survive and none are being made, but a thirty year old cassette deck beats a Spotify subscription.
I listen to streaming and CDs most of the time. I went back to vinyl few years ago, but only for nostalgia and occasional listening. Never went back to cassettes, although I do miss the rituals of recording my LPs to type II tapes on my Nakamichi 582.😊
It’s about owning a physical copy of your favorite music. Most people don’t give a rats a* about sound quality (whatever that may be these days with blue tooth equipment). Btw, reel2reel should have been an option. :) To my ears, a master tape played on a Revox PR99 has sound more convincing than the same album played digitally via a Bryston BDA 3.14 DAC.
Ripped CD's on my pc is 90% of my music listening.
I see the cassette resurgence as just another fad. Cassettes are a novelty to those that didn't grow up with them and that's fine. There's no logic in buying new music on cassette, but I can understand the novelty in making a mixtape. Now, excuse me as I go back to listening to a mixtape I recorded off the radio (in mono) back in 1980.
When I was a kid in the 80's my local book library had an upstairs section where you could borrow cassettes. Music, audiobooks etc. Of course now there's no cassette tape to be seen.
Sure its just a hobby but I still run them. I'm able to get amazing recordings from hifi streaming and they give me a lot of pleasure how good they sound. The decks after all these years are a high maintenance item, I service them myself, and I can imagine this would be a pain if you didn't have the ability to do this. Unfortunately "collectors" got into the game and quality tapes are unaffordable now. I'm fortunate in that I've enough tapes to keep me going for quite a while.
I use them, record them and listen to them every day in the car using line input. Player is a restored Sony DD2. Living happy with it.
I ever used cassettes only as "backup" of vinyl, radio and CD, longest for car, walkman and the famous '"girl friend compilations". I bought music I like most as Vinyl and/or CD. I used cassettes for "common" music and mainly for old recordings from older music lovers or musicians. In late 70s and early 80s, Jazz and Blues recordings of the 50s and 60s were hard to find. Original releases of Verve, BlueNote, Impulse etc have been suspended and the back catalogs were only available as compilations, mostly in bad quality. Only Atlantic, later WEA, as major lable was still publishing new recordings. Beginning in the early 1980s the re-releasing of old recordings was boosted by the CD and their possible profit for the lables. Unfortunately with less experience in digital audio and no effort in transfer or remastering. And there the market for used records started tiny and slow. So, the cassettes were needed until CD-burners and AD-/DA-cards for PCs get common.
Beside the hybris of the music industry with streaming, there are good remasters today, also for HighRes-download, and the market for used records is strong. I'm buying older, used vinyl only, and the quality of orignal Vinly from the late 50s to the late 70s on a modern HiFi-set floors me, even if the condition of the copy ist not so good. And I buy used CDs because there are enough releases until the 2020 not avaliable as new CD today, nor as streaming or download. I recovered a lot of my Cassettes content. For the rest, I use my used Denon DRM-800, bought for 200 EUR, for playbak only until the deck or I will die. Cassettes are only sastisfying with CrO2- or Me-tape, Dolby and a maintained Cassettes-Deck, but only Fe2O3 tape is in production today, because for reel-to-reel other tape types never get real common. The development of digital audio started in the late 60s and the development of analog-tape in professional audio came to an end then. Yes, so early. Beginning in 1978 Classical music recordings were made digital, and since 1980-81 all major lables are using digital only for the production masters of all music. Good cassette-decks with noise reduction are also no more in production since 20 years. For me, Cassettes is alive only 2% in deed.
One thing to add I lived through at the time: CDs were often excessively bright for the format's first few years, as mastering engineers didn't realize they no longer needed the high frequency boost to overcome the high frequency rolloff response of an analog master tape.
I understand the appeal of importing your content only available on cassettes. But what's the advantage of continuing to use it for playback, instead of capturing it all into computer for instant random access and no degradation from repeat plays?
@@editingsecrets Cassettes can last very long and their content is not so special to spend the effort in capturing as digital transfer until now, despite the fact, that I have two good Audio Interfaces and a DAW.
I also replace releases of the 80's to mid 90's with digital remasters because of the harshness of the orignal release. I think, it had not only been done to overcome issues in the production chain or due to traditional workflow. The quality of control rooms acoustics and monitor speakers was not as today. Only a few studios were using LEDE-design i.e. as standard, and the monitors where no good in the higher bands because it was not needed with analog tape. My most extreme example is 'Tug Of War' by Paul McCartney. Original release as Vinyl recorded at AIR Studios. Cuts your eardrum out. The famous Dire Straits recordings from there, that time, have similar problems. The second issue was "optimization" for car audio and disco in using Exciters excessively. The US productions from that time are more friendly but same sound design.
