Vinyl Eyezz Don’t know where I’ve been...at 50 and a former 78 rpm owner I cannot believe I ever never seen this. A lover of actual mixtapes, crappy CDs and probably 10 turntables. I was even a spinner in Chicago 1999 with vinyl. Don’t stop the funk rock. Man, I still have some 8 tracks...nothing to play em on but I’m proud to own them. Thank you for the knowledge 🤪
@joker Darkerdouble decks are great.but head rotating models are given lot of problems with tuning for high frequency response on worn heads due to HQ metal tapes & mechanical wear-age. luckily you have owned equipment of classy user.
I have many great memories involving cassette tapes. I was in high school in 1999, which was when the music industry started really pushing CD's over cassettes. My best friend and I would go to flea markets and garage sales, find tons of tapes, and say "How much for all of them?" We put ALL tapes in a huge plastic bag and then, whilst driving, one of us would shout "New tape" and then I (because I wasn't driving) would reach into the bag (without looking) and pick a new tape. It was awesome. We'd go from Adam & The Ants, to Johnny Cash, to The Bangles, etc. Yes, you can do this with mp3's, but it doesn't feel magical 😔
Yea, there's something about hearing the soft rattely sound in your hand as you take that small yet sturdy plastic container and place it in your player and then hearing the closing of the lid as well as hearing the clackity adjustment sounds that align each reel and finally the click of the play button. I think this ritual plays an important part in the nostalgia and magical feeling we cassettorists experience.
1999 they weren't pushing them then, they were more than mainstream by that time, if anything was being pushed at that time it was home computers and the internet. You were way behind the times, sorry to say.
good old days, I also loved to explore random CDs or floppys with software or games, sometimes it was virus, but who cares, I was reinstalling Win 98 almost every week anyway 😀
Tip: Always fast forward or reverse your tapes to the end when done listening to keep tape taunt. This will keep the tape free of whats called "Drop Out" a fluttering sound a wrinkled portion passing over the tape head will make.
@Loring Mc Crorey Thanks for the advice. I'm getting into cassettes and I found a 12 tape collection at my grandparents autorepair shop, and a few tapes had the main tape showing insted of the header, so thanks for the tip!
@@markmooch radio DJ's typically ran Fidelipac's which were sort of a professional version of 8-tracks. They ran at 7 1/2 ips, and only had 3 tracks. 2 for music, and one double-wide track for control. The control track would stop the tape automatically where cue was placed on the tape.
That's more necessary because a tape left midway has a chunk of music exposed to damage. The start/end of the tape has the clear leader exposed, which has no music.
Most people who say anything about an analog medium “sounding like crap” probably only heard said medium at someone’s house (or their own place) on equipment that wasn’t taken care of properly. Take care of vinyl properly, take care of cassettes properly, they sound great.
Or it’s just what has become the acceptable response. It’s just ignorance LOL granted there are some sources that are bad quality. But you can’t generalize an entire product :)
Most people in the day wouldn't clean tape heads, fixing snapped tapes with sellotape was a good one for making the pinch wheels sticky and then the tape would wind around it.
Aldo Reyes you're telling me you hate convenient and instantaneous music at the tips of your fingertips? Aight. Hope you're just trolling with that comment but knowing society today I wouldn't be surprised if people genuinely think Streaming audio is worse than physical media
I recorded Radio all the time with my cassette player. Little did I know that I would treasure them today with all of the original commercials etc. It's like a time capsule from the 1970's and 1980's.
I also used to record songs I liked from the radio. It would've been too expensive to buy all of the records I liked and we were poor (either that or my parents were tight). I guess you could say those were like the music downloads of that time.
I experimented as a kid with this. I had an old large speaker with a surprisingly strong magnet and slapped a tape against it, slid it over it and moved it around. Didn't do squat. I'll admit it wasn't a very scientific test (I was only about 14 at the time!) but I do think magnetic storage is more robust then it is sometimes given credit for. Still I wouldn't want to store my tapes near a magnet for any length of time though!!
I’m 46 and still have all of my cassettes from the 80’s & 90’s...and I still buy cassettes, along with vinyl and CDs. Simply put, I love music! Rock on! 🤘
You can barely buy any physical music now - iTunes, etc, even ended digital sales. Doubt many cassette albums exist today. You struggle to even get old albums in print on CD, and even less vinyl. But, if you have CDs that's all you want...Even iPods were ended, to force subscriptions.
Yep, that's the main reason I'm interested in looking into cassets. Just bought the Mysticum special edition full discography set because I wanted the exclusive book that came with it, but now I got a whole Mysticum casset collection.
I actually like the shoddier sound, I listen to a lot of lofi genres; hip-hop, vaporwave, future funk. I don’t know why I enjoy lower quality more, maybe it’s the texture? I dunno. But I dig it
I think it depends on the type of music I’m listening to. If I’m listening to older music then I like the lesser quality sound. It just adds to the experience. But if on the off chance I’m listening to something more modern, I usually go digital for a cleaner sound without pops, cracks, and tape hiss. But I rarely listen to modern music so it’s not too often
I usually listen to metal, but from what I know about history of music, cassettes ARE hip hop!! The whole genre of hip hop was born out of the cassette culture and mixtapes! Think about it, in the 80's there was no cheaper way to sample parts of songs together to something new and groovy than through cassettes. That's why the typical 80's ghettoblaster (!) came with two cassette players and microphone jack! Without cassettes Hip Hop would not exist.
Growing up as a child it was all about watching the VU meters and spectrum analysers that helped you judge how good a stereo system was. That, and also watching the woofers move as you powered up the amplifier. Vinyl was a more sonically engaging medium, but it required a patience & maturity of an audiophile who wasn't as interested in how the mechanisms all worked. Apart from using an LP as a rolling road for your James Bond Matchbox car, there was less stuff visible to keep a child's eyes entertained.
I’ve been living in the ‘80s ever since they ended. I won’t give up my physical media: CDs, VHS tapes, and my extensive collection of original cassette tapes. I have an old tape deck and my car is old enough to have a cassette player in it! Thank you for extolling the virtues of cassettes! I knew they had value to someone somewhere. Glad to see they’re being respected again!
I'm 52. Used cassettes forever back in the day. You are correct. A Metal tape has the best fidelity range. I would always buy a brand new vinyl record and record the tape on the very first play. Purchased my first CD player in 85. However even then the studios would record it (SPARS code) Analog Analog Digital. Wasn't until about 87 when CDs were recorded Digital Digital Digital. Unlike most millennials, my music library has gone through SEVERAL format changes over the decades.
That is the best way to treat your vinyl, but DAT has got to be the best tape format ever created. If you've never recorded onto dat you'll never know high grade Recordings. The music industry loved using dat but hated the public getting a hold of it.
@@nonyabiz62 although Dat is just a storage medium for a digital recording, usually at about the same rate as a CD. There is no warm harmonic distortion/saturation that is present in an analog tape or vinyl. We used DAT for the mixdown at my studio in the early 90`s as we didn`t have CDRs yet, they were very convienient and all the Mastering places could easily use those from us but we used 2 inch reel to reel for the original multi track recordings. These days many of us are using all digital at a higher bitrate than CD or dat was inside computers like Pro Tools DAW however we also use tape/tube saturation plug ins within the DAW to inject some analog warmth back into the tracks and because we are using such a high digital resolution to make the music then the plug ins can do a really good job of emulating the analog sound
@@noiselabproject9659 "warm harmonic distortion/saturation" can be added is desired, as you note. However, if the analog record/playback mechanisms are adding it due to their limitations, then it's not part of the music.
Lemme say this...I was born in 1954. Right now is as good as it will be, I believe. Here's why: 1960-68 I listened to an AM and Shortwave tube radio or 45 Records. Even had a 45 player in the car. Had Turntable and Reel-to- Reel in home. Then I got FM - what a difference. My buddy had a reverb hooked to a speaker in the back - Trippy. Then came STEREO! 1970-80 Got a Muntz Jet 4-Track and later a 8-Track and a recorder for the home. Got rid of Reel-to-Reel and tapes. Made lotsa mixtapes, but the endless loop tapes meant real careful planning to keep the song from getting split between tracks. Got quadraphonic Turntable and car stereo (which never caught on). 1980-90 Got cassettes in car and home and recorded everything over. Kept doing this until CD came out...recorded everything over again. Looked in closet and got rid of all vinyl, 8-track, and cassettes. Amassed several hundred CDs. 2000-2010 Got iPod and PC computer with CD recorder - kept CDs until I put 4 Terrabytes storage on networked drives, recorded everything over to digital. 2010-2016 Got car with mp3 interface for iPod. Got rid of all CDs. I don't know what can come next, but this is as far as I go. I Am now 62 and have every piece of music I have ever owned on my network and am Happy. (I upgraded my music collection like I traded my TRS-80 for an IBM PC, then 20 other computers all the way up to today I have a 4-core and Linux. Technology in media has probably gone as far as it will. I have spent countless man-hours and dollars keeping up and this is where I draw the line.) Thanks for listening.
+David Graham 100% agree. Where audio and video technology is concerned, not upgrading is just plain dumb. I worked in the audio industry in R&D in the 1980s and everything was developed to either be smaller and more convenient, or and this was mostly the case, to improve upon the current noise and distortion figures. For one thing, wow & flutter vanished with the demise of tapes and vinyl. We always had the best stuff to play with and I can tell you that CD was a massive improvement.
David Graham My car stereo has USB. So now days I keep my music on a thumb drive. Maybe where it's headed next. Small compact, portable. Take your whole collection with you. Maybe even have it all stored in flash memory right in the stereo.
David Graham If I stuck to what I remember about records, I wouldn't have bought a new turntable because I remembered the clicks, pops and skips as well as the stuck records. Now I have records that are as silent of any of the surface noise that I assumed was part of the medium. I also bought a Sony cassette deck which was made in 1978 and it gives excellent reproduction. Not perfect, which nothing is, but very enjoyable. I still love Spotify but it's taking records out of their sleeves and having to turn them over. It's the larger sized art work on the covers and the whole interaction of flipping through records in record shops and of playing vinyl that makes me prefer it to digital. The same with Cassettes. A portable cassette player damaged tapes and didn't give good reproduction. My "new" cassette deck gives very good sound. Making mixed tapes from records and even Jazz radio is fun. There's more to enjoying music than focussing on the imperfections of the media.
Well, thankfully the world hasn't given up like you have. Technology is improving at a faster rate than ever, and I guarantee there are still plenty of improvements you can make to the quality of your music and setup right this moment.
I have a drawer with hundreds of factory and home recorded cassette tapes and recently (well, about two years ago) I upgraded my player to a Pioneer model. Some of the tape sound great while others...not so great. I adjust the levels and balance between lows/highs to my taste with the help of an EQ. Love them.
