Originally published at: Photos of vintage cassette tapes | Boing Boing
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As an analog format cassettes were awful (20kHz?)
I wouldn’t say awful, sure it’s not the clarity of digital, but I think a lot of it was how things were recorded.
I had TDK hi-metal tapes that sounded great when recorded without any type of noise reduction from a clean source. Of course my Sony Walkman could also play metal biased tapes. Turn the noise reduction on and you lost all of the high end.
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I recently found a shoebox of mix tapes from the early 80s. The expensive metal tapes flaked apart and were unplayable, but the cheap ones still work great. Mix tapes were much better than the current playlist sharing.
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For me cassettes were a thing of early childhood and have a precise aura: one part read-along kid tapes, one part 8-bit computer games, one part top 40 carefully taped off the radio.
For most of the late 70s and early 80s, I used them to make my vinyl portable and keep it from being used too often. There was also the problem of one’s drunken “friends” who didn’t care much for others’ personal property and would fling cassettes up on the car’s dashboard to warp in the sunlight and heat.
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As an analog format cassettes were awful (20kHz?)
Seriously? Your hearing might’ve started out when you were young maxed out at 20,000 hertz but as an adult I’ll bet you’re now at 15khz. My Revox B215 records on some tape formulations up to 24.5khz but there’s no way I’d hear it. In fact, you would NOT be able to tell whether the source you were listening to was a tape or the original source.
Tapes could suck depending on what tape you used (Certron I’m looking at you) and equipment (Soundesign I’m looking at you) but it could also be sublime.
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That post thumbnail brought back a flood of memories, and I found myself recalling which albums I’d dubbed onto certain types of cassette tape. But then I realize there’s no Maxell XLII-S in that image… probably the cassette I owned the most of over the years.
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The history page is pretty interesting. I never realized that the 8-track and the cassette were developed around the same time.
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I did something similar a few years ago after finding cassettes in trash on the streets of Taipei:
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A few years ago someone came up with a device based on that assumption that would prevent teenagers from loitering where they weren’t wanted. My ex was watching a news story about it on her computer, and put on her headphones to listen to the sample sounds provided. I was on the other side of the same room, with my headphones on, engrossed in my work.
Eventually I pulled off my headphones to ask her if she knew what was making whatever mysterious sound I kept hearing. She couldn’t hear the tones at all in her headphones, so she kept turning it up louder, driving me nuts in the process.
She grew up in marching band, then used a hair dryer near daily ever after. I grew playing guitar and installing car stereos, and had been running sound in bars on and off for over ten years at that point. Yet somehow I managed not to knock the high end off of my hearing, despite being seven years older than her at the time. I’ve not tested my hearing in a long time, but I have no reason believe I’ve lost very much yet.
ETA: She was 26, I was 33. The best headphones I’ve got these days are Sony MDR-7506, so I can’t easily verify that I’m still good >20k fifteen+ years later.
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Upper Playground makes a great shirt for fans of the old cassettes.
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I dragged a large suitcase of cassettes with me all over the globe when I was a sailing man. Small comforts keep you sane while the Sea rages outside.
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I did the same thing in Seoul, Korea. Seemed like everyone threw out their cassettes all at once in 2011
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I’m old enough to have done my first multitrack recording using 2 cassette decks. Safe to say I have a love-hate relationship with them.
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Same here. My worst problem was cassette players (usually in cars) that would grab and mangle the tape. No matter how many cleaners I used, it kept happening. That’s what drove me to CDs. Still, I spliced the damaged tapes to keep them usable. One of my future projects will be to play them and note which tunes are on the ones without labels.
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Yeah, the frequency cutoff here isn’t a problem. The notional 44.1? KHz of CDs is to deliver 22KHz but there’s a filter at the top end so really it’s only 20ish. Nyquist frequency thing.
Not that I’m saying modern digital audio isnt great.
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I was guessing at the theoretical frequency and assume that the practical frquency range would be lower, like up to 10 or 12Khz. If Nyquist applies that would be about right but I don’t think it does.
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Ah, TDK. Back in the 90s I made a mixtape for a dear friend, and he says it’s the best one he’s ever heard, let alone had or made. I used a TDK 90.
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You’re right it doesn’t not being digital. They were more sensitive to volume issues though. Obviously if the volume is going to bum out a digital medium you would have limiters (as they fail catastrophically - hence the low pass filters to keep any sound near the theoretical limit of the Nyquist frequency from being sampled), tapes lose fidelity at higher volumes so 20K and but say 15K if you got too loud.
Of course you’d want a fancy system with VU meters and all that. I’d imagine that the equipment most of us had was too shitty to worry about the theoretical limits of the medium. Analogue suffers from more circuitry and hardware issues than digital in terms of degrading sound. Early digital issues was often right there in the specs rather than real world.
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