@@ericberger6966 That all makes sense.
"I think, it had not only been done to overcome issues in the production chain or due to traditional workflow." Exactly! To get high frequencies back from vinyl, you have to boost them in the master recording. Took a while for some mastering shops to realize you don't need to do that any more on digital, so some of those early digital releases were too bright.
I know Knucks but I’m not an old timer. 30s, so not the youth buying cassettes either. Perhaps Stranger Things on Netflix is responsible for the resurrecting of cassettes, it baffles me. Perhaps the desire for analog audio, and physical media, and vinyl records being too expensive. Either way if history is repeating itself, think of all the joy that’s coming when they discover CDs.
Bands doing limited release cassettes is making a comeback, just like the diy punk days of 70's & 80's, I'm involved with some bands doing this using portastudios etc, part of the appeal is the lofi diy ethic, same as back in the day, photocopied inserts etc, some amazing stuff being produced!
Reminds me of around 1990 when samplers started getting really good and could do CD-quality sampling, and acts like Beck and Cypress Hill used them to make these grainy-sounding creations which sounded awesome with basically 'bad sound quality' used strategically in the mix.
You're forgetting the huge impact of Sony's Walkman. Though inferior, the cassette was portable & the reason for my transition from reel-to-reel (still a niche) to cassette. My biggest cassette regret was BASF. Ten years after purchase, those cassettes squealed like a pig, with no possible fix, into the trash they went. Luckily I transitioned to Maxell half way thru my cassette life. The cassettes were used (car, pool side) until my transition to MP3.
I did mention portable players, although perhaps without sufficient emphasis. Being able to listen to music while out and about was a breakthrough. DM
Every medium has a different sound. Some people like the cassette's sound. It's warm and smooth and has great continuity, and tape is the only true analog medium which doesn't have ticks and pops. It's coming back. Welcome it.
I like tapes too but they do get static sometimes and often have lesser sound quality overall, and records don't all have "ticks and pops" but lots of people never really learned how to use records properly, like cleaning, lubricating and removing the static from them, or picking a good needle and balancing it properly, so that's why there are lots of people whose experience with records is 'lots of noise' instead of what I get, which is very smooth, rich sound quality out of records that are in good shape (because we're not comparing 'good tapes' to 'bad records' here, we're comparing the best of each format, and records win that contest). Tapes are definitely not "coming back" like they're gonna be on the shelf at Target next to the records, but they have their users.
I inherited my Dad's Ampex cassette deck which is really cool. You can stack up to six cassettes in a holder, and it will play each one individually. The changer is kind of sluggish nowdays, but once the cycle is over it still plays quite well!
Car cassette players were great in their day, and survived well into the 90s, until CD players became the norm. But it was the Sony Walkman that truly put cassettes in the forefront. Taking your selected music wherever you liked, without having to hoist a huge boom box on your shoulder, was a game changer. Then came portable CD players, and then iPods, and then smart phones, and now streaming. Streaming is certainly most convenient and I do subscribe to a service, but still, I enjoy selected a physical medium from my shelf, cleaning the LP, and playing it on my turntable/player. I have so very many classical LPs from my earliest days of collecting. I don't want to get rid of them and they still sound fine to my ears.
I also have a number of prerecorded cassettes and they sound just fine on my Sony machine. If I want them on the road, I can digitize them to mp3, and stream them through iCloud on my phone, via my car receiver.
By the way, I really like your demeanor and your expertise and your delivery. You sound like a person I'd like to sit down and share a pint with in the local pub.
It's worth noting that a lot of new cassette sales come with a digital download included.
So when you buy the tape, and some bloke freaks out about "you could have better sound quality", you are getting a FLAC DL in the package, as I did with Wet Leg's release and others.
I've bought CDs with the same deal, CD plus zip file to dl.
It raises the question whether when you're out and about you listen on your Walkman or phone. I suspect Walkman for swag. DM
The tragedy is that there is no cassette deck produced today (in 2023) that can reproduce the audio quality of what was produced decades ago in the 90s. It's not like humankind has lost the knowledge to physically produce type II or IV tape stock or a cassette deck with Dolby C or S, but the borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s has reduced the majority of cassette releases to the noisiest (cheapest) type I tape with no noise reduction because that's the current lowest common denominator of available playback units.
The cassette format has limitations, but currently available releases demonstrably do not reflect the state of the art, and that's tragic.
Kudos to the indys still releasing with XDR and Dolby B.
@@GladeSwope it would be neat to compare current releases with decades-old DIY!