To really enjoy cassettes, you do not need be as nerdy as this guy. I've been around since the first cassette PLAYER - not deck, which came later. Points I make: 1. I agree: cassettes sound great. 2. You do NOT need a 3-head deck to enjoy cassettes. A 2-head deck sounds just as good. You only need a 3-head deck if you are going to attempt serious recording. 3. Used cassette decks may have a well worn head. So like your stylus for vinyl, they need to be replaced. Or the deck replaced. 4. Dolby S is NOT required. Tapes made with Dolby S are not compatible with nay other player. You need an S player. Dolby S would be for your personal collection. See item 2 above. 5. Most "newer" decks have iron based heads and they wear out. See above. METAL tape wears 'em out faster than anything else. 6. Use Chrome tape - best compromise and everything supports it. Chrome recordings sound outstanding. FeCr tape were made because Chrome tapes didn't sound quite like vinyl sources whereas the Fe tapes sounded more natural but were noisier. FeCr tapes make great recordings, and an be played on chrome compatible decks. You owe it to yourself to try it. 7. The tape transport counts. Maybe MORE than the electronics or number of heads. You need a solid performer with low W&F as well as steady long term W&F performance. Most decks W&F are different at the beginning, middle and end of tape. It takes some solid engineering to get this right. So if your deck has a flywheel the size of a silver dollar, you need a new deck. 8. Ferrite heads: Plenty of pro and con about this. But the main advantage is with a ferrite head, you have a chance the unit will meet original spec. This head will easily outlast 2 or 3 main belt changes. Think 30+ years. 9. Finally: If you buy a deck from 1990-1995 it is going to need belts. At least the main belt. Even un-used, these belts soften, sag and even melt. Not like the 1970-1986 belts, which were made from real rubber component chemicals. 1990's belts are much cheaper, although that is less a worry in better quality decks.
Jeffery Larson; Some good points there! W&F standing for "Wow & Flutter", which was basically how stable the deck could hold the proper speed of 1-7/8 inches per second, and that stability was helped greatly by having a large flywheel attached to the capstan... Again, terminology that can only be understood if you know about the format... Anyone interested in cassettes now-a-days who doesn't already know about the format needs to do their own "homework" and research on it before just jumping into using it, because without proper knowledge and understanding on how the format best works and how to get the most out of it, they will most likely be quite disappointed and consider it "too much trouble to be worth their time"!... But with proper knowledge and understanding it doesn't have to be like that, as it can be quite fun and enjoyable if utilized properly!
Yes. Everything Jeffery said is true!!! Though it's incredibly difficult and expensive to find good chrome tapes these days. Older TDK D and Sony HF are good enough for most uses if you are using a good deck. But there's nothing like a TDK SA-X if you can afford it. :)
This was and sometimes still is the best way of recording sound in a portable way, specially if you rebuild the VCR to just record audio. Don't always assume digital is magic, it is just the cheapest and easiest way of recording and cutting/pasting sound. VHS was only good for sound, Betamax was best for picture.
Provided that you have a hi-fi VHS machine that recorded the sound with spinning heads on the video drum. This was recorded on two separate FM carriers (left and right) using two extra heads co-located with the video tracks. The standard VHS audio (even with Dolby nr) was crap.
Paul Gibbons i have what was once a 2000 dollar professional grade Panasonic AG-7350 super vhs deck that records sound flawlessly. but ive also tried the cheapo stuff that toshiba still puts out and it also sound great. i mainly use that machine to dump peoples vhs to dvd since all the combo units suck these days
Although I still treasure my records, cassettes had the wonderful advantage of recordability. I used to capture stuff off VHS recorded TV shows before recycling the VHS. I also used to use the VHS timer facility to record Audio In from radio shows and copy that to cassette. To have the recording at all is sometimes more important than the fidelity. TH-cam is full of old video we are just grateful to see, never mind the quality.
I was not aware the head moved in auto-reverse. I thought they just had two capstan rollers and the tape just changed direction. I'm pretty sure the read head stays exactly where it is.
no, the head does flip, otherwise it would just play back the same two(stereo) tracks in reverse, the flipping aligns the tape head gaps with the two tracks in the corresponding direction,
however, auto reverse portable walkman units did not move the head, they had four tape head gaps and a mechanical switch to select the proper gaps for the side being played. I have wondered why the high end auto reverse decks did not use this method. There must have been a reason, such as inductance of signal between the gaps or something like that.
The main reason is that the tape shifts slightly with the direction of travel so the best head alignment (azimuth) in one direction is not the same as it is in the other. You can verify this on an auto reverse deck with a stationary head. Adjust it until the highs are as good as they can be on side 1, then reverse it. The highs will be duller. Adjust it again on side 2 and you'll see the dilemma. So, a flipping head has two adjustable stop-points. The best solution is Nakamichi's tape-flipping method used on decks like the RX-202.
I'm 64 and I well remember cassettes. I also remember that anything I recorded myself from my own records (vinyl) was always much better than what was then available as prerecorded stuff in the stores. There was a lot of "cheep junk" prerecorded cassettes back then.
So true. So true. One could almost always identify the prevailing wind direction of a location by where blown tape had accumulated in and around shrubbery and trees.
Been there!Done that!!Spent 10s of 1000s of $$$ Doing it!!I ain't going back!Hell NO!!!The new Digital/Internet Age has expanded my Collection with Superior Sound at Minimal Cost!!Also ,so much quicker!Used to spend Hours doing what now takes Seconds!!No.Sorry!I can't go back!! ;)
DjCole100 so so wish I still had my vynil and my tapes man! Worst thing, in fact also stupidest thing I ever did was sell my album collection and go to cds
Mark Rushton Actually an MP3 isn't compressed. It's recoded and bits of information are tossed out. A lossless FLAC file is simply squeezed down for storage and unsqueezed for playback. Sorry I stopped buying cassettes in 1987 and don't plan on ever going down that road again. It's MUCH more logical and economical to buy hard drive space. A 4 TB WD BLUE costs $118.
In terms of wear and tear, I find the one thing with cassettes is they're more adversely impacted by extreme temperatures. Also, don't accidentally drop them into cans of paint. (My Smashing Pumpkins - Gish tape met its untimely demise that way.)
I have always been happy with the sound of cassette tapes. Turntables are making a comeback, why isn't someone making good quality cassette recorders. Like with three heads, Doby etc. What happened, Sony.
Good used cassette decks are still available online. Look for a SINGLE deck, three head deck, just like the man above explained. Two head decks do not last, and have poor sound quality by comparison. You don't really need Dolby if you have a good sound system and/or a graphic equalizer. Dolby actually removes authentic sound quality....getting rid of all the hiss also gets rid of sound quality and realism. Especially from vinyl.
The market isn't there, unfortunately. Another issue is tape - only one or two companies are currently producing tape, and they're only able to produce type 1 ferric oxide tape, which isn't particularly good. There will never be cro2 magnetic tape made again because of the manufacturing processes' affect on the environment. Best buy a used deck, and all the NOS type ii and iv tape you can find, before prices get even crazier
Bought a used car, turned the key and drove away. Six months later I was putting a parking garage ticket in the center console and found out it has a 6-disc changer in it (factory). Still haven't put anything in it...
i cant say i'm much of a vinyl or cassette phile, i'm not even really sure why i clicked on this video, but I ended up watching the whole video, lol. Your content was thorough, clear, and you have a good voice for a youtube personality. keep it up!
heh, I'm not sure why I came either, and I watched it all too.I guess nostalgia.I wasn't into albums much, rode around alot as a teenager in the 80's, so boxes of cassettes were the norm.God bless Columbia tape club, 15 cassettes for 1 penny lol.
do you? Cassettes were never cool, but they were very good to bring along in the car or for the Walkman. The anolog interest I get, but cassettes are not fantastic in 2017.
Oh my dear lord. It's the wisdom of the ancients. You don't think there were hi-end cassette decks 'back in the day'? There were, such as the Nakamichi Dragon,etc., but who's kidding who about any of them sounding 'fantastic', or 'amazing', compared to even red-book digital. I don't miss the noise, the gradual degradation, the high-end roll-off, the inconvenience, the mechanical wear on the machine itself. I've owned lot's of the things, and still have one that works well despite being sourced from a free pile, but honestly, I don't miss them. Buy a cheap digital recorder. Revel in the silence, the headroom, and the wide, flat frequency response. And the Earth is ROUND!!!!
Yep. 10,000 songs in my pocket. Only buying the song that I actually like instead of the whole cassette full of stuff I won't listen to, downloading the song I want immediately, not having to wait to rewind the thing and know exactly where to stop, forgetting to put my collection out of direct sunlight so it won't be destroyed when I get back in my car, the background hiss, Dolby music reduction, metal (The Best) tapes with little to no bass. NO THANK YOU. I'll stick with digital. I have already sold all my cassettes and players. As far as CD's, I haven't bought one in years either. If a so called (Artist) isn't happy that we are only buying 1 song instead of the whole album, then maybe they should create some better music. Yep I'm quite happy with digital.
I had a nice deck and nice tapes back then too, even my first crappy CD player caused my jaw to drop and music was practically brand new again, I couldn't wait to hear everything I'd once listened to on tape. I understand the nostalgia but when one is old enough to remember reality, tapes were poop: sometimes I even thought 8-track sounded better than cassette but I was pretty young then.
Haha. I've been singing songs using the wrong lyrics for the last 30-35 years because of the poor quality of the system and cassettes that I had. Digital has really opened my eyes.
Beautiful sharing and clear, I have 3 Tapedeck : CARVER, DENON, and NAKAMICHI LX-5 enjoy music with cassette and make healthy..haa...haa...thank you sir..I am 67 years old.
probably the best things about cassettes is when you make a mix tape is that favourite song is not played to death and goes into rotation unlike using the repeat function on mp3 players. This has the added value of not getting bored of it so quickly and not having loved ones tearing their heads out because you have played it 20 times in succession. \\good luck buying a decent portable player these days though//
When recording songs off of the radio I have tapes where I accidentally recorded the same song twice in a row. This was mainly because you had 1 or two notes to recognize the song before hitting record real quick and I wanted as much of the entire song as I could get.
or ffd, rew, shuffle LOL No, you would have to be a complete moron to switch back to cassettes. CD's, not being great because of its generally poor ability to reproduce an analog signal, still sound better than the mass produced junk that was released to the general public - CDs sound the same time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time...
+Synthematix Not mine. Got 3500 of them, some 34 years old, no problem with any of them. I call BS. Now, the recordable ones are problematic, and do fail rather quickly, but not the commercially pressed ones.
Also another very important feature to look for is Dolby HX-Pro Dynamic bias system (This is not a noise reduction system but a Headroom eXtension system that work only during the recording phase). This in my opinion vastly improved high frequency response.
