There was Dolby B and later Dolby C to correct the high end roll off. But 90% of cassettes had neither, including nearly all that were commercially produced. People just didn’t care.
It was a quaint era before Dolby had their claws in nearly every consumer format.
Basically the only mechanism used in new cassette tapes is the Tanashin-made or more precisely a clone, that was initially designed to be used on low-end Panasonic decks.
Another problem is the availability of tapes to record, and that it’s another story, even in the '80 there were a lot of cheap and bad-sounding tapes. Basically the cassette tape was born as a dictation media and not as an high fidelity medium, ad was amazing on what was achieved using better heads, better tapes, better mechanisms and noise reduction.
In 2020 seems to me that also CD are being phased out, but in this case the quality possible of the medium it’s way higher that what is recorded on and what some low-end CD player is doing. You can find a hi-fi brand like NAD, Denon or Pioneer, but are now a niche.
I bought an old GE boombox on ebay a while back so I could listen to mixtapes from Mississippi Records. That said, surprisingly hard to find other tapes for cheap enough to make it feel worthwhile.
I often think of the Deadheads I knew in college who listened to 10th generation audience cassettes recorded on crappy decks 20 years earlier.
What is it about music that gives us enjoyment? Do we really need that extra bit of high end or low end of the audio spectrum? I don’t listen to stuff recorded on old 78s and worry about the missing frequencies (although I admit those cassette Grateful Dead bootlegs were pretty horrendous sounding, even if the band happened to be good for that show.)
Cassettes, in their day, were invaluable. It was about convenience and portability. There were few things more enjoyable than making a mix tape, for yourself or for someone else.
I know people buying new cassettes now who never even open the shrink wrap-- it’s like the limited edition colored vinyl pressings of some albums, people are buying collectibles, investments, not music.
Even “budget” soundbar systems come with wireless subwoofers. They might be boomy “one-note” bandpass crap but they go below 40 Hz, so you’d notice if it wasn’t there. Pretty much any headphones/earbuds (which is how a lot of people listen) cover the full 20-20k audibly if not cleanly. Cassette tapes sound even worse now than they did when speakers were an afterthought on most stereos.
my first of first purchases on vinyl was ‘the glass mountain’… that was a mono recorded item…
bbc didn’t introduce stereo till the late sixties which turned round some recording from ‘top of the pops’…
I think you nailed it in what you already wrote: Missing a bit of high or low end doesn’t matter. It’s not like you could hear it anyway if you’re old enough to be going grey. This applies more to amps/speakers these days than recordings because digital, but you just feel the music more when every detail is coming through. There is expression in the vocal and instruments you don’t get from muddy reproduction. Some music gives me goosebumps on a good system and that just doesn’t happen when it’s playing out of a phone speaker or something similar. Tape is still the worst for that kind of feeling tho because of the lack of dynamic range, subtle sounds just get lost.
As for the Dead bootlegs… they probably sound a lot better on mind-altering substances.
I actually cared and bought accordingly, but of course years later it’s like oh c’mon I went through that rigamarole all for I dunno a 2% improvement and then compressed digital formats come along and as crappy as they were still blew the best chromium metal dolby C (or whatever the those were) setups out of the water.
I still have the fairly decent-for-consumer level deck I got in the early 90s, but it long ago “slowed”. I took it to an authorized repair shop in the mid-aughts, where it sat on a shelf for 3 months until I realized the guy was running more of a museum than a repair shop so I took it back, and now I just digitally correct the speed/pitch on the computer. But I would like to fix it someday.
Coming at this as the Son Of A Really Good Recording Engineer…
First, to say that CDs accurately cover the frequency range from 20Hz to 20kHz is…well, not the case. Vinyl? Much, much better. Or high-end tape, both the player and the tape medium itself. Also, there are a number of different tape manufacturers (or were) and there was something called bias that needed to be adjusted for depending on the type of tape that was used…
Long story short, you can still (or again) find some pretty high-end sound stuff, but cassettes aren’t ever going to be it. Here’s a principal reason why: the more surface area that you can put a second’s worth of music down onto, the better off you are (to a point, anyway). Dad recorded at 30 IPS (inches per second) on a two-channel, 1/2-inch tape machine (Willi Studer, if you care). That means that one second’s worth of music from one channel was laid out on a piece of tape that was 1/4 inch wide by 30 inches long. When you’re magnetizing something to represent an audio signal, that makes a big difference. So what have we got with a cassette?