It seems weird to me that could overdub existing commercial releases on my mid-80s tape deck from the digital sources and have them sound better. Is the poor quality an aesthetic choice?
I wish a company like Sony would just do 1 run of new cassette decks with all the bells & whistles. Bet you they could charge a high price and they would sell out.
Later cassette machines were really good, even consumer stuff including Pioneer's 'Digital Noise' reduction. Despite this, technically, cassette was always inferior...just like MP3 or cheaper hifi gear...but that's all irrelevant as most people listen to music on cheap radios, computer speakers or crappy headphones and still derive enjoyment from the music. The fetishistic obsession of engineers and hifi enthusiasts with gear and 'quality' invariably exceeds the capabilities of the human ear to hear it.
Why cassette still rocks?
1.Extremely durable format (I play tapes I recorded in 1978..over 40 years old and they work the same as they did in 1978). Compared to CZcams's digitally remastered Dark side of the Moon, Pink Floyd the old cassette of the original vinyl was markedly better sounding...noisier but so much more dynamic.
2. With decent decks, cassette can sound very good (human ears are very forgiving; why mp3 is so popular).
3. Linear. You tend to listen to whole albums and appreciate tracks you would have initially skipped. These overlooked tracks invariably become favourites.
4. The tactile, tangible nature of the format engages you more with the music, instead of distracting with the camera work of a high production video etc..
5. It is great fun making recordings. This is why some young people fall in love with the format. Make your own labels, J cards, mixtapes...as opposed to a dry streaming playlist on a remote web page.
6. I have recordings from 1982 and I can still play them, digitise and remaster them. I can not play/find digital stuff I did a few years ago as the latest OS/plugins/ DAW/Computer are now incompatible with it. (Why Steve Albini still uses tape).
7. Top record producer, Trevor Horn recently said; aspiring engineers and producers would do well to learn the craft by starting out on a cassette 4 track machine and with good reason.
I listen to high-quality cassettes on a superb Nakamichi deck. Let me say that it's leagues better sound than streaming.
True story, I've got a Technics M11 and it's a very-good but not amazing deck, but it still sounds WAY better than a lot of music online.
@@jamescarter3196 I know what you mean. I also have a Harmon Kardon dual cassette deck and it is in pristine condition. The dynamic range and warmth are unreal. It's always great to meet like-minded friends.
@@jamescarter3196 Completely agree with you. Most of the online music is only good enough for portable BT boomboxes kids are carrying around. I'm now running almost daily my Pioneer Terminator, mean T-1000S, with large variety of tapes ranging from Sony CHF / TDK D at the cheap end and Sony's SMM, Maxell MV, TDK's MA-XG at the top and they sound really amazing. Well, not so sharp as SACD (or just CD), but very very enjoyable.
There was no need for a Nakamichi deck. They were excellent machines but others also knew how to get good high frequency reproduction out of the compact cassette.
I use Nakamichi as an example because I've heard them and considering the limitations of the format the sound is amazing. I've also used both Revox and Studer cassette decks and they were very good but no more than that. Of course, there may be other decks as excellent as Nakamichi but I haven't heard them (yet). DM
Overkill for people who cherish precision engineering at the top of the line, the same way that after a certain point a Swiss watch isn't about knowing what the current time is.
Well it is a good standard, they put a lot of engineers to working overtime so they could meet that standard. Thankfully many came close in the eighties. My JVC DD-7 an excellent example. Three heads. Direct drive single capstan, and good electronics to back it up. Could be bought new about 1982 for 600$. Yeah that was the draw back in 1982 for less than 300$ you had a Technics direct drive turntable and a really good cartridge. That JVC I put 15 to twenty thousand hours on since I found twenty years ago. It's also when I discovered that a cassette could sound very good and it's didn't need to be metal or so called chrome. And that the TDK D series was actually a decent cassette close to 60 Dbs dynamic range and flat out 17K with room for good bass. Everything is fine with it... well after I recap it , can't say enough about those Sendust Alloy heads,they still look new.
@@stevengagnon4777 Etsuro Nakamichi was a brilliant and visionary engineer who pioneered a lot of beneficial developments we took for granted later on. And up to the mid-eighties, I'd argue that his cassette decks were the reference. But after that, development stopped and others caught up.
I love audio cassettes and i still have lots of fun playing tapes and recording. I have a Denon 3-head deck and a fully operational Tascam 246 4-track recorder, both in excellent condition. I still buy pre-recorded tapes these days, because some artists only release their music on tapes. Maybe not everybody’s piece of cake but the audio cassette surely has not died in several underground music scenes.