I've been really obsessed with analog music lately! I don't have the space for vinyl so I've been thinking about CDs and cassettes a lot. This video was very informative.
luck kelu Hey, this is not a "practice your listening" channel . Just kidding. I thought the same way while watching this video because my first language is Spanish. By the way, he made me feel nostalgic about those old cassettes and how little children loved to unroll them.
oh yeah ! my childhood"s music is cassettes/tape/vinyl i remember running on the streets with my yellow waterproof sony cassettes ......today we have the MP3 (maybe mp5 tomorrow haha)
Hey i own a Brazilian casette tape, bought it at a fleemarket and it is some heavy metal music played into a cheap recorder. I think it is from the "tapetrading years" long before my active years. :P
Great video and a good way to encourage the use of a wonderful format. The only comments I can make to vinyl Eeezz is that the date range to look for the best cassette deck is NOT the 90's in fact there were very few well made decks in the 90's truth is that cassette really declined by the late 80's with the rise of CD affordability. There were a few good 90's decks here and there but the best made decks were made from the late 70's to the mid to late 80's.being that the cassette format was the strongest during this period. The best MFG for cassette decks hands down was Nakamichi. I can tell you through experience in order to make a cassette sound great you need a number of factors that Nakamichi got down pat... You need proper head alignment and tape torque, proper level matching to the tape being used and proper bias. All addressed by Nakamichi. When properly set up even using Dolby you can get a nearly perfect match from source to tape even with type 1 "normal" bias tape with true 20-20Khz response. I own a Nakamichi ZX-7 and a Dragon and They are as good as it gets. There were plenty of others made too and the key is having a bias adjustment and built in test tones. You will get amazing results with a properly tuned deck much the same way you would get amazing results with a properly tuned turntable. Thing though with going after tape decks from the late 70's to mid 80's is that many of them will need maintenance unless they have had them done recently. More likely the 90's decks will have a greater chance of working out of the box. Also make note that Dolby "s" was a rare feature only found in a few decks, Sony was one of them. That Sony ES deck you shown was one of Sonys better 90s deck so a good choice.. Dolby B,C was the most common and some decks even had DBX and HX pro.
I remember Nak in the 80s-90s. Great Gear, well built, looked awesum! On a side note I recall a Tape Deck that physically extended the port outward and turned the cassette around... for continuous play. Coolest thing i ever seen in 1982 @ a Sound World store.
+Grant Agreed. But the NAK stuff was too pricy for my blood back then. Hitachi and Technics made some awesome three head decks back in the early 80's. Several were marketed under the Radio Shack brand. I still own an SCT-30 three head Radio Shack deck. Made by Hitachi, it has dual capstans, front panel bias adjustments and Dolby B. Not the latest and greatest, but it will still make tapes that will knock your socks off. Amazing performance considering the track widths and the incredibly slow tape speed. A technical marvel, only surpassed, IMHO, by the mass-produced helical scan video tape machines!
I've got a TEAC A450 but it needs servicing. I think I'll have to replace the main rubber belt. The problem will be getting one. The sound was almost indistinguishable from CD & in someways it was better - less harsh on the ear.
I was thinking similar thoughts (though not in as much awesome detail!). I was in high school from 90-94, cassettes were still around and plentiful, but were definitely starting to take a back seat to CD's by then. The 1980's was the height of the cassette tape era. My dad had an awesome stereo setup, including turntable and cassette players (sorry I forget which brand) and taught me how to take care of both formats. My very first now 30 year old cassette tapes still play well to this day :)
Or Audiophiles are running out of ideas to be edgy, so in desperation turn to crappy cassettes. What's next, phonograph cylinders, and how they sound better than CD's
I'm glad more people are starting to stand up for cassettes I'm sick of people shitting on the format. I recently bought a pioneer from the late 90s and I was amazed at how my ac/dc tape sounded in it, it sounded great
Good video Jarrett and I came here from Technmoan's video believe or not, and got hooked on the channel since then. Wanted to comment on the dual deck point you brought up, I have a Sony TC-WR645S Dual Cassette Deck with Auto Reverse and I have to say, it is actually a pretty darn good piece of equipment despite those specs implying otherwise. Tapes sound amazing on that thing and the auto reverse feature is pretty rad for those moments of laziness that I experience from time to time.
I'm an old recording engineer. Metal cassettes were phenomenal. I realize a few eyebrows will rise but... you can get CD or DAT quality (I.e. master quality) from a cassette. It wasn't uncommon to bounce your two track master to SVHS video cassettes. This was great for long term storage. However most consumer video decks require some video source to record audio. A black burst generator, color bar generator, or the composite / S video out from a tuner, DVD, or VCR will suffice . With that said. There is maintenance involved with cassette decks. Primarily cleaning with 99% isopropyl alcohol or head cleaner and occasionally "demagnetizing" your heads. A cassette is basically a mini reel to reel. This was a great video!
You can also silence a constantly squeaking tape by spraying just a touch of wd40 on the felt tab and running it both fast foward and rewind. Squeak is gone. This is not for squeaking spindles, it's for old tape squeaking against the heads. Spindles can be treated with a shot of spray silicone.
The best thing about cassettes was loading programs onto your 8-bit computer. You could hear the program loading, so you knew it was working, and it took 10 minutes and 15 retries to load a 4k program. We should dump this lame internet thing and go back to acoustic couplers and 300 baud modems. I may even have some old AOL and CompuServe floppies in storage somewhere...
I agree. I can hear my data going into my Ohio Scientific c2 4p and my Heathkit Hero1 robots, not to mention my Heathkit 3400 microprocessor trainer add-on to the et-3400 that gave i/o and cassette data storage. Oh, I left out my C-64.
Loading time was usually under five minutes on my old Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. However the Commodore 64 took a very long time.....even as much as nearly twenty minutes! :-o
From a teen who used cassettes and walkman back in the 90s I think the real problem people have today with digital music and what makes people overglorify obsolete media formats like vinyls and cassettes is that digital music and cloud hosting and streaming basically made the music inexistent, uncollectible, the music in a physical form I mean. I have broken so many cassettes and vinyls I loved just for normal use and back then an album or a single was not a few bucks or 99 cents as today. Sure digital files can get corrupted, a server can be shut down. But you can easily get your tracks quickly and for cheap. I really don't miss the old times. Also, don't even start the argument 'vinyl sound better' if you don't know the difference between Analog and Digital audio. Digital audio is superior. The rest is nostalgia.
I don't know Analogue has some advantages - yes eventually parts and such will disappear and it will be more a historical thing in a another Generation or two. but at least there is no worry about built-in obsolescence like you see with Computers and some other technology. I can still slip a 1980's Rocky Sound Track tape in for a listen but I can't do the same with a 1980's PC game (not without a lot of messing about anyway). Besides they don't take up a whole lot of space I've always preferred to to CD's myself for reasons of portability and the sound is less clinical.
I used to get 90 min metal cassette tapes and copy my vinyl albums on them. A lot of walkman players supported metal, so I was able to play them on those for portability. The only part I was missing was a good set of headphones... but then again, a 16 year old kid would have not been caught dead with a huge pair of cans back then.
I have been rebuilding my childhood cassette collection recently. I had the idea they sucked but liked the nostalgia of my childhood. Then i picked up an old Sony F18 Walkman and hooked up some good ear buds. Blown away how good it sounds. Anything from early Metallica, Slayer and even some Motley Crue. Now I'm sold on them again. I just hate rewinding/forwarding. Records and CDs killed it on that 1 point.
I was born in 97 but I have an obsession with the 80s and old fashioned styles of many different things. I do wish there were more people like me but at the same time it's nice to have an uncommon hobby.
After reading through a few of the comments one thing becomes obvious. The younger generations are so used to immediate satisfaction that they have no patience. I came up in the generation when 8 track was brand new. Cassette tapes and some of the older media types are not totally about the music, it was also about the process. Cassettes we are huge jump up from the 8 track tape. If you used the right equipment and took care of your tapes they sounded incredible. I have recorded 100's of mix tapes and complete album tapes over the years and always used good quality tapes and good equipment. You youngsters need to slow down and enjoy the process as much as the music
There is a lot of truth in that. I still have hope for the kids, the other friday my godsons brother came to visit. I showed him radio casettes, vinyls and a floppy disc when we really were looking for a Playstatio game. He was astonished. I showed him the Microsoft Aquarius from 1982. He was blown away. I showed him the Commodore 64 with attachements. Mindblown again. I showed the Canon X-07 portable computer from 1984. He started to get the picture, smart kid. He understood that it was like now, just "like it was then because it was like that back then". He did not believe me when he tested my Casio SL-80 Solar Powered-Touch Buttoned pocket calculator and i said it was from 1983. The funniest thing was thel headphones, old school black-plastic-bigger-than-fighter-pilots-used from 1972. His mom was born in 1976.. I told him how they work and that i use them with my smartphone. He looked shocked: "WHAT?! Can you use those seventies in a smartphone from twenty sixteen?!?!" :D Then i talked him into testing a Sega Megadrive, and he was amused by that even if the game was old, and it looked old "it's not bad at all". I think he still wonders what a floppy disc is, he had never seen one before... The kid is 10, a good kid. :) Should by him a vinyl-player for his birthday.
I am fifteen and my mom got me really interested in cassettes at a really young age. I really like the style and the process of making a mixtape its not only fun and interesting but incredibly gratifying when you get to listen to your favorite music like queen or Jim crose!
Even if what you're saying is based in a great truth, when you start saying things like "you youngsters need to learn to enjoy the process as much as..." Eh, on second thought, nevermind this comment. Carry on...
As I bumped into my "first" cassette player back in 2015, I fall in love with the hissing Hi-Fi sound immediately. In conclusion, if you have decent gear (e.g. SONY DD series or Walkman Professional series) even rec./playback on mediocre type I tapes can sound great.
***** It was a joke, I would have thought calling him technoman and the wink would have given it away. Bad insulting youtube comments are a running joke in his videos, it was a play on that. I actually am a huge fan of his stuff.
Dude i grew up in the 80's they suck there is almost always a background noise, plus finding your song sucked snd tape rolling out, stop romanticizing crap technology.
OK, not joking: I had six 78s but they fell and broke... One was 'Dream of Olwen' And I have a Webster Chicago dictating machine with 'natural voice playback' from 1949. It is a wire recorder and it's about my age ;)
When i first started collecting, i bought cassettes from my local thrift shop for 10 cents cad each, and my buddy found a GE portable player from 76 in great condition for 10 dollars cad.
Hey man! I completely agree with you about sound quality. I used to repair and maintain hundreds of cassette deck in the past years. I still have my Nakamichi BX150 that sound just great and is not for sell! Not like vinyl or CD but quite close and much better that average people thing. You just forgot a VERY important thing: KEEP THE HEADS CLEAN ! A dirty head will gradually erase the recording. Use a cotton swab imbibed with alcohol or acetone (be careful with acetone, do not let it come in contact with plastic). Clean the head and all the tape path at least every 25 hours of playing time. If you do it, your cassettes will last for lllllllong!
Thumbs up regarding the Nakamichi. Love mine from the early nineties. Still in mint condition and performs perfectly ! And in addition to cleaning the heads, periodically demagnetizing is a good idea as well. Cheers !
Christian Forget Oh my god, the second paragraphs take me back to the 70’s when I used to clean heads with meth spirit and cotton buds. A question for you, being very impressed with your knowledge on matters related to cassettes. I have also been ‘de-magnetising’ player heads regularly, with a plug in device for 3 decades now, and the players have served me well. Would you recommend this? I would really like your input.
