Why it's so hard to find a good tape deck these days

[dabeyc]

All of that. I remember when i got a dual cassette deck and spent hours making NEW mix tapes with songs off my OLD mix tapes and bootleg concert tapes just to get that perfect playlist. what a geek i was. those tapes must have sounded awful. but you were completely in your own head and god, it was fun.

[MonkeyT12]

Just this week, I passed a guy jogging who was listening to a Sony Walkman.

[Melizmatic]

Obligatory:

[sdmikev]

@nixiebunny

The appeal of cassettes these days clearly has nothing to do with good audio quality; a micro SD card the size of your thumbnail can hold a quarter million cassettes’ worth of music with much better dynamic and frequency range.
It’s something about the tangible aspect of holding a little plastic box with a delicate ribbon of rust-coated polyester that somehow contains music. Your parents littered the car with these things when you were a kid.

I was so happy when cassettes died the death the deserved.
Having that be the only way to listen to music in the car for so long (other than the radio, of course) was bad. CDs were a good replacement, but gimme satellite radio and Apply Car Play any day.

[dculberson]

@hancocks

First, to say that CDs accurately cover the frequency range from 20Hz to 20kHz is…well, not the case. Vinyl? Much, much better.

Citation needed.

Frequency Response

“Frequency response of CD players is commonly flat to 20kHz, before dropping like a stone.”

They also test BluRay and DVD players, finding flat response up to 48khz or 96khz depending on sampling rate. Vinyl is not “much better” in any technical, measurable aspect, only in the distortion and lofi effect that people find aesthetically pleasing. Which is fine! Just don’t claim otherwise without proof.

[generic_name]

[ETA: dammit, @Mindysan33 beat me to it.]

[Mindysan33]

I mean… mine has some old white British lady… yours has Muhammad Ali…

[Gyrofrog]

@nixiebunny

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

Same with CD players, e.g. the belt that opens the tray. I bought a nice Parasound player back in '97 or '98 and I figured out this had happened when I tried to set it all up again a few months ago. (Also found out the power supply inside isn’t otherwise insulated ) This assumes the laser even still works because, IIRC, those wear out over time, too.

I still prefer having a given recording on CD but now I wonder how long players (or drives etc.) will remain available.

[generic_name]

What you don’t know is that I was looking for a pic I remembered seeing of Lawrence Welk with his car turntable when I saw the Ali one, so you still come out ahead.

Lawrence Welk driving a car with a record player in the dashboard | Boing Boing

[Mindysan33]

But the point is you POSTED Ali, so…

[nixiebunny]

@Mindysan33

I mean… mine has some old white British lady… yours has Muhammad Ali…

Not only that, but he’s in a '59 or '60 Caddie. (my rides of choice in the 80s)

[Mindysan33]

@nixiebunny

my rides of choice in the 80s

Did you have one with a record player?

[prooftheory]

For some reason this article sent me looking for one of these:

1978 2-XL TALKING ROBOT by Mego Corp. USES 8-TRACK TAPES with six games...

Did anyone else have one?

[klossner]

I recently confronted a trove of tapes of family events from half a century back. I had both reel-to-reel and cassette tapes to digitize. All my old gear was useless. What finally worked was trolling ebay until I found listings for decks that said the owner was an audiohead and had meticulously rebuilt the machine – cleaned everything, changed the belts, etc. I now have good decks for both formats that I used for one week and are now sitting on a shelf. Next up is a collection of VHS videotapes.

[Jim_Campbell]

counterpoint to the cassettes always sounded bad argument in this video. Id never argue they are better than CDs, but if recorded and played back properly with good quality tape, they can sound very good: Cassettes - better than you don't remember - YouTube

[Jim_Campbell]

Could be the jogger was playing a tape, but there may be another explanation: they are generally still very good for listening to the radio.

[p96]

I think it really depends. A quick survey of advertised specs of some well known brand low-end soundbar systems:

Polk Signa S2 $200: 45Hz - 20kHz system response
Polk MagniFi One $240: 40Hz - 22kHz system response
Klipsch Bar48 $300: 40Hz - 20kHz system response
JBL Bar 2.1 Deep Bass: $350: 40Hz - 20kHz system response
Samsung HW-A550 $230: does not provide a measurement
Sony HT-S350 $280: does not provide a measurement
LG SN6Y $250: does not provide a measurement, rates subwoofer amp at 80Hz 10%THD
Yamaha YAS-209 $350: 34 - 190 Hz subwoofer

You get some bass but it isn’t going to be a revelatory sub-20Hz experience or even adequately demonstrative of the deficiencies of tape.

[semiotix]

What’s wrong with the one you have?

—your dad, probably

[roomwithaview]

@Mike.71

the cassette tape was born as a dictation media and not as an high fidelity medium

Correct, if you need portable magnetic fidelity then DAT or GTFO.

[bobtato]

I coveted a Sony TC-D5 for imaginative play purposes, so I bought a broken one off eBay (where they’re always available). I thought it might be a fun project to get it working. The seller said it couldn’t record, but he obviously just didn’t realise that on older cassette machines you had to hold down both the play “forward” and “record” switches together – it actually worked fine, and in fact it looks like someone even replaced the belts. So in my case it kind of wasn’t hard enough to find a good cassette player.