It strikes me that an upcoming band might release an album on cassette because there are people who will specifically search for albums that are only available on cassette. Possibly. DM
@@AudioMasterclass The cassette artists i’m interesting in are mostly artistic, creative musicians. They experiment with loops and speed modulation, even degradation of the tape itself. I have always loved the mechanical part of cassette operation. Actually, i bought two simple but decent quality new portable Sony cassette players for my kids to experiment as well and they love it! Audio isn’t always about sound quality, it’s about interaction and excitement!
Although I'm now retired, I was an audio engineer. I was ALWAYS a critical listener and would frequently return crappy pressings when I was a kid!!! (My Dad called me "Take it back Ken") I had reel to reel machines by the time I was 8. So when cassettes became I "thing" I was highly aware of their flaws and limitations. When I finally got a 4 track reel with DBX NNR in the 70s it seemed like the best quality audio to my ears. Even 45 years later some of my old 4 track studio recordings sound AMAZING and very close to digital dynamic range, super clean. Unfortunately cassettes I recorded from that era are inferior in every way.
I find this subject painfully hilarious… The first CD I bought was U2’s “Achtung Baby” and I never bought a cassette again, except for blank ones I used for recordings. Not long after getting used to listening to CDs I realized that most cassettes already started to sound worse within the first five times playing them.
Immediately copying your vinyl to cassette isn't really that far from immediately ripping your CD to mp3 for your phone.
I believe that several years ago, Disney was playing mind games with people when the opening sequence of a Guardians of the Galaxy movie had ELO's Mister Blue Sky with, according to the story, it being played from a cassette tape. I suspect that on the basis of that some people may have even dusted off their old cassette decks, but only to find that the rubber capstan roller had indeed perished.
Having had cassette decks since childhood, I have never personally experienced that. I do not have the very first decks that I used to have. But the rollers in the Pioneer CT-91a, the Beocord 8000 and the Tandberg TCD-3014a that I have had for years and years, are the original ones, and they work well. In fact all 3 decks sound great. Only regular cleaning and now time for a quick belt change on the Beocord 8000, is the level of maintenance I have had to do so far. That is by far lower maintenance than I have had to do on my pc, router etc, as well as on my cd-player and LP player as well. Just my own experience.
Kind regards.
I just got on ebay new old stock nakamichi bx300, paid 600.00 plus shipping and tax, love it, I got a total of 4 nakamichi cassette decks, and type 2 cassettes, anyway I'm have a lot of fun, wish I had all that in the 80's. I'm more of a vinyl record guy, love analog
I think I get it. They are doing it for the same reason that teenagers & young adults in the 1970s and 1980s bought originals on cassette rather than vinyl, even though they knew that records were patently better and also knew about dubbing from record to cassette.
It's because they wanted the *original copy*, but they wanted it in a format that is more convenient to carry around (and possibly for storage purposes as well). They were prepared to accept the inferior quality in return for these benefits. Plus, a lot of people's music centres etc didn't do particularly well with the dubbing from record to cassette.
I think it is much the same now, but with the added dimension that they want to be a little bit "hipster" and have their music on an analogue medium, like a record, rather than a digital one but don't want the bulkiness of vinyls. I believe just like back in the day, cassette releases also tend to be a little cheaper than the vinyl versions.
Vinyl is simple - easy for a small engineering concern to build a turntable out of more material than necessary and call it high end with a price tag to match. Cassette tapes, for the better end of the available quality of reproduction, depend on machines and blank cassettes that haven’t been manufactured for decades. Do to the extreme unlikelihood of anyone committing the development cost of putting anything comparable back in production - the format is dead in any useful sense.
New tapes are being made, type 1 never went away and have been in continuous production. Type 2 are making a comeback, although they're not up to scratch yet, the gears are in motion and new Chrome tapes can be bought..
@@Daijyobanai Yes, I meant for decent recordings the higher quality blank tapes are no longer available. If they’re going to all that bother, from a pretty much blank slate, why not revive something better like Elcaset.
Physical copies give you much stronger sense of owning something. Your copy, becomes more yours each time you play it. Especially with analogue formats with some imperfections. Neither Vinyl nor cassette can produce as perfect sound as digital formats, but they produce good enough. It's not like we only listen to perfect studio recordings either. We often pay good money for live recordings that have plenty of "flaws", but that is often what we are seeking. We don't value what comes too easily, and there is no easier way to listen to music than streaming. As easy as putting a cassette into a player is, it is still harder than pushing a button on your phone. Ordering a cassette or vinyl requires extra steps to digital download. Seeing parts moving in order to play the music, again, makes it more real and more valuable.