Not necessarily true. I have cassettes that are 20-30 years old and they are well looked after and have a fantastic quality sound. These are the basics cassettes too. If you look after your cassettes, cassette decks etc, then you will not have a problem.
I bought a cassette player too, because I didn’t even know Vinyl was a big thing until after I had a ton. I wanted to explore all kinds of music, and feel closer to me.
By the way, metal was all I ever bought. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think what degraded tape sound was stretching. The metal tapes were better because they didn't stretch.
Although metal tapes were the BEST to record on, they were also the most abrasive on the tape deck heads. I had worn a noticeable depression in the head by using metal tapes. I also purchased 2 or 3 replacement heads for the deck just for that reason.
yes it is stretching and also it holds the patterns magnetized into the tape better, basically its a better conductor of magnetism without spreading. However they still had these same issues any tape had, just much less.
***** very true that the tape material can wear out but if you have 50 tapes each played about 10 times, that's 500 plays on the one head. That's why I say the head wears out more than the tapes do.
Corson Wyman - I never had a head wear out, it may get a little worse but then a headcleaner would take care of it. Im sure it can easily happen, but would take lots more than hundreds of tape plays from my experience.
I have about a thousand cassettes, possibly more. My favourite brand was TDK. I've got loads of records on cassette that I haven't heard for years, some of which are now unavailable. I recently got my old cassette deck out of storage, for the first time in about fifteen years and it didn't work. Aaargh. I was disappointed, to say the least. Now I'll have to look around for a second hand one. You talked about buying old albums on cassette. Strangely enough, many of the prerecorded cassettes that I bought were of worse quality than the ones I recorded myself. The tape was poor and it stretched and snapped easily. Anyone buying old prerecorded tapes should prepare to be disappointed quite regularly.
Pre-recorded cassettes are duplicated at a very high rate on specialized reel-reel machines and then loaded into the cassettes. There are several problems with this. The frequency response of the high speed duplication machines is very poor as is the signal to noise ratio. The cassettes tended to be very cheap welded shells with poor internal lubrication. Also, the cheap cassette shells tended to skew the azimuth of the tape. One can do much better by real time duplication and using a high quality cassette cartridge. My cassettes made from vinyl sounded much better than the Pre-recorded cassettes of the same material.
There is places that still fix the old cassette players, you should check it out. fix it instead of replacing it if you can and that way you know it's your original player.
Pwecko, I have that same problem, or did have. I have well over a thousand cassettes in my music collection along with reel-to-reel, 8-track, vinyl and the soon to be dead CD's. One point that Vinyl Eyezz brought out is absolutely true. The newer decks with all of their whiz-bang gadgets are junk looking for a house to land in. I bought one of the last top-of-the line decks only to have it die shortly after the warranty expired (naturally!). Rather than make that mistake again, I started looking for older units with a solid reputation for reliability and landed with a Pioneer deck that just keeps going, and going, and...well, you get the picture. The more gadgets a deck has the better the probability that you will probably have a good paperweight soon. Stick with the sturdier ones with fewer things to break. TDK and Maxell were two of the best brands of tape and still hold up well.
As someone who's been buying and listening to music since the mid 70's, I must say that almost no one back in the 70's and pre-CD 80's listened to cassettes on home stereos. Sure, you could make great sounding cassettes for your own use, to play in the car, for instance, and the ones you bought at the store were fine for that purpose and for boom-boxes, but very few people listened to cassettes for true sonic purposes. They were made for portability and convenience, not for sound quality. Also, as far as durability goes, CD's are inherently more durable. Cassettes will eventually wear out, and the cheaper ones like they used for general release music are subject to jamming as well. So as a nostalgic thing, cassettes are fine. But as a way to listen to quality music, not so much. And I say this as someone who used to put every LP I bought onto high quality chrome tape to listen to in the car!
I've always just loved the look and feel of the cassettes themselves. What other medium can you just flip around in your palm like that? so satisfying.
Tapes got a bad rep, because duplicating standards were often poor, and most decks had improperly adjusted "azimuth" alignment on the playback head (even straight from the factory). Also, poorly made shells, caused more "wow and flutter", and the ferric oxide build up from the cheap quality store bought tapes would cause even more degradation in sound quality, not to mention residual magnetic fields on the play head that would actually cause pre-recorded tapes to be slowly "erased" over time. Cassette decks need periodic cleaning, maintenance and degaussing, to play back at consistent fidelity (and to prevent tapes being "eaten", pinch rollers and capstan, must be cleaned too). It only takes a few minutes to adjust azimuth, (or head alignment) on most tape decks with a mini (non magnetic) phillips screw driver, (even on the Walkman type). Another factor is that most decks do not have a proper speed adjustment (some modern ones are fixed, and often off-speed) Sony "Sport" Walkman had an easily accessed speed adjustment port, with a rubber seal, BTW . Add even more dirt and grime and problems to the typical car cassette, and you can see why people ditched them for CD a long time ago, but on a properly maintained deck, (or even a good quality Sony Walkman) a good cassette can far surpass CD quality (albeit with more 'hiss'), and come close to the quality of an LP recording.
You got DAT right! The DA-20 can record directly from CD at 44.1 K and the copy protection can be turned off. Are you aware of DCC as in Digital Compact Cassette?
Oh yeah!!!!;-) One of the biggest bombs in audio history!! Along with the El-cassette many moons ago. Analog is dead, even the growth in vinyl is being mostly sourced from digital sources. Any recording system is bound by the law of GIGO, and Hi-rez digital is virtually transparent in how well it reproduces what yuo feed it , again, garbage in, garbage out. I was born in the 78 RPM era, and I hated vinyl when digital was far off for consumer audio.
Being born in the late 90's I was growing up when old formats were dying, and honestly I don't remember them being as bad as people say, my sister's cassettes never crackled or anything, games on cartridges looked and sounded fine and my VHS tapes had no lines and the picture was absolutely fine.
It's all relative. Cassette tape can sound good but listen to a good recording on a CD then it is not so good. Same with watching a DVD and then watching VHS.
Uh no. I have clear memory of the year 2000-2004. By 2004 I was eight years old, and if it it took you until you were eight to develop memory and comprehension skills then your mother really should have stopped drinking during pregnancy. Also they were still making VHS tapes circa 2004-2005 most of the stuff I had on VHS was all stuff that was recent in it's time. And old games were far easier to come by back then, not to mention the GBA which still used carts.
When I started collecting vinyl, I had a suitcase player and wasn’t satisfied. I planned on giving up on vinyl, but I decided to give TH-cam a look on what people say about vinyl. Your video came up and told me everything I needed to know. Immediately I bought an ATLP60X which I still use and am very happy with. Over two years later I own 100 records that I properly sleeve up and take care of thanks to you. When I went to my record store today I looked around longer and saw a fantastic selection in the tape section. I picked one up even though I don’t own a player knowing it was cheap and I wasn’t taking a big risk. This time I decided I wasn’t gonna make the same mistake and looked up “what to know about cassettes” and this video popped up. Feels like a full circle moment, and this time I’m going into it educated! Thank you, very much.
I've no idea how I've ended up here because I gave up collecting vinyls a long time ago and I've also sold most of my cassettes so really this isn't my topic YET I found this super interesting and informative to watch mostly because of your personality. You seem to be a nice guy and aren't the annoying average TH-cam person that's totally in your face and has to scream at you and what not. Keep up your friendly and leaned back attitude.
Wow! We may be leading parallel lives. How did I get here? Why did I watch this? I sold my vinyl, gave away/lost my cassettes......curiously, I was remarkably interested in everything the nice man said. lol
Patrick EH There is little if any interaction involved in digital music. We used to have to get a cassette out of its box, press play and record. Pause at the end of the track to put on a different record and after the tape was made, sometimes we'd take it with us to a friend's ( actual friend, not virtual friend) house to give him/her the mix and enjoy the company of a living, breathing human. Now it's press a button or swipe a screen for a playlist. No need to see a living person. Sometimes the longest way round is the best.
nahh.. we can still have a human interaction through digital medium. me and my friend still sit in front of computer and share our new finding from the web. sometimes it is an obscure band on youtube or a new releases in bandcamp, spotify. we would sit together and discuss about it without even spending a dime on buying the physical releases (the best part of this shit). it depend on your set of friends really.. for me human interaction is not really that relevant in comparing the digital and tape. sharing and interaction still exist in digital world if you find a way to do it. tape on the other hand is shit.. trying to repeat a song is shitty as fuck. and i have a stash of damaged cassettes in my collection. i had stop buying for quite a while now especially with the new rise of cassettes cultures that cause the price to increase especially with the international releases ( i'm not from america btw -a tape from america and Europe can be as pricey as the vynil version)
Technics makes an awesome cassette deck. I still have mine that I purchased in 1995. Also always look for a record volume control so that you may control the volume of your mix tape recordings as well. Cassettes were/are always the easiest way to record music, especially for me as a vinyl DJ.
Older prerecorded casette tapes were almost exclusively sold on low bias type I tapes that really did sound horrible. There are a few exceptions to this.
Absolutely. There is a vintage Hifi store near my house-get lost in there looking at all the old beautiful Marantz, Denon, Pioneer, Nakamichi, etc tape decks and receivers. They wouldn't look out of place next to a high end guitar or piece of artwork.
I run a Pioneer SX-850, (Jamo Millenium speakers with a Cambridge Azure CD deck...) I rarely run it, because the neighbours would riot... the kid next door thinks his POS stereo is Audio armageddon... it isn't in the same league... just listening to SPECTRE or Planet of the Apes through this thing is breathtaking... warmer, richer sound than anything I've seen today...
I worked in a music shop in my 20s and was once paid with a big box of blank CrO2 tapes, most people would be like " where's my money!?" I was pretty damn pleased.
Heheheh :))) I just bought now two box CrO2 and one box Metal II. For reel to reel I realized, the best sounding is the EII or old master tapes. I still have a unopened new mastering tape. Maybe I will do a comparation video about new produced masteing tape vs old BASF mastering tape....
Yeah, and have you seen the price of 'em?! I used to buy the chrome tapes at Richer Sounds. Their own brand - That's - for £1 each. Shoot me in the face if I didn't just see for of them on ebay - FOR £100!
Still have tons of cassettes and started regularly recording lps onto them starting in the early 80s. Used to be a lot of fun and most of them still sound good. Maxell and TDK were especially good.
Cassette recording was an art. I owned a Nakamichi 3 Head cassette deck and my recordings on Maxell tape could never tell the difference between vinyl and the recording. Such was the passion in recording with perfect azimuth alignment and correct biaz. I was lucky to experience this. The Walkman by Sony was a revolution. The 15 inch spool machines showed you as a high end audiophile and unit playing displayed clarity at its best, besides the machine looked impressive, sexy, and romantic. It simply displayed ones personality. One day all this will return as the effects of radiation in smartphones has begun to show.
