The state of brand new cassette tapes
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- čas přidán 22. 08. 2024
- There's plenty of tapes being made in 2023. They're not all great, but they're not all bad either. I compare the ones I can get in this part of the world.
Short clips and my findings are the first 25 minutes of the video, after that you can audit the tapes yourself. Timestamps are below.
BUYING LINKS:
GPO C90: amzn.to/3ZPKRnR
Maxell XL-II amzn.to/42i5SZF
RTM FOX C60: amzn.to/3FsE0s4
Sony HF amzn.to/4087qDS
TDK D60: amzn.to/3TknJv2
TDK D90: amzn.to/3JosQFR
TDK SA90: amzn.to/3yJ1HJ1
TDK SA-X90: amzn.to/3TmVfkc
TIMESTAMPS
25:12 TDK D
27:30 RTM FOX C90
29:46 RTM FOX C60
32:01 GPO C90
34:18 Capture C60
36:33 ATR Chrome Pro C60 1
38:49 ATR Chrome Pro C60 2
41:05 ATR MDS Ferro C60
43:22 EQ Professional C90
45:37 Cassette Comeback NAC C456 C64
47:53 Gallunoptimal UR C90
50:08 TDK B60
52:22 BASF/EMTEC Tapestock
They removed their comment, but I saw it anyway; Someone mentioned a strong wow in the piano recording. This is a fact, and also just a property of this Denon deck. I have three of those decks, and had other affordable 2-head denons of the era, none of them run particularly 'tight'. They sound good anyway though, and it's easy to hear whether a tape has a nice frequency response and tons of drop-outs. I don't use the Denon for serious recordings, usually. I used it for this demo because I didn't want to use a higher end deck as that wouldn't be a fair reference.
the Denon´s do coloured the sound, the reason why they stoped having calibration decks in mid 80´s like the 33MH or 44MH or close to it, the doble i don´t like them because of the auto-reverse each time it rotates the head azimuth is off (tune)
Definitely agree on the auto-reverse issue. i don't care so much if sound is coloured or not, as long as it is musical and pleasant :)
@@RUfromthe40s
@@rollingtroll i also don´t mind it, it corrects not having calibration to a certain point, but Denon decks do sound very good, i have two but sold a early model which was very good with calibration, and have a good frequency response, other brand that is forgoten and had very good decks is Kenwood ,Sony ES doesn´t came near them ,and i own a TC-K555ESL or similar ,not sure now
@@RUfromthe40s I never heard a Sony ES deck I liked. Even the most expensive ones are outperformed by a simple NAK CR1 (literally). Sony's audio from the mid 80's and beyond, give or take a few super upmarket preamplifiers, just isn't good sounding. Very reliable though.
I think the Denon DR-M30/40hx are extremely good decks for the money. My 'goto' is the Aiwa AD-F800/810 though. They are dirt cheap and actually great.
JVC also did some good, affordable decks. The KD-D55 for instance sounds Nakamichi good and no one thinks twice about it. Another fun series; Akai GX-F31/51/71/91. Even the humble F31 sounds great. The world has found out though, they are going up in price.
@@rollingtroll it´s kind of true, my father had all top end models from nakamichi and i had the 680 ZX, 700ZXL and the cassette deck 1(maybe the best built) the DRAGON sold it after 6 monthes before it stoped working ok, but i only bought it because i had not enough money to buy a Z-7000 from TEAC, any pioneer since 1976 top end model are better than all nakamimichi´s, i´m not saying they sound bad but as i use them since 1974 i know they are far from being the best decks and built with the cheapest material but my father liked it only to be surprised when he bought a B215 FROM REVOX TO HIS LATE 70´S B SERIES SYSTEM ,sorry for the caps lock it get stucked , it´s chinese 3€ and after 17 years is failing
Just the video I was looking for. Have an old tape deck and fancied doing some recordings , and instead of buying second-hand old tapes I was thinking of new, your face says it all with the TDK b tape :)
I was a slitter at Certron in the late 60's and the coating department always struggled to get good coating . The best was the Ampex tape recycled from 2 inch and slit to cassette on a mini slitter, coating was almost black
@@lawrencerasmus Awesome! Ampex sounded great. But reliability is zero now unfortunately. The cassette tape RTM makes these days is also just based off basf 900 reel to reel tape. Pretty decent cassette tape too!