I record streaming radio stations with my finger near the pause button of one of a collection of pretty reasonable decks I've collected. it is a nostalgic affectation, I grant you, but it also sounds nice in my sony ex-5 while I'm commuting. I brush off the looks of 'hipster fool' from the other passengers if they even notice the old tech.
getting good results from cassettes now takes time & patience, & deep pockets to do properly. I do my own maintenance (broadcast engineer with bench skills).
it's also a collection of technology- some of these machines, the portables particularly- took mass produced electromechanical engineering almost to an art-form, something we have lost to pick-&-place robots building solid-state portable computers.
Just yesterday I bought a cassette from a band I love. I was lucky to happen on it because they make such small runs of 50 or 100, rarely 500. Since I have a cassette player from long ago, bought one of the last Sony music systems that came with it before it disappeared along with the cd-tray, now that bluetooth is so popular. I thought, I have the player for it, why not use it. Listening to music is such a personal experience, from compiling your listening systems to finding the music to play on it. The digital age is very convenient but the soul has been lost somewhere.
4:00 I disagree, vinyl records can reach only 60DB of SNR they are wobbly, there is rumble, click's, pops... Ewww.. . 72 DB of signal to noise ratio is feasible with Dolby B only (on many Akaï decks). 94DB is possible with DBX. My Harman Kardon CD 491 vith a Metal tape has a 20Herts to 26 Kiloherts bandwidth. I stopped buying new vinyls! To expensive, poor pressings... One of my hobby is to make a recording on cassettes that actually has better sound quality than CD. To acheive this, i use Super Audio CD as a source and record it to a good cassette. This is my favorite prank on my studio partner. Every time i make a blind test between an original CD and a recorded cassette made with Dolby B, he chooses the copy and not the original: "Why does this copy has a better sound than the original? Why the bass is warmer and the highs are more delicate? I have the impression of listening to the original reel of the album in the studio and not a copy". It must be said that to achieve this result, the deck's are restored, calibrated and of course, these processes require time, money and effort... Just like the original reels of the majority of classic recordings! I'm not talking about the specifications of reel-to-reel tape recorders, which are disastrous to say the least at the W&F level... Apart from the Nagra. :-) Sometimes, i don't use noise reduction and i use a double layer super ferric cassette ( TDK-AR X ) to restore the background noise removed from digitaly re-mastered CD'S; i don't like to hear the pumping effect of the noise gate to remove hiss in quiet passages. I prefer my copy with a constant background noise ( the brain is dealing with) and a clear sound. It's like a time machine to go back in the 60's studio recording console! I hear every detail with the original noise restored. Nature is analog. Long live to analog cassette tape!
Well reasoned but as a greying old music (or sound) fan here's my perspective. I disliked the high speed duplicated cassettes and the 'Dolby out' trick compensated for the losses even on a well maintained deck. But I also had some non dolby cassettes (tubular bells being one) and despite the hiss, sounded very good. My prime use of cassettes was RECORDING, one off radio programmes, field recordings (the sound of a JT9D engine as a rear passenger in a BAC 1-11), personal life moments, concert bootlegs, Tony Blackburn unable to pronounce "Duran Duran". The only medium available to me. I even blocked off the permanent magnet erase head from engaging on blank tapes on portable recorders. Eventually I bought a Sony D6C. We cannot rewind those times, so the cassette is all I have, to the best recording at the time, no Dolby, an Altai electret one point stereo mic powered by a 1.5V button cell. It definitely is not about the quality, it is not even the nostalgia for the medium, it is the only thing I have, and the original source is just that, and it is cassette. You'll not be surprised to learn I also have DAT recorded in the field as well as later solid state recorder balanced mics with phantom power, but they hadn't been invented when the JT9D jet engine was making its classic sound taking holidaymakers to far off destinations. I've boxes and boxes of the things, and a lot I have 'ripped' to compressed digital format for ease of access cataloguing and listening convenience. Those old ILR commercial - LOCAL - radio stations (remember those?) had some unique output and adverts. Even the BBC local stations, even national output. Preserved (in part) on cassette. You mentioned demo tapes, which were on cassette, never made it to vinyl or CD. Unique, and highly valued by the artists most dedicated fan base and essential inclusion on CD box sets, hiss and all. CZcams, Mixcloud and Soundcloud are sources for others' recordings of rare and unique material, personal recordings when radio really was national or local with character we do not hear today, so I would cite any of those as a source, because it is all we had, all we have, unless I went along to the provider of the material to listen with them, but I am eternally grateful, and humbled that someone else took the time to make a recording, no matter how poor the quality (many of medium wave!) available to a wider audience. If we had waited around for "something better" and simply not used the medium we had, those sounds would have been lost forever, hiss, HF loss and all.