I just don't understand... I have FLAC compression and CD's... why choose anything else? I'm musician and audio engineer... there's just no technical point to vinyl or cassette. I'm also a electronic design engineer by trade so trust me, I know my stuff regarding the technology. Is imperfect audio reproduction so much better? Or are you people just gotten fed up with loudness war and you escape to vinyl since loudness war doesn't work with vinyl and they need to be mastered better?
i think it might be the thing about the loudness war. i personaly also like the imperfections for example the little needle noises from the vinyl player. also compare the artists: compare fredie mercury with lady gaga or katy perry, there is simply no effort put into music nowdays!
Why do people collect or own older cars rather than by the newest model which are safer and very much more technically advanced. There are many reasons people why people do things. Nostalgia for one. Does the average listener actually care about the technical data concerning fidelity. You'd have to hit the bottom range of the fidelity spectrum for a listener to really care. You said it yourself that you are an expert in the field. Most audio fans are not. There is a certain quality; a "warmth", if you will; that digital media cannot duplicate. I think analog audio will always have a place in music and with fans.
The loudness war _does_ work on vinyl. You can cut a dynamically compressed track as easily as an uncompressed one. In both cases you just have to observe reasonable cutting levels.
+Arpad Zakar It is mainly the loudness war. A lot of the albums in my iTunes library are recorded from vinyl as well as rips from cd. Comparing Amy Winehouse track for track, the mastering is much louder on the CD and gets a little fatiguing after a couple of tracks I find myself easing the volume down. The same album recorded from vinyl, I can keep turning up the volume up and it stays smooth.
Don't forget... in the studio... that amazing vinyl record... was recorded on TAPE. Like a 24 track... So, if "TAPE SUX and is INFERIOR!!", then guess what... that vinyl... is a RECORDING made from >>>TAPE
Tapes are great for making original recordings to be transferred to a metal press. They don't get repeated use. They are not is a cassette but reel. Once complete studios usually put them in a can and in a climate controlled storage vault. Studios rarely use tape decks any more for recording. They can get many more tracks digitally.
We were. In the past that's how it worked with up to so many tracks ( I think 16 or less for tape) but tape gave way to digital for a number of reasons, one being the track limit not just the sound quality. There are a few companies that make vinyl records still. The press is made out of metal and the biscuit is pressed onto it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_press In the past the they made the press from the master tape but I'm not sure if they still do it that way or make it from a master digital recording. The couple of studios I've seen were all digital and only made cd's.
You are literally not telling me anything i do not know. My point was this. The "vinyl purists" who feel that vinyl sound reproduction is superior to tape, don't seem to think about that fact that that vinyl was produced from a magnetic tape MASTER -- DURING the era we're talking about (compact cassette). And back then, DAWs were NOT 32bit float 192HKz, or 5MHz 1bit. Back then the first digital recorders were nowhere near that quality. When vinyl was in it's highest prevalence, it was typically created from TAPE sources. So, if the vinyl of the day was superior, it lost it's superiority by having been sourced from an inferior medium. Somewhat like playing a million dollar recording through $10 speakers. If the music comes through an inferior medium, any the quality before it, or after it in the audio chain is thrown away.
OK I guess I didn't get what you were saying before. Right, the press for the vinyl record was made from a tape except for some of the earliest recordings which were scored right into the acetate and sounded like crap.
As someone who lived through the cassette era I always loved them and boomboxes. Sound was incredible. I have cassettes that I play on stereo which sound awesome. Glad you're getting up to speak.
I watched this vid 4 years ago. I am back for the 2nd viewing. I loved your beginning. I laughed so hard. I could hear alot of people yelling exactly what you said.
I know. I went through a box this weekend and found about a hundred cassettes that my wife had from about TWENTY years ago. We hooked up the old Nakamichi and danced to stuff I didn't even know she listened to. The look on my sons face was priceless. He looked at the cassettes like they were little green men from mars.
Great stuff! Good tape players are hard to find these days; I just had one of my old decks re-conditioned and am using it frequently and enjoying it. I love my old mix tapes, they sound great. Glad to see someone else thinks the tape format is worthwhile too. Keep up the great work, this site is a blast!
Cassettes were just fine during their period of ubiquity. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and used all different quality of tapes and players, including professional equipment costing hundreds of thousands. But I would not want to go back to it. They really require a lot of care. Like vinyl, tapes can warp in the heat of an automobile. Tape heads need regular degaussing. Tape does wear and once you get one little crinkle in it, it will be far more likely to get caught and make a terrible mess that you have to untangle, from which point it will be for all intents and purposes, useless. Unlike vinyl or a digital format, you cannot simply go to your desired track nearly instantaneously. The only pro I ever saw of cassettes was how easily they were to overwrite, even the write protected ones, since all you have to do is stick tape over the hole or stuff some folded paper in there. By the same token though, down the road you might wish you hadn't been able to record over that old stuff so easily. It was also fairly easy to make somewhat professional looking commercial tapes... but still? I'd never go back, that shit sucks. Enjoy though if that's your thing.
Degaussing! HA, I remember that:.... the thing that almost no one did and almost all machines needed (badly). I used a Tascam 424 multi-track cassette recorder for guitars well into the computer DAW era because tape handled guitar recording better (to my ear) until the DAW software got better. DAW - digital audio workstation
Dirty pinch rollers on a cassette deck will chew the tapes up ,the heads and rollers have to be kept clean..I have a 45 year old factory cassette tape that plays fine..
It's all part of being a "tapehead" or tape collector. Caring for the gear. It's part of the soul in analog music collecting that it is all degradable and that we enjoy it while we have it. If it lasts forever, do we really respect having it?
Keep in mind also that little "sponge" you see at the bottom of the cassette. I forget what it's called, but if it falls off, you won't get any sort of playback aside from muffled gobbledegook. You can reapply it again, but I forget the compound you use to make it stay on there.
The cassette is one of the worst audio formats but one of the smartest. They interest me because its hard to believe that sound can come from a square box with tap in it very smart invention eventhough not the best sounding. Sorry if that affends any of you.
+Tricob1974 Out of all the cassettes I've gotten from various sources and since I was a kid, I haven't really run into issues involving the pressure pad very often. If something does happen however, you can always replace it from another cassette. That said, there are some tape decks that don't use the pad at all. Instead, they use a second capstan and pinch roller to put the right amount of tension on the tape. Since the pad isn't needed in this dual capstan configuration, the pad is lifted right off by a "cage" that surrounds the tape head. Nakamichi is one brand that uses this method.
🔔 Hit that BELL NOTIFICATION for more sweet ANALOG Videos! 🔔
mr eyezz i have a question do they sell tapes at charity shops?
Vinyl Eyezz Don’t know where I’ve been...at 50 and a former 78 rpm owner I cannot believe I ever never seen this. A lover of actual mixtapes, crappy CDs and probably 10 turntables. I was even a spinner in Chicago 1999 with vinyl. Don’t stop the funk rock. Man, I still have some 8 tracks...nothing to play em on but I’m proud to own them. Thank you for the knowledge 🤪
@@lovepeaceandsoulfullrighto9053
If you go to garage sales at leastthe ones I go to there dirt cheap.
I don't think double cassette decks are so bad. I have a technics rs-d190w double deck and it looks and plays great.
@joker Darkerdouble decks are great.but head rotating models are given lot of problems with tuning for high frequency response on worn heads due to HQ metal tapes & mechanical wear-age. luckily you have owned equipment of classy user.
I have many great memories involving cassette tapes. I was in high school in 1999, which was when the music industry started really pushing CD's over cassettes. My best friend and I would go to flea markets and garage sales, find tons of tapes, and say "How much for all of them?" We put ALL tapes in a huge plastic bag and then, whilst driving, one of us would shout "New tape" and then I (because I wasn't driving) would reach into the bag (without looking) and pick a new tape. It was awesome. We'd go from Adam & The Ants, to Johnny Cash, to The Bangles, etc. Yes, you can do this with mp3's, but it doesn't feel magical 😔
Yea, there's something about hearing the soft rattely sound in your hand as you take that small yet sturdy plastic container and place it in your player and then hearing the closing of the lid as well as hearing the clackity adjustment sounds that align each reel and finally the click of the play button. I think this ritual plays an important part in the nostalgia and magical feeling we cassettorists experience.
1999 they weren't pushing them then, they were more than mainstream by that time, if anything was being pushed at that time it was home computers and the internet. You were way behind the times, sorry to say.
@@up0820 You completely misunderstood my post - please read it again.
@@up0820bruh liked his own comment 💀
good old days, I also loved to explore random CDs or floppys with software or games, sometimes it was virus, but who cares, I was reinstalling Win 98 almost every week anyway 😀
Tip: Always fast forward or reverse your tapes to the end when done listening to keep tape taunt. This will keep the tape free of whats called "Drop Out" a fluttering sound a wrinkled portion passing over the tape head will make.
@Loring Mc Crorey Thanks for the advice. I'm getting into cassettes and I found a 12 tape collection at my grandparents autorepair shop, and a few tapes had the main tape showing insted of the header, so thanks for the tip!
I wonder if radio DJs did this
@@markmooch radio DJ's typically ran Fidelipac's which were sort of a professional version of 8-tracks. They ran at 7 1/2 ips, and only had 3 tracks. 2 for music, and one double-wide track for control. The control track would stop the tape automatically where cue was placed on the tape.
That's more necessary because a tape left midway has a chunk of music exposed to damage. The start/end of the tape has the clear leader exposed, which has no music.
Most people who say anything about an analog medium “sounding like crap” probably only heard said medium at someone’s house (or their own place) on equipment that wasn’t taken care of properly. Take care of vinyl properly, take care of cassettes properly, they sound great.
Or it’s just what has become the acceptable response. It’s just ignorance LOL granted there are some sources that are bad quality. But you can’t generalize an entire product :)
Most people in the day wouldn't clean tape heads, fixing snapped tapes with sellotape was a good one for making the pinch wheels sticky and then the tape would wind around it.
@@pauldavies8638 oh the horror hahah but that's also how i learned to splice VHS tapes together - essentially I was film cutting :)
@@JohnDonovanProductions I can put a chrome cassette on my tape player and it is as sharp as a cd, you can't tell the difference
@ Nick Haldin Well said.
Also I like that retrowave/outrun pfp of yours.
Long live physical media-CD’s, Vinyl and cassettes.
Same too, i hate specially streamimg music services
Aldo Reyes you're telling me you hate convenient and instantaneous music at the tips of your fingertips? Aight.
Hope you're just trolling with that comment but knowing society today I wouldn't be surprised if people genuinely think Streaming audio is worse than physical media
@@EffoVexx u clearly don't get it.
@Sam Saoulekinda like your parents.... When they had you
Long live!
I recorded Radio all the time with my cassette player. Little did I know that I would treasure them today with all of the original commercials etc. It's like a time capsule from the 1970's and 1980's.
Same here! :)
I also have a few cassette recordings (early to mid 80's) from my GE boombox that I still listen to today and they sound good.
You should upload some of those recordings!
back in the day: "gotta cut all commercials"
today: omg I recorded some old commercials by accident!!!
I also used to record songs I liked from the radio. It would've been too expensive to buy all of the records I liked and we were poor (either that or my parents were tight). I guess you could say those were like the music downloads of that time.
