And could record better tapes themselves than commercial pre-recorded tapes.
4 Likes
Well, my parents didn’t, because in the 1970’s cars didn’t have cassette decks in them (at least the old crappy ones my Dad could afford didn’t) but my car certainly did, later on.
It wasn’t because they sounded any good, because they didn’t it was the fact it was portable music. You could go to the beach and rock out to The Clash or whatever.
Records and cassettes are both terrible music formats in my view, and I’m very pleased to have digital music now.
And the failure of DAT to catch on basically proved that no one was interested in tapes you couldn’t copy no matter the quality.
1 Like
I wonder if this is what happened to my Tascam portable DAT recorder. The transport started working less and less until I was left using it as a mic-pre recording directly into a computer.
1 Like
I have an 81 year old, cognitively disabled uncle who has a collection of cassettes he listens to daily. He’s also really hard on his mechanical things and tape players are by far the things my family have to find for him most often, so now he has an excuse as to why they crap out so often. The $60 Bluetooth capable ones I’ve been buying every 3 months from Amazon are absolute garbage in material and sound terrible.
It also explains why this guy wanted $40 for a dusty Sony cassette player at a garage sale I went to this summer. Refused to haggle with me claiming he saw them listed online for $60. I was outraged. If he wanted $40 for a relic from the 80’s he should have listed it online, or at least cleaned the cobwebs off it. I found one at goodwill the next day for $3. It’s a cd cassette combo unit presumably from early 2000’s. It hasn’t crapped out…yet.
2 Likes
1 Like
My Marantz 5220 slumbers, waiting…
Music copied from vinyl to tape was always decent enough for the car or portable players.
I still have a dozen or so cassettes that I always intended to rip to digital, but no doubt I would have to replace belts. It would make more sense just to buy the music again.
After a quick search I was staggered by the prices being asked. $400-$500 is not unusual, and some optimists are asking quite a bit more.
After 45 years, these decks are still maintainable. Belt kits are available for about $32, and LED lamp kits (one of my VU meters has a burnt-out bulb) for $22. The manual came with a 20"x14" (50x36 cm) fold-out schematic, because of course. Take that, Apple!
9 Likes
who did pine for of these beauties…
6 Likes
320kbps is good enough for most people, but I did listening testing for mp3 encoders and I know what the flaws are.
Thankfully I never learned what the flaws were for AAC, so I can get away with listening to that, although I prefer FLAC when it is available and convenient (and if there is a CD available, so is any other digital format)
1 Like
Me me! Nagra…tres chic… as used in the 1981 movie DIVA.
Except that one was a later but still tiny Nagra IV-s
5 Likes
Well, the transfer to Reel-to-reel is canny easy, you either like Dolby frequency remapping or …you know, what’s the alternative? You can edit either with MAGNeTS, with frequency selection even, and distortion effects, that’s how you get to know distortion and effects. Do you -not- use a solid-as-drag analog of the tape as a timeline? There are sound edit games to be made!
4 Likes
Oooh… [Googles it…mid four-figures results come] the TASCAM was hurtin’ bad enough at $400 more than the other one, yikes! Well, saved the kid dressing like Cokie Roberts for Halloween at mid-four figures. [Watches moar demo] Saved it being too fiddly to tolerate, too! Loving that playback-record single control as a '60s spy, too…ack! …oh but the mics being plugged in -prevents- playback, betterish. 2 mics=2 chan…yeah, that’s the date put on it. …another DSP acronym that’s Doublebass Special Playback SEPARATE UNIT. [Fires Analog Devices SHARC preamps into the air like Yosemite Sam using headphone drivers.] 3 thicknesses of tape…yeah cool. Longest record time 3h [Just splurts tea and throws the cup.] Yeah, pleased to 3D print me a good replacement tape deck having seen that. [3D printer head shuttles a bit in nervous agreement.]
Technocholer> [Belt kits about $35]
Sooo, what about the 100 (500?) belt kits that are $13 with shipping instead of $34 belt kits?
Technocholer >Take that, Apple!
Take that to heart, and pay them, Apple!
Something about the pulled-out tape]]
So all this time without being able to take things out on a song or joke album by puling out the tape, and people start believing Q-Anon and trashing elections instead, eh? But for want of a nail…
5 Likes
I used to test audio and video codecs for a hobby. For many years. I informally taught myself signal processing nyquist-shannon theory all that. Not very well.
Codecs do make a really huge difference. The old fraunhofer iis refrence MP3 codec makes everything sound awful. Vorbis builds early on didn’t sound as good as LAME but now they’re equivalent. AAC basically was equivalent to the best LAME MP3 builds, but when the spec for AAC added in SBR it was able to halve the bitrate with acceptable quality for internet transmission.
I actually found a VST plugin that had an SBR effect that I’d use to restore old tapes to a listenable state. I preferred the swirly artificial high-end to muffled sleepiness.
1 Like
Relevant YouTube video is relevant:
7 Likes
I’d probably flunk for a uher 4000 if I could find a mains outlet as the nagra is a bit too fussy to handle
imagine having to use space suit gloves to work it…
it went to the moon
1 Like
I suppose they’re okay for those who can’t hear the difference. 
I confess I didn’t do a lot of research before quoting the first few prices I saw, but if I’m going to go for the lignum vitae volume control knob on my tube amp, cheaping out on the belts in my cassette deck would be false economy.
3 Likes
Did you ever see any of the several physical music player projects featured on Hackaday in recent years? I especially liked the look of this one, but they all share the same basic idea of grafting the user experience of physical media onto modern technology. A lot of them are specifically aimed at people with cognitive impairments.
3 Likes
Another reason DAT never got started was because the music publishing industry didn’t support it. You could buy vinyl, cassettes, or (eventually) CDs but not prerecorded DAT.
Cassettes were perfectly good for car audio because audio quality is wasted in a moving vehicle when wind and road noise dominate.
3 Likes