I must be a odd man out. For now, I discover lots of music on CZcams. I’m relooking at my cassettes again. Back then, cassettes were the most convenient way to play music in cars and other “mobile” devices.
If you mean enjoying music recorded to cassettes many years ago, I can see the point of revisiting old cassettes. I can't imagine any benefit today to recording a cassette mixtape, instead of transferring mp3's to a phone to take with you.
Why didn’t you add 8 track and reel to reel to your survey?
Modern cassette duplication sounds better than modern vinyl, point blank. It's a mine field finding a pressing of an album on Vinyl that won't throw your needle to the next song when the bass hits. So if you want a physical album thats actually going to be listenable that's not a boring CD, tape is the way to go.
Also, I've got a rip of a The Weeknd album released in 2015 on cassette that 100% has a higher audio quality to a very noticeable extent compared to the CD release. I'd love to share it but, ya know. I have shared it before and have seriously impressed some audiophile guys with it though. You can get Hifi Vinyl level quality recordings on modern cassette tape, especially if you're The Weeknd and somehow manage to get Dolby B HX Pro on your release.
Also, a $60 at most tape deck from 1995 that still works or just needs new belts is going to run circles around any modern turntable for that price.
Cassettes need more love ❤️ I don't care what anybody says about Cassettes and Cassette players.😅I enjoy playing all my cassettes and I take very good care of all my cassettes. I love recording and making mix tapes still in 2023 # It's all about choice ! I say like what you like.Streaming sucks !
Just like model railroads are a very inefficient way to move stuff around the room, there will always be people who find it a joy to have a tinkering hobby.
Cassettes are fine. They get a bad rap. I’ve mastered releases from cassette. Nobody complained or noticed. Well recorded and well maintained decks can sound excellent.
My bigger problem is the quality of what people are listening to music on these days.
I understand that streaming is commonplace and convenient, but why not rip music from compact disc to flac if a person is into quality sound. I also understand that space is at a premium, but so is data. I loved cassette tapes, except the rewinding and fast forwarding to search for a favorite song. I like the small form factor too. 🎶
Why rip CDs when someone else has already digitized them for you? Likely for every CD you own, or ever will own, and in at least CD quality.
I didn’t see the poll but it would have been interesting for me as I probably listen to vinyl, CD and download in equal measure. When I want to really get into my music it’s vinyl every time. I have however got a substantial cassette collection, probably a couple of thousand which I used to buy to play in the car or on a Walkman back in the 70’s and early 80’s.
I recently got my cassette decks out of the loft, a Nachamichi and 2 Yamaha’s and all 3 would not play. The drive belts had all melted into black goo and 2 out of the 3 would not even power up. A repair guy advised me to not bother getting them mended and to buy a serviced one off eBay which I did. I have played a total of one cassette since I bought it. It’s nice to have the option though as my kids buy special edition vinyls that sometimes come with a cassette tape version in the collection. A plus point is I will be able to easily record a radio show that I am involved in.
The price of blank tapes shocked me though as a bog standard ferric C120 is now £10!
Sounds mad but I record from a streaming service on to cassette using a Denon 3 head deck , so nothing fancy but I find the result more pleasing to the ear.
Some don't even know what a cassette is! LOL Were getting old!
Audio cassettes are far from dead. Check out successful cassette artists such as Amulets and Hainbach and initiatives such as Cassette Store Day. You would be surprised of the number of specialised cassette labels worldwide with a wide and eclectic range of music styles only available on cassette!
Considering it costs next to nothing to release on Spotify and the other digital services, I have to think that cassette releases are a marketing gimmick. There's nothing wrong with that if people enjoy it and I might look into it in a future video. DM
@@AudioMasterclass Do it yerselfers might make a lot more money from just a few cassette or vinyl sales than from a million plays on Spotify, if they can even get them.
I would love to get back to cassettes, the only reason I don’t is because they’re not easily available be it the players or the tapes and the troubles of maintaining and repairs. But I would love that it catched on again and anyone could buy a new casette deck or walkman.
I'll have a new video coming out about cassettes soon. You may possibly get your wish. DM
I keep waiting on the MiniDisc revival so I can finally buy a new player. Mine is on its last legs. Come on Sony, get your finger out!
In today's world, what does MiniDisc give that isn't bettered by uncompressed audio files on a phone?
@@editingsecrets You're right but I've got a box full of recordings I made during the 90s that I just can't give up. It's nostalgia as well. I just love the format.
@@stevetosh if it's fun to dig through the box and put the disc in the player, enjoy!!
as minidisc is a proprietary format and you need Sony's licensing to sync via a PC, it isn't coming back. Just get a decent used player off of Yahoo auctions Japan.