I cant wait when he discovers CD
😅
@@paulalverson7211
Haha yes
hahaha
@@HaraldSjellose
And blue ray and high definition
@Sweatshirt
Yes your right about that.
Keep your cassettes away from magnets
I experimented as a kid with this. I had an old large speaker with a surprisingly strong magnet and slapped a tape against it, slid it over it and moved it around. Didn't do squat. I'll admit it wasn't a very scientific test (I was only about 14 at the time!) but I do think magnetic storage is more robust then it is sometimes given credit for.
Still I wouldn't want to store my tapes near a magnet for any length of time though!!
Simply overwrite.
too late for me all music is gone
@Duribethin Accidental or not, I never liked Erasure's music.
@@dotTomdotcom I think only us Brits would get that joke. "Lol" to you, sir.
I’m 46 and still have all of my cassettes from the 80’s & 90’s...and I still buy cassettes, along with vinyl and CDs. Simply put, I love music! Rock on! 🤘
Rock on dude!!! 34 here, have a few tapes, cds. and A bunch of records
@@markagnessi4731the only way to go is Reel to reel tapes, believe me.
You can barely buy any physical music now - iTunes, etc, even ended digital sales. Doubt many cassette albums exist today. You struggle to even get old albums in print on CD, and even less vinyl. But, if you have CDs that's all you want...Even iPods were ended, to force subscriptions.
You forgot about the black metal underworld. Tapes are still the media of choice.
ncshuriken back from the Grave tapes has Some great tapes for sale
Same with hardcore
And there type 1 lol
@@baphomet8638 type 1 tape isn’t bad it’s just not the best
Yep, that's the main reason I'm interested in looking into cassets. Just bought the Mysticum special edition full discography set because I wanted the exclusive book that came with it, but now I got a whole Mysticum casset collection.
I actually like the shoddier sound, I listen to a lot of lofi genres; hip-hop, vaporwave, future funk. I don’t know why I enjoy lower quality more, maybe it’s the texture? I dunno. But I dig it
coldguyRONE420 Oh, okay same with me I like the way it sounds
I think it depends on the type of music I’m listening to. If I’m listening to older music then I like the lesser quality sound. It just adds to the experience. But if on the off chance I’m listening to something more modern, I usually go digital for a cleaner sound without pops, cracks, and tape hiss. But I rarely listen to modern music so it’s not too often
I usually listen to metal, but from what I know about history of music, cassettes ARE hip hop!! The whole genre of hip hop was born out of the cassette culture and mixtapes! Think about it, in the 80's there was no cheaper way to sample parts of songs together to something new and groovy than through cassettes. That's why the typical 80's ghettoblaster (!) came with two cassette players and microphone jack! Without cassettes Hip Hop would not exist.
Because it sounds more real. It sounds raw, like real life, not like the cold, clean, compressed, DRM-riddled digital future.
cassettes aren't lower quality. they're not any worse than vinyl or digital.
i still keep my father's old cassette tapes from the 80's and 90's... coz its a big part of my childhood
Growing up as a child it was all about watching the VU meters and spectrum analysers that helped you judge how good a stereo system was. That, and also watching the woofers move as you powered up the amplifier.
Vinyl was a more sonically engaging medium, but it required a patience & maturity of an audiophile who wasn't as interested in how the mechanisms all worked. Apart from using an LP as a rolling road for your James Bond Matchbox car, there was less stuff visible to keep a child's eyes entertained.
Hi Cindy
What do you own on cassette?
cindy mananzala martinez ugh lucky, my parents got rid of all their old cassettes and records.
@@bailey9947 Who was this message above meant to be sent to?
I still have few tapes to remember how hard to be made.
I’ve been living in the ‘80s ever since they ended. I won’t give up my physical media: CDs, VHS tapes, and my extensive collection of original cassette tapes. I have an old tape deck and my car is old enough to have a cassette player in it! Thank you for extolling the virtues of cassettes! I knew they had value to someone somewhere. Glad to see they’re being respected again!
I'm 52. Used cassettes forever back in the day. You are correct. A Metal tape has the best fidelity range. I would always buy a brand new vinyl record and record the tape on the very first play. Purchased my first CD player in 85. However even then the studios would record it (SPARS code) Analog Analog Digital. Wasn't until about 87 when CDs were recorded Digital Digital Digital. Unlike most millennials, my music library has gone through SEVERAL format changes over the decades.
That is the best way to treat your vinyl, but DAT has got to be the best tape format ever created. If you've never recorded onto dat you'll never know high grade Recordings. The music industry loved using dat but hated the public getting a hold of it.
I did the same
@@nonyabiz62 although Dat is just a storage medium for a digital recording, usually at about the same rate as a CD. There is no warm harmonic distortion/saturation that is present in an analog tape or vinyl. We used DAT for the mixdown at my studio in the early 90`s as we didn`t have CDRs yet, they were very convienient and all the Mastering places could easily use those from us but we used 2 inch reel to reel for the original multi track recordings. These days many of us are using all digital at a higher bitrate than CD or dat was inside computers like Pro Tools DAW however we also use tape/tube saturation plug ins within the DAW to inject some analog warmth back into the tracks and because we are using such a high digital resolution to make the music then the plug ins can do a really good job of emulating the analog sound
@@noiselabproject9659 "warm harmonic distortion/saturation" can be added is desired, as you note. However, if the analog record/playback mechanisms are adding it due to their limitations, then it's not part of the music.
it is mainly about demand. when more people prefer that way, these sellers will find a way to make something smaller.
“ ..if you’ve already spent your entire allowance on vinyl”
i felt that lol
Lemme say this...I was born in 1954. Right now is as good as it will be, I believe. Here's why:
1960-68
I listened to an AM and Shortwave tube radio or 45 Records. Even had a 45 player in the car. Had Turntable and Reel-to- Reel in home. Then I got FM - what a difference. My buddy had a reverb hooked to a speaker in the back - Trippy. Then came STEREO!
1970-80
Got a Muntz Jet 4-Track and later a 8-Track and a recorder for the home. Got rid of Reel-to-Reel and tapes. Made lotsa mixtapes, but the endless loop tapes meant real careful planning to keep the song from getting split between tracks. Got quadraphonic Turntable and car stereo (which never caught on).
1980-90
Got cassettes in car and home and recorded everything over. Kept doing this until CD came out...recorded everything over again. Looked in closet and got rid of all vinyl, 8-track, and cassettes. Amassed several hundred CDs.
2000-2010
Got iPod and PC computer with CD recorder - kept CDs until I put 4 Terrabytes storage on networked drives, recorded everything over to digital.
2010-2016
Got car with mp3 interface for iPod. Got rid of all CDs.
I don't know what can come next, but this is as far as I go. I Am now 62 and have every piece of music I have ever owned on my network and am Happy.
(I upgraded my music collection like I traded my TRS-80 for an IBM PC, then 20 other computers all the way up to today I have a 4-core and Linux. Technology in media has probably gone as far as it will. I have spent countless man-hours and dollars keeping up and this is where I draw the line.)
Thanks for listening.
+David Graham 100% agree. Where audio and video technology is concerned, not upgrading is just plain dumb. I worked in the audio industry in R&D in the 1980s and everything was developed to either be smaller and more convenient, or and this was mostly the case, to improve upon the current noise and distortion figures. For one thing, wow & flutter vanished with the demise of tapes and vinyl. We always had the best stuff to play with and I can tell you that CD was a massive improvement.
David Graham My car stereo has USB. So now days I keep my music on a thumb drive. Maybe where it's headed next. Small compact, portable. Take your whole collection with you. Maybe even have it all stored in flash memory right in the stereo.
David Graham
If I stuck to what I remember about records, I wouldn't have bought a new turntable because I remembered the clicks, pops and skips as well as the stuck records. Now I have records that are as silent of any of the surface noise that I assumed was part of the medium. I also bought a Sony cassette deck which was made in 1978 and it gives excellent reproduction. Not perfect, which nothing is, but very enjoyable. I still love Spotify but it's taking records out of their sleeves and having to turn them over. It's the larger sized art work on the covers and the whole interaction of flipping through records in record shops and of playing vinyl that makes me prefer it to digital. The same with Cassettes. A portable cassette player damaged tapes and didn't give good reproduction. My "new" cassette deck gives very good sound. Making mixed tapes from records and even Jazz radio is fun. There's more to enjoying music than focussing on the imperfections of the media.
"There's more to enjoying music than focussing on the imperfections of the media." that statement is made out of the stuff of legends. Well said.
Well, thankfully the world hasn't given up like you have. Technology is improving at a faster rate than ever, and I guarantee there are still plenty of improvements you can make to the quality of your music and setup right this moment.
I have a drawer with hundreds of factory and home recorded cassette tapes and recently (well, about two years ago) I upgraded my player to a Pioneer model. Some of the tape sound great while others...not so great. I adjust the levels and balance between lows/highs to my taste with the help of an EQ. Love them.
To really enjoy cassettes, you do not need be as nerdy as this guy.
I've been around since the first cassette PLAYER - not deck, which came later.
Points I make:
1. I agree: cassettes sound great.
2. You do NOT need a 3-head deck to enjoy cassettes.
A 2-head deck sounds just as good. You only need a 3-head deck
if you are going to attempt serious recording.
3. Used cassette decks may have a well worn head. So like your
stylus for vinyl, they need to be replaced. Or the deck replaced.
4. Dolby S is NOT required. Tapes made with Dolby S are not compatible
with nay other player. You need an S player. Dolby S would be for your
personal collection. See item 2 above.
5. Most "newer" decks have iron based heads and they wear out.
See above. METAL tape wears 'em out faster than anything else.
6. Use Chrome tape - best compromise and everything supports it.
Chrome recordings sound outstanding. FeCr tape were made because
Chrome tapes didn't sound quite like vinyl sources whereas the Fe tapes
sounded more natural but were noisier. FeCr tapes make
great recordings, and an be played on chrome compatible decks.
You owe it to yourself to try it.
7. The tape transport counts. Maybe MORE than the electronics or
number of heads. You need a solid performer with low W&F as well
as steady long term W&F performance. Most decks W&F are different
at the beginning, middle and end of tape. It takes some solid engineering
to get this right. So if your deck has a flywheel the size of a silver dollar,
you need a new deck.
8. Ferrite heads: Plenty of pro and con about this. But the main advantage
is with a ferrite head, you have a chance the unit will meet original spec.
This head will easily outlast 2 or 3 main belt changes. Think 30+ years.
9. Finally: If you buy a deck from 1990-1995 it is going to need belts.
At least the main belt. Even un-used, these belts soften, sag and even melt.
Not like the 1970-1986 belts, which were made from real rubber component
chemicals. 1990's belts are much cheaper, although that is less a worry in better
quality decks.
Jeffery Larson; Some good points there! W&F standing for "Wow & Flutter", which was basically how stable the deck could hold the proper speed of 1-7/8 inches per second, and that stability was helped greatly by having a large flywheel attached to the capstan... Again, terminology that can only be understood if you know about the format... Anyone interested in cassettes now-a-days who doesn't already know about the format needs to do their own "homework" and research on it before just jumping into using it, because without proper knowledge and understanding on how the format best works and how to get the most out of it, they will most likely be quite disappointed and consider it "too much trouble to be worth their time"!... But with proper knowledge and understanding it doesn't have to be like that, as it can be quite fun and enjoyable if utilized properly!