1 7/8 IPS, and the tape (for presumably two channels) is a shade over 1/8" wide - meaning, you’ve now put your one channel/one second of music onto a piece of tape that’s 1 7/8" long and about 1/16" wide. It does’t take a rocket scientist to imagine that you’re stuffing a signal into a much, much tinier space in that scenario. Ouch. And it will not sound the same as a result. There are other factors that play in regarding tape thinness as well (the longer-playing cassettes had thinner tape, by definition, to fit into the cassette, which means that the little magnetized bits of tape were that much closer to the other little magnetized bits of tape that were adjacent because it was a spool…you get the idea).
Blah, blah, blah. The bottom line is that this is a case where, almost entirely, the so-called “old ways” were better for music quality. All of this makes little difference to most of us listening to a Led Zeppelin album, but if it’s Mozart, you better believe it does (if you have the ear for it. I’m not saying I do, but I’m just saying). CDs? Cassettes? Not so much. But for easily 90+% of the population, it won’t make a bit of difference - MP3s are just fine.
And then there was 8-track. Hoooo-weeee…
Yes.
I personally have no problem with 320kbps mp3s. I know in theory they’re not as good as wavs or flacs or the original analog reels they may have been recorded on. But in practice, an ipod going into good full sized speakers sounds great to me-- I don’t understand how people can listen to music out of their phone speakers. I do still have a lot of vinyl and a decent system, but at the moment circumstances mean it’s all in storage, so the ipod is a great boon.
One detail that the article didn’t touch on regarding cassette decks is the drive belts. These are little rubber bands made to precise tolerances, that convey motion from the motor to the rotating bits in the mechanism.
The rubber used to make these belts in the eighties was of a sort that magically turns into either goo or concrete after a couple decades.
These belts used to be widely available in the electronic parts supply industry, but they’ve become hard to find. I replaced the belts on my wife’s Sony double deck a few years ago, and I had to buy belts from Portugal on eBay.
Also, replacing the belts took about two hours, and I’m an expert at repairing small mechanical things.
And can be quite beautiful as they do so
Also, the best way to listen to music in a car will always be a reel-to-reel.
This was in 2017, Lemons Rally, in a Corvair. The deck is the same one that we drove around North America in the late sixties in our '67 Plymouth wagon with four kids.
I’ve moved over to Apple Music these days. I ripped and uploaded my stuff that isn’t in their catalog a long time ago, so those CDs are gathering dust on shelves and in boxes. I discover so much new and old stuff I would have never heard otherwise, that’s the real benefit of a streaming subscription like AM or Spotify. They use lossless when available so it’s CD-quality or better.
Back when MP3 was a new thing I heard some pretty awful 320k files and 128k files that sounded perfect. Bitrate isn’t everything, encoders can really choke on some kinds of music.
Tapes worked in cars. Good luck with records in cars.
Also, at least over here in Germany audio plays for kids were and are super big and with a tape, pause and resume were super simple. It was even transferable across devices, like from the aforementioned car to your player at home.
Also, they were indeed the only way to record yourself. Which meant that you could record your own voice. As a 8 year old in the 70s: HOW COOL IS THAT!
People still use cassettes?
Wow! (And Flutter!)
Anti-skip got pretty good. In the late-90s I had a cheap off-brand portable CD player with a 20-second anti-skip feature, and assuming you gave it a few shock-free seconds at the beginning of playback while the buffering got going, you’d have to encounter some pretty bad and sustained vibration to interrupt the playback.
I used to test this, because I was a weird kid.
The wirecutter article tested sound quality on ELAC Debut 2.0 B6.2 speakers, which taper off at 44 Hz-- decent low end. but perhaps not low enough for tape’s deficiencies to show through?
Most consumer-grade cassette tape decks are belt-driven. Those belts, in use or not, harden over time and become brittle. I had an AKAI CS-M3 tape deck that had some wonderful VU meters on it. The belts eventually fell apart and I couldn’t find replacements easily. There are motor-driven (servo) decks that were very expensive (still are) that don’t have such issues but need their own kind of regular maintenance.