Cassettes are just perfect. I have acquired quite a stack of new blank ones and use them to record music from my vinyl collection on it to listen in the car or Walkman when I’m out of the house. Yes I could stream via my phone or even use an old iPod, but it’s not just about the music.
Long ago, I used to catch music from FM radio to K7, and also recorded various other things on the same K7 (voice, music, ambients). Listening to these medias now is a wonderful "life slice"
Bought a mid-range Kenwood deck with an external DAC to record Bluetooth audio. Run the bluetooth through DAC to cassette and use dolby C. Recordings come out amazing!! Actually shocking how good they come out as long as you watch your levels.
Edit: Forgot to mention the negative. To get good recordings I use good quality chrome tapes. Occasional metal tape as well. Prices on new old stock are getting insane. People want $50 for a metal tape!
For sure CD and streaming for quality and clarity. Tape though satisfies something else for me, I love making new mix tapes. A streamed playlist that I’ve created just doesn’t do it for me. I also love minidisc for the same reason.
A good Cassette Recording sounds Exellent and full of character
I think that this video is a good summary. As it pretty much said, there isn't a single performance attribute of cassettes that isn't beaten by some other format. Well, I can't think of one.
It's been pointed out to me that, despite their shortcomings, cassettes are fun. I'll have a video out on this soon. DM
@@AudioMasterclass I look forward to it.
I expect that your channel will have heaps of participation bias surrounding your survey, because your expertise is 'excellence in audio' and not convenience in audio (and those pesky cassettes are fun as you aptly pointed out in another vlog). Most of the cassettes I have bought in recent years have been new old stock from Sony, TDK, Maxell, BASF et al and (pseudo) chrome prices have been silly for some time. None of the major manufacturers are in a hurry to mass produce cassettes anymore. Junior doesn't own a cassette deck, player or Walkman and she recently purchased a cassette from Fall Out Boy, not because she intended to listen to it, because she wanted to support the artist. She said it was like buying a tour poster, just another form of merch that was tactile, that she could pick up and look at and read the J card. I love my cassettes. I know that they aren't the best format for fidelity, however, you can get some excellent results if you set up your deck properly. I also use MD, vinyl, digital downloads from Bandcamp and CDs and enjoy all as each has its merits and shortcomings. I gravitate towards the older formats because they are tactile in nature. Downloads are not cuddly. If cassettes aren't dead, thay are gravely ill in hospital, much to my disappointment.
My favorite thing about cassettes is their durablity. You can thrown them around carelessly for years and they will play.
I used to buy pre-recorded cassettes because I was afraid of CDs until 2005 when I got a CD player for my birthday. But I still love blank cassettes.
Let me give you an example. I bought a recently released album from the viagra boys on cassette.
I played the album on an old cassette recorder I repaired myself. It's far from perfect but more decent than the new ones you can buy these days. Listening to that particular album on cassette felt like enhancing the experience in the right direction. It has to do with the attitude of the band. I would not want to listen to the Sex Pistols like a classical masterpiece. Cassettes are more than people give it credit for. It's the rebel of the physical medium. The spray paint on the walls of musical history. Pirates of the Hi-Fies. It's not for audiophiles, it's for the kids on the streets. And as such it is as important as Vinyl and CD, no matter the quality. And I hope it never goes away. It will, but still...
Yes, cassettes are a "dead" medium. What that means however, is where we may disagree. For me, it means that all of the time I'm putting into "fiddling" with cassettes, is actually worthwhile. I'm extending the life of some really excellent recordings. I'm listening to mixes and releases that aren't available in other formats. Every form of storage has it's achilles heel. Even the ultimate winner, digital. Hard drives fail, and sometimes it doesn't take much, or give any warning! I'm buying old commercial cassette releases and transferring them to newer tapes. I'm not bothering to import them into the computer as there's not going to be any gain in quality. I do also record digital sources to tape. That works amazingly well. As far as robust longevity, you'll be hard pressed to beat tape. I've got commercial CDs from the 80' and 90's that are rotting right away. They're dying, and there's no way to restore them. The foil is flaking right off. Cassettes ten years older than that, often play just fine. They can also be repaired pretty easily. A 40 year old HDD? You probably won't be able to read it, if it still functions at all.
I adored the solenoid controls and precise tape handling of the best made machines. Some of the finest Japanese engineering went into the higher end cassette decks like Nakamichi. For the home recording enthusiast, it was a way of connecting with the music that was different to vinyl. Still is.