Yes. Everything Jeffery said is true!!! Though it's incredibly difficult and expensive to find good chrome tapes these days. Older TDK D and Sony HF are good enough for most uses if you are using a good deck. But there's nothing like a TDK SA-X if you can afford it. :)
@@labnine3362 Sony HF. I use it a lot. Great natural sound. TDK SA: probably the best tape ever made.
i use old vhs tape somtimes to record audio only. its sounds nearly perfect to the source audio.
VHS tapes have excellent audio
This was and sometimes still is the best way of recording sound in a portable way, specially if you rebuild the VCR to just record audio. Don't always assume digital is magic, it is just the cheapest and easiest way of recording and cutting/pasting sound. VHS was only good for sound, Betamax was best for picture.
Provided that you have a hi-fi VHS machine that recorded the sound with spinning heads on the video drum. This was recorded on two separate FM carriers (left and right) using two extra heads co-located with the video tracks. The standard VHS audio (even with Dolby nr) was crap.
Paul Gibbons
i have what was once a 2000 dollar professional grade Panasonic AG-7350
super vhs deck that records sound flawlessly. but ive also tried the cheapo stuff that toshiba still puts out and it also sound great. i mainly use that machine to dump peoples vhs to dvd since all the combo units suck these days
Although I still treasure my records, cassettes had the
wonderful advantage of recordability. I used to capture stuff off VHS
recorded TV shows before recycling the VHS. I also used to use the VHS
timer facility to record Audio In from radio shows and copy that to
cassette. To have the recording at all is sometimes more important than the fidelity. TH-cam is full of old video we are just grateful to see, never mind the quality.
I was not aware the head moved in auto-reverse. I thought they just had two capstan rollers and the tape just changed direction. I'm pretty sure the read head stays exactly where it is.
no, the head does flip, otherwise it would just play back the same two(stereo) tracks in reverse, the flipping aligns the tape head gaps with the two tracks in the corresponding direction,
however, auto reverse portable walkman units did not move the head, they had four tape head gaps and a mechanical switch to select the proper gaps for the side being played. I have wondered why the high end auto reverse decks did not use this method. There must have been a reason, such as inductance of signal between the gaps or something like that.
That is the system I was familiar with, since I had a walkman.
Panasonic "Walkmans" rotate tape heads for exemple. Very nice to know sony have different system.
The main reason is that the tape shifts slightly with the direction of travel so the best head alignment (azimuth) in one direction is not the same as it is in the other. You can verify this on an auto reverse deck with a stationary head. Adjust it until the highs are as good as they can be on side 1, then reverse it. The highs will be duller. Adjust it again on side 2 and you'll see the dilemma. So, a flipping head has two adjustable stop-points. The best solution is Nakamichi's tape-flipping method used on decks like the RX-202.
I'm 64 and I well remember cassettes. I also remember that anything I recorded myself from my own records (vinyl) was always much better than what was then available as prerecorded stuff in the stores. There was a lot of "cheep junk" prerecorded cassettes back then.
A common sight from days of the cassettes and 8 tracks, was miles of tape blowing around pretty much every parking lot everywhere.
I miss that... You never see the brown glistening streams along the roadside anymore. :(
miles ? maybe ten of thousand miles haha ( do you remeber when a tape is cut ,repear it with scotch ? ;)
Wow now thats a trip down memory lane lol I'm a "youngin" only 27 but damn that was a sight of my childhood I completly forgot about
So true. So true.
One could almost always identify the prevailing wind direction of a location by where blown tape had accumulated in and around shrubbery and trees.
0:30 That "MERRRRR..." I'm sorry, that makes me chuckle so much.
MERRRR
interjection
An expression regarding extreme anger
Been there!Done that!!Spent 10s of 1000s of $$$ Doing it!!I ain't going back!Hell NO!!!The new Digital/Internet Age has expanded my Collection with Superior Sound at Minimal Cost!!Also ,so much quicker!Used to spend Hours doing what now takes Seconds!!No.Sorry!I can't go back!! ;)
DjCole100 so so wish I still had my vynil and my tapes man! Worst thing, in fact also stupidest thing I ever did was sell my album collection and go to cds
me too. that was a sad day in retrospect.
DjCole100 What does " i should have ripped them to wave" mean? Another format?
.wav is lossless but also uncompressed. You're far better off using FLAC. Its also truly lossless but compressed (just not as much as MP3).
Mark Rushton Actually an MP3 isn't compressed. It's recoded and bits of information are tossed out. A lossless FLAC file is simply squeezed down for storage and unsqueezed for playback. Sorry I stopped buying cassettes in 1987 and don't plan on ever going down that road again. It's MUCH more logical and economical to buy hard drive space. A 4 TB WD BLUE costs $118.
In terms of wear and tear, I find the one thing with cassettes is they're more adversely impacted by extreme temperatures. Also, don't accidentally drop them into cans of paint. (My Smashing Pumpkins - Gish tape met its untimely demise that way.)
I have always been happy with the sound of cassette tapes. Turntables are making a comeback, why isn't someone making good quality cassette recorders. Like with three heads, Doby etc. What happened, Sony.
Good used cassette decks are still available online. Look for a SINGLE deck, three head deck, just like the man above explained. Two head decks do not last, and have poor sound quality by comparison. You don't really need Dolby if you have a good sound system and/or a graphic equalizer. Dolby actually removes authentic sound quality....getting rid of all the hiss also gets rid of sound quality and realism. Especially from vinyl.
The market isn't there, unfortunately. Another issue is tape - only one or two companies are currently producing tape, and they're only able to produce type 1 ferric oxide tape, which isn't particularly good. There will never be cro2 magnetic tape made again because of the manufacturing processes' affect on the environment. Best buy a used deck, and all the NOS type ii and iv tape you can find, before prices get even crazier
my car still has a casette player..
If I have a car, It'd have one as well.
When you get a job you can buy a newer car with a CD/MP3 player
Dan Druft No my dear, thanks! I deliver pizza!
+Bluesy Trigger wow you will be managing director soon and will have a DVD player in your Range Rover
Bought a used car, turned the key and drove away. Six months later I was putting a parking garage ticket in the center console and found out it has a 6-disc changer in it (factory). Still haven't put anything in it...
I'm "Surfing The Internet."
Remember that from the early 2000's...
"Surfing The Net?"
In the seventies Phil Spector had a slogan: 'Back to Mono'. I think we should start a slogan 'Back to Analog'.
Hell yeah!
Back to Morse Code
@@suncookrocks *laughs in smoke signals*
CASSETTES DO SOUND VERY GOOD !!!
HIS VIDEO WAS 100% TRUE !!!
i cant say i'm much of a vinyl or cassette phile, i'm not even really sure why i clicked on this video, but I ended up watching the whole video, lol. Your content was thorough, clear, and you have a good voice for a youtube personality. keep it up!
+tec fx thank you so much!
heh, I'm not sure why I came either, and I watched it all too.I guess nostalgia.I wasn't into albums much, rode around alot as a teenager in the 80's, so boxes of cassettes were the norm.God bless Columbia tape club, 15 cassettes for 1 penny lol.
do you find him handsome too?
do you? Cassettes were never cool, but they were very good to bring along in the car or for the Walkman. The anolog interest I get, but cassettes are not fantastic in 2017.
i used to keep my cassettes in a shoebox (i think Vans, with the conveniently folding top).
Oh my dear lord. It's the wisdom of the ancients. You don't think there were hi-end cassette decks 'back in the day'? There were, such as the Nakamichi Dragon,etc., but who's kidding who about any of them sounding 'fantastic', or 'amazing', compared to even red-book digital. I don't miss the noise, the gradual degradation, the high-end roll-off, the inconvenience, the mechanical wear on the machine itself. I've owned lot's of the things, and still have one that works well despite being sourced from a free pile, but honestly, I don't miss them. Buy a cheap digital recorder. Revel in the silence, the headroom, and the wide, flat frequency response. And the Earth is ROUND!!!!
Yep. 10,000 songs in my pocket. Only buying the song that I actually like instead of the whole cassette full of stuff I won't listen to, downloading the song I want immediately, not having to wait to rewind the thing and know exactly where to stop, forgetting to put my collection out of direct sunlight so it won't be destroyed when I get back in my car, the background hiss, Dolby music reduction, metal (The Best) tapes with little to no bass. NO THANK YOU. I'll stick with digital. I have already sold all my cassettes and players.
As far as CD's, I haven't bought one in years either. If a so called (Artist) isn't happy that we are only buying 1 song instead of the whole album, then maybe they should create some better music. Yep I'm quite happy with digital.
I had a nice deck and nice tapes back then too, even my first crappy CD player caused my jaw to drop and music was practically brand new again, I couldn't wait to hear everything I'd once listened to on tape. I understand the nostalgia but when one is old enough to remember reality, tapes were poop: sometimes I even thought 8-track sounded better than cassette but I was pretty young then.
Haha. I've been singing songs using the wrong lyrics for the last 30-35 years because of the poor quality of the system and cassettes that I had. Digital has really opened my eyes.
TOTALLY relate
Yep fully agreed, he really oversold redundant technology on this one.
Beautiful sharing and clear, I have 3 Tapedeck : CARVER, DENON, and NAKAMICHI LX-5 enjoy music with cassette and make healthy..haa...haa...thank you sir..I am 67 years old.
probably the best things about cassettes is when you make a mix tape is that favourite song is not played to death and goes into rotation unlike using the repeat function on mp3 players. This has the added value of not getting bored of it so quickly and not having loved ones tearing their heads out because you have played it 20 times in succession.
\\good luck buying a decent portable player these days though//
When recording songs off of the radio I have tapes where I accidentally recorded the same song twice in a row. This was mainly because you had 1 or two notes to recognize the song before hitting record real quick and I wanted as much of the entire song as I could get.
I think you have overlooked this point: cassettes are susceptible to heat, dust, moisture, magnetism and wear and tear.
or ffd, rew, shuffle LOL No, you would have to be a complete moron to switch back to cassettes. CD's, not being great because of its generally poor ability to reproduce an analog signal, still sound better than the mass produced junk that was released to the general public - CDs sound the same time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time...
TH-cam Potatoe I live in a desert 95 degrees if I'm lucky all my tapes are fine
And cds rot
+Synthematix Not mine. Got 3500 of them, some 34 years old, no problem with any of them. I call BS. Now, the recordable ones are problematic, and do fail rather quickly, but not the commercially pressed ones.
I have had 1 in 15 rot, shop bought ones aswell, cds are too fragile as a format, im tempted to say minidisc are better
Also another very important feature to look for is Dolby HX-Pro Dynamic bias system (This is not a noise reduction system but a Headroom eXtension system that work only during the recording phase). This in my opinion vastly improved high frequency response.
I agree. My last Technics deck ( 3 head ) had HX Pro and it really opened up the dynamic range.