This was actually a very cool video man, nice to see a fellow Dutch person also interested in cassette tapes. I also really liked your method of comparison.
Awesome! Still not done editing the Aliexpress one that I have been working on. I'll get there!
@@rollingtroll I really look forward to seeing the dodgy tapes! Take your time, I am subscribed anyways!
i got aqddicted again to record cassettes because they sound great not like digital recorders who all sound the same and with many tracks recordings one notices some distortion not from the guitar amplifier but from the speakers on my systems
This was fun to watch. I love cassettes. A good Nak CR-7A or Dragon is going for about $5K in the US, and vintage blanks prices are also very high so I think a lot of other people still like them too.
i have a CR-7a and a 1000ZXL ,a the same but special edition in gold, a 1000 from 74 ,a ZX-9 ,a cassette deck 1(this maybe i´m going to keep it) and the Dragon´s i had, one in 12 of 1982 and other in january of 1994 ,sold them fast as after 6 monthes im notice some problems and had two because the seller told me that the 90´s version had been sold and also have a RX-909 that was told that they are very rare, but all of this were from my father and he passed away recentelly so all are for sale but working at a 100% perfect ,all were restored and the 1000ZXL gold was never put to use but the prices for what i have seen aqre from 8.000€ to 10.000€ for the crap i´ve seen being sold for 5.000€ , mine was a 700ZXL ,a BX-2, a 680ZX, and a DR-10 the last series they released,this i´m not going to sell them but forget about the dragon they are a incredible headache as decks they are the worst i´ve seen, any pioneer akai or TEAC or Revoxare so better that i can´t compare them with such a crap or nakamichi as a brand, i have other components but those who work still i´m keeping them, by the way ,you´re not interested on the DRAGON turntable or the CD player as i have them for sale too ,10.000€ each and yes i already sold a lot for this price but like new not already destroyd like other i´ve seen for sale for half the price but i think the value is maybe 50€ for the look of having a nakamichi ,no matter if it doesn´t work or do work but with a lot of vibrations heard while playing or recording
very good and interesting video🎉
Really happy to hear that!
Liked your video as I am a big fan of cassettes
I suggest you get in touch with the National Audio Company in Missouri USA. Steve who runs it has been working on a new magnetic mix and they now have a new tape that I believe is very good
On my NaKamichi amd on TEAC it sounds great
Awesome! There are a few cassette videos on my channel! I would love to get tapes from the us but shipping and import duties are often prohibitive. I am by no means rich and don’t want to spend 20, 30 bucks on a tape. If this channel made me any money things would be different but it does not 😄
GPO in the UK back in the day used to be the General Post Office ….looks like they nicked the logo with the crown 😀 I must have cloth ears as I can’t hear the dropouts. That or I’m just getting too old! Still interesting stuff. I still love cassette for nostalgic reasons ….who doesn’t like to watch tape rolling!
Use headphones! :)
@@rollingtroll I was 😉
Just remastered Linguaphone Nederlands course Nice Language Useless to learn but I'm guaranteed I will be able to study it for the next 40 years.
@@adventureguy4119 hahaha, pretty sure Duolingo will do a better job there 😀
@@rollingtroll Dutch people
Will just roll their eyes and say so anyway I speak English.
i have around 1.000 of TDK SA and maybe 2.300 of SA-X got them in 2005 when i only recorded digitally at the time for free and were thousands of them the ones that can fill a merc. 350SE from 1971 only leaving the front left seat for me the driver when to get them, i couldn´t find a friend who owned a ford transit to bring more cassettes that were going to be incinerated but i already gave and recorded since 2005 some 2.000 cassettes that either than this i refer also brought some TDK AD , AD-X and AR also some SONY´s UX-PRO and i do prefer C60 cassettes they do not worn out the belts or engines in direct drive decks so fast , but also took a box of balck maxell XLII-S and XLI-S ,forget to refer that also took some TDK minidiscs and only a box which inside were dozens of 5 minidisc boxes but all are black ,i didn´t mind of having some coloured ones ,that i recorded either than CD-R´s or CD-RW´s on the computer with great sound, minidisc for compilations and cds for albums and mostly to my car audio system ,who as a radio minidisc player and a box of 10 cds under my seat , but not in the 350SE but in a more recent Skoda Octavia turbo diesel with 150 h.p. enough for family trips
the fox tape does sound good and i own a denon DRM-700a and a DRM-800a ,the only diference between the two is one having the famous but not loved amourphous heads because they make a faith full copy of the original and people prefer High´s high´s and more high´s ays,eyes,ays!!! bias turned to the left ,the most possible, i turned them to the right to meet the original source or sauce, if good i love both
when that "TDK B" started playing I actually started laughing out loud.