Cassettes have been in my life since my first tape player around 12 years old, I am 56 now and still love cassettes. Store bought music tapes were always junk, I would buy high bias tapes usually 90min length and fill them up with recording records or recordings taken off the radio and then from cd and even tape to tape because whats better then a mixed tape of your own creation and set levels from your personal collection of music, mixed tapes rock and was great making mixed tapes for friends. Sure they cant compare to records or cd and beyond but they were personal, it took time and care to make a good one. Tape decks need a good back bone, need some stereo watts and jack the bass and treb and the mids if you have too. Not many could tell if they did not see the little guy spinning with a good deck and tape combo.
There are twenty or so CD player models from the mid-eighties that have the option to record and play back at twice the standard speed, bringing a very noticeable improvement in sound quality. I use a couple of these machines to copy my records and move them between my house in Australia and my flat in Spain. So cassettes still have some niche uses.
The Dual C844 is a double speed cassette deck. One would expect the higher speed to be better. Info at www.hifi-classic.net/review/dual-c844-281.html DM
I have an amplifier made by a company called MVL the real music company,the amp is called MVL A2+Integra,it came with an add on called SS option pack(£354 at the time in 1999)sound sentinal ,the tailor the sound to each input phono,cd , Mini disc cassette,Dat ,vcr ,the instructions for cassette were to leave Dolby off as the SS sound sentinel reduced hiss ? Unfortunately the company dont exist any more .have you Heard of SS sound sentinel systems?
Back in the 79's and 80's I only copied vinyls I couldn' afford or radio programs. Vinyls were expensive in my country, most of them imported.
Streaming is compressed music... unless we pay for the lossless audio Premium Plan. Bluetooth doesn't support lossless audio either.
This is true. I look forward to a world where lossy compression is entirely a thing of the past. DM
Cassettes are hobby for me. I like collecting and restoring them. It can be quite challenging with all the little parts. Very rewarding when you pop in a cassette in and it plays and rewinds. That's not always the case. lots of redos but that's part of the fun. Just received my lot of 35 southern rock cassettes from ebay. looking forward to checking them out.
Biggest problem with compact cassette is that they aren't making any quality transports anymore. I think only one company is making transports for all cassette machine and they're pretty much crap.
I got a used Sony 3 Head cassette deck a few years ago to tinker around with (only cassette device I've ever seen in person, with Dolby S NR) and while it produces the best sound from a cassette I've ever heard, when you've got DVD-Audio, blu-ray Audio, SACD, DSD, Hi-Res FLAC, etc., there's really no point in it for me. Unless I come across some super rare album on cassette that isn't available anywhere else, I don't really plan on using it much again.
As far as I know, no-one is making a deck with Dolby.
@@AudioMasterclass no they are not
To me, playing vinyl records is a bit like driving a classic 60s muscle car. And playing tapes is like driving a Ford model a. They both have their charms, and the former is the only way I listen to music when I'm just listening to music.
That said, I'm completely with you on cassettes. I have several hundred if not over 1,000. However, the way I acquired them was at garage sales and estate sales were people were just giving them away because they were so done with cassettes. I also have a nice pioneer CT f1250 cassette deck that's quite frankly, just fun to watch.
But I think you and I are on the exactly the same page with the cassettes in the cassette resurgence. For what it's worth, I sold Hi-Fi back in the 70s and early 80s. Back in the seventies cassette did have an advantage but all the advantages were completely destroyed when the recordable CD came out.
Younger people buying these cassettes are typically getting them as collectables. Affordable merch from artists they like (where vinyl would be way more pricey). For listening it is still primarily streaming
In theory, CD would be a useless media today because we have computers that can hold 500+ CDs in storage but we didn't abandon them completely because of the experience that physical media can provide us
The only problem is the price, here in Brazil is a elitist hobby collecting any type of physical media, but we still collect because of the unique experience it can provide
For me, Cassette is a cheaper way to listen to analog media, I have found various rare vinyl albums in Cassette because nobody here care about cassette
It's a good time to look at cassettes bins in thrift shops
"but we didn't abandon them completely because of the experience that physical media can provide us" ???
actually CDs are not abandoned because it's the cheapest way to have a good sounding physical copy of the music,
and what experience physical media can provide us? the music right? maybe reading the booklet too?
Young people? I'm 18 and I LOVE cassettes!
That's what I said in the video. DM
I like cassettes. I put a compilation into by cassette deck and voilà, one hour and a half of music. I like the pleasure of making complications. I like the physical device. It's not for hifi listening purpose, CDs are better, it's just for background music
If it's just quietly in the background, the noise and distortion artifacts of a cassette aren't noticeable at all.
It's fascinating to me. I have found that some of my genze friends and the younger millennials prefer video cassette because of the way it looks they like the imperfections I believe this might be why cassette is popular amongst these people