I've been really obsessed with analog music lately! I don't have the space for vinyl so I've been thinking about CDs and cassettes a lot. This video was very informative.
your english is so clear that I can understand everything that you say. I'm from Brazil! Nice tips about cassets!
luck kelu Hey, this is not a "practice your listening" channel . Just kidding. I thought the same way while watching this video because my first language is Spanish. By the way, he made me feel nostalgic about those old cassettes and how little children loved to unroll them.
I like retro things too, and I remember when I was very young I play musics in cassetts!
oh yeah ! my childhood"s music is cassettes/tape/vinyl i remember running on the streets with my yellow waterproof sony cassettes ......today we have the MP3
(maybe mp5 tomorrow haha)
Hey i own a Brazilian casette tape, bought it at a fleemarket and it is some heavy metal music played into a cheap recorder.
I think it is from the "tapetrading years" long before my active years. :P
luck kelu my Brazilian blows.
Great video and a good way to encourage the use of a wonderful format. The only comments I can make to vinyl Eeezz is that the date range to look for the best cassette deck is NOT the 90's in fact there were very few well made decks in the 90's truth is that cassette really declined by the late 80's with the rise of CD affordability. There were a few good 90's decks here and there but the best made decks were made from the late 70's to the mid to late 80's.being that the cassette format was the strongest during this period. The best MFG for cassette decks hands down was Nakamichi. I can tell you through experience in order to make a cassette sound great you need a number of factors that Nakamichi got down pat... You need proper head alignment and tape torque, proper level matching to the tape being used and proper bias. All addressed by Nakamichi. When properly set up even using Dolby you can get a nearly perfect match from source to tape even with type 1 "normal" bias tape with true 20-20Khz response. I own a Nakamichi ZX-7 and a Dragon and They are as good as it gets. There were plenty of others made too and the key is having a bias adjustment and built in test tones. You will get amazing results with a properly tuned deck much the same way you would get amazing results with a properly tuned turntable. Thing though with going after tape decks from the late 70's to mid 80's is that many of them will need maintenance unless they have had them done recently. More likely the 90's decks will have a greater chance of working out of the box. Also make note that Dolby "s" was a rare feature only found in a few decks, Sony was one of them. That Sony ES deck you shown was one of Sonys better 90s deck so a good choice.. Dolby B,C was the most common and some decks even had DBX and HX pro.
I remember Nak in the 80s-90s. Great Gear, well built, looked awesum! On a side note I recall a Tape Deck that physically extended the port outward and turned the cassette around... for continuous play. Coolest thing i ever seen in 1982 @ a Sound World store.
+Grant Agreed. But the NAK stuff was too pricy for my blood back then. Hitachi and Technics made some awesome three head decks back in the early 80's. Several were marketed under the Radio Shack brand. I still own an SCT-30 three head Radio Shack deck. Made by Hitachi, it has dual capstans, front panel bias adjustments and Dolby B. Not the latest and greatest, but it will still make tapes that will knock your socks off. Amazing performance considering the track widths and the incredibly slow tape speed. A technical marvel, only surpassed, IMHO, by the mass-produced helical scan video tape machines!
YEah & Yeah. That NAK price was steep. and one of my buddys whos parents owned a music store.... he liked TEC or I think it was Fisher.
I've got a TEAC A450 but it needs servicing.
I think I'll have to replace the main rubber belt.
The problem will be getting one.
The sound was almost indistinguishable from CD & in someways it was better - less harsh on the ear.
I was thinking similar thoughts (though not in as much awesome detail!). I was in high school from 90-94, cassettes were still around and plentiful, but were definitely starting to take a back seat to CD's by then. The 1980's was the height of the cassette tape era. My dad had an awesome stereo setup, including turntable and cassette players (sorry I forget which brand) and taught me how to take care of both formats. My very first now 30 year old cassette tapes still play well to this day :)
Full circle....Old is New again!👍
Or Audiophiles are running out of ideas to be edgy, so in desperation turn to crappy cassettes.
What's next, phonograph cylinders, and how they sound better than CD's
@@Jin-Ro Lol!! I think you're right! 😆👍🏻
@@Jin-Ro 8 Track tapes will be the next thing to blow up
I still record music (mostly downloaded ) from my PC to my 1990 Kenwood Deck...and still have a Tape player in my car!!!
I'm glad more people are starting to stand up for cassettes I'm sick of people shitting on the format. I recently bought a pioneer from the late 90s and I was amazed at how my ac/dc tape sounded in it, it sounded great
Yeah, but Ac/DC sounds great on anything
Good video Jarrett and I came here from Technmoan's video believe or not, and got hooked on the channel since then. Wanted to comment on the dual deck point you brought up, I have a Sony TC-WR645S Dual Cassette Deck with Auto Reverse and I have to say, it is actually a pretty darn good piece of equipment despite those specs implying otherwise. Tapes sound amazing on that thing and the auto reverse feature is pretty rad for those moments of laziness that I experience from time to time.
+SpooferJahk nice! I'm glad your auto-reverse deck works for you! Sony definitely made amazing cassette decks!
Vinyl Eyezz Sure did, though I imagine it can wear down but I am sure it is possible to fix it at some point.
I'm an old recording engineer. Metal cassettes were phenomenal. I realize a few eyebrows will rise but... you can get CD or DAT quality (I.e. master quality) from a cassette.
It wasn't uncommon to bounce your two track master to SVHS video cassettes. This was great for long term storage. However most consumer video decks require some video source to record audio. A black burst generator, color bar generator, or the composite / S video out from a tuner, DVD, or VCR will suffice .
With that said. There is maintenance involved with cassette decks. Primarily cleaning with 99% isopropyl alcohol or head cleaner and occasionally "demagnetizing" your heads.
A cassette is basically a mini reel to reel.
This was a great video!
Yes. however that one is not handy, also with many carings. It looks like tape is for archival purpose more than for consumers.
Hi!
How do you do head demagnetizing?
@@elhasaneelhafidy2033 you can buy cassette tapes that demagnetize the head, i stil have one.
You can also silence a constantly squeaking tape by spraying just a touch of wd40 on the felt tab and running it both fast foward and rewind. Squeak is gone. This is not for squeaking spindles, it's for old tape squeaking against the heads. Spindles can be treated with a shot of spray silicone.
Lighter fluid works on heads too. Then rub the heads with a q-tip containing a little spray silicone. Helps the tape slide by effortlessly.
My favorite thing to do is find old used blanks that people recorded off the radio, you find all sorts of old DJs and commercials.
upload them if it's not a nightmare job.
The best thing about cassettes was loading programs onto your 8-bit computer. You could hear the program loading, so you knew it was working, and it took 10 minutes and 15 retries to load a 4k program.
We should dump this lame internet thing and go back to acoustic couplers and 300 baud modems. I may even have some old AOL and CompuServe floppies in storage somewhere...
I agree. I can hear my data going into my Ohio Scientific c2 4p and my Heathkit Hero1 robots, not to mention my Heathkit 3400 microprocessor trainer add-on to the et-3400 that gave i/o and cassette data storage. Oh, I left out my C-64.
Loading time was usually under five minutes on my old Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. However the Commodore 64 took a very long time.....even as much as nearly twenty minutes! :-o
One word: Turbo.
and these tapes still work after 30 years, try getting a cdr to last that long.
From a teen who used cassettes and walkman back in the 90s I think the real problem people have today with digital music and what makes people overglorify obsolete media formats like vinyls and cassettes is that digital music and cloud hosting and streaming basically made the music inexistent, uncollectible, the music in a physical form I mean. I have broken so many cassettes and vinyls I loved just for normal use and back then an album or a single was not a few bucks or 99 cents as today. Sure digital files can get corrupted, a server can be shut down. But you can easily get your tracks quickly and for cheap. I really don't miss the old times.
Also, don't even start the argument 'vinyl sound better' if you don't know the difference between Analog and Digital audio. Digital audio is superior. The rest is nostalgia.
In my heyday, mid 80's, i had more than 900 of them. I loved tapes!
They're super cool! :D
I have close to 2000
Chomp of course, tapes never really died out. most of mine are noise but this recent resurgence is kind of silly imo
I don't know Analogue has some advantages - yes eventually parts and such will disappear and it will be more a historical thing in a another Generation or two. but at least there is no worry about built-in obsolescence like you see with Computers and some other technology.
I can still slip a 1980's Rocky Sound Track tape in for a listen but I can't do the same with a 1980's PC game (not without a lot of messing about anyway).
Besides they don't take up a whole lot of space I've always preferred to to CD's myself for reasons of portability and the sound is less clinical.
I used to get 90 min metal cassette tapes and copy my vinyl albums on them. A lot of walkman players supported metal, so I was able to play them on those for portability.
The only part I was missing was a good set of headphones... but then again, a 16 year old kid would have not been caught dead with a huge pair of cans back then.
I have been rebuilding my childhood cassette collection recently. I had the idea they sucked but liked the nostalgia of my childhood. Then i picked up an old Sony F18 Walkman and hooked up some good ear buds. Blown away how good it sounds. Anything from early Metallica, Slayer and even some Motley Crue. Now I'm sold on them again. I just hate rewinding/forwarding. Records and CDs killed it on that 1 point.
I was born in 97 but I have an obsession with the 80s and old fashioned styles of many different things. I do wish there were more people like me but at the same time it's nice to have an uncommon hobby.
Your not the only one
After reading through a few of the comments one thing becomes obvious. The younger generations are so used to immediate satisfaction that they have no patience. I came up in the generation when 8 track was brand new. Cassette tapes and some of the older media types are not totally about the music, it was also about the process.
Cassettes we are huge jump up from the 8 track tape. If you used the right equipment and took care of your tapes they sounded incredible. I have recorded 100's of mix tapes and complete album tapes over the years and always used good quality tapes and good equipment. You youngsters need to slow down and enjoy the process as much as the music
There is a lot of truth in that.
I still have hope for the kids, the other friday my godsons brother came to visit.
I showed him radio casettes, vinyls and a floppy disc when we really were looking for a Playstatio game.
He was astonished.
I showed him the Microsoft Aquarius from 1982.
He was blown away.
I showed him the Commodore 64 with attachements.
Mindblown again.
I showed the Canon X-07 portable computer from 1984.
He started to get the picture, smart kid. He understood that it was like now, just "like it was then because it was like that back then".
He did not believe me when he tested my Casio SL-80 Solar Powered-Touch Buttoned pocket calculator and i said it was from 1983.
The funniest thing was thel headphones, old school black-plastic-bigger-than-fighter-pilots-used from 1972.
His mom was born in 1976..
I told him how they work and that i use them with my smartphone.
He looked shocked:
"WHAT?! Can you use those seventies in a smartphone from twenty sixteen?!?!" :D
Then i talked him into testing a Sega Megadrive, and he was amused by that even if the game was old, and it looked old "it's not bad at all".
I think he still wonders what a floppy disc is, he had never seen one before...
The kid is 10, a good kid. :)
Should by him a vinyl-player for his birthday.
I am fifteen and my mom got me really interested in cassettes at