Haha, yeah that's definitely the loser of the bunch.
Expect more laughs soon, I did an order on a... dodgy website. May take a few months to arrive. You know exactly what I mean.
@@rollingtroll It was a late model Imation B. I actually have a different Imation B but with the TDK hubs and it worked very well.
@@rollingtrollsome three or four years ago the aliexpress TDK B (with or without "life on record") was a fairly decent proposition. Perhaps not a genuine TDK, but definitely not type zero. But then the same money, around a dollar a piece, could buy a NOS Maxell UDI, without any shipping hassles, so the choice was quite obvious.
@@pcorf 👍 agree , there must have been a bad batch of them somewhere.
Did you tried the tapes with the bias adjusted too? In my experience it's essential to get the highs right. Too much bias will make the highs roll off and making it sound dull and not transparent, too less bias it will get bright and distorted. The optimal bias varies enormous from tape to tape, in my experience.
Actively didn't use different biases, I stuck to the one for the TDK D because let's face it; most people don't have decks with adjustable bias, and most people who do won't buy cheap ferro tapes :D.
@@rollingtroll Ah then I will probably one of the exceptions :) All my decks have bias adjustment, but I mostly use type 1. The TDK D / AD are my favorite tapes, just because they sound so great and they hold up very good too. You can play them hundred times and still next to no drop-outs. In practice, I found only the noise floor better with Type 2's, so for quit music I use type 2's (BASF mainly). But except noisefloor, the more expensive tapes don't have really audible differences for my ears when biased properly. Putting the money in great decks with inexpensive tapes worked better than the other way around :)
With those TDK B , there could have been a crapy batch of them , i have a few , and they are not brilliant, lol , but ones i have sound a Lot better , i have some recordings from a AM radio station and i tried recording music on them too on these tapes and are ok but not brilliant.
They do sell the ferric tapes ;) I found a supplier and just ordered 25 for my band
Which ones?
Btw, I found the C90 Fox audio sample many times better. The C60 is clearly much worse on the dropouts . .
Why no Analog Fidelity ferro tapes from the Bandjesfabriek?
Missed it! I am including one in my next video about this.
Here in Algeria and North Africa in generally vinyl records and cassette tapes never did make a comeback
Any idea why?
@@rollingtroll here's the thing Algeria was a French colony form 1830 all the way to 1962 as you can imagine during the war listening to music wasn't really a priority so we kind of missed out on the whole vinyl record Golden Era After the revolution people were still broken down basically just trying to survive the 70s was more like a recovery era owning a basic appliance like a fridge or a radio was considered a luxury finally the 80s came and life quality started to improve and as you can imagine the cassette tape and China Deluxe cassette players wear the star of the show the 90s was really the turning point where we started to catch on with the rest of the world the 2000s came and CDs and mp3 players took over specifically 2004 those cheap VCD players that I told you about and iPod bootlegs where everywhere but you could still buy cassette tapes all the way to 2006 I guess but anywho since then physical formats left the scene and never came back
RTM is like BASF Fe E1
It’s literally BASF sm900 made thinner and narrower
They dont make´m like they used to
They literally can't. The formulations and machinery are largely lost, and many of the most reliable tapes used materials that are now illegal (like whale oil). They will make them like they used to eventually, but the focus for now is on reel to reel tapes as no one takes cassette seriously (which is sad).
@@rollingtroll its also sad that most of the old chrome tapes are unusable today. got a bunch of BASF crome tapes from around 1990 and they just dont record well. maybe ok for speach but not music.
@@groovechampion1462 someone told me this before but that is not my experience at all actually!
@@rollingtroll im meaning the pure chromes, not the "type2" many called their type 2 chrome when they infact was just cobalt, these still works perfectly fine.
I bought 3 x TASCAM Master 424 cassettes last year and don't like them at all
Nah, they are just cheap crap with Tascam on them I'm afraid. I meant to try one but then read the reviews.
Would still love to try one but you can't get them here in the Netherlands unfortunately, and having them shipped from anazon.com literally doubles the price.
So what was wrong with them?
@@rollingtroll A lot of hissing, no highs and really expensive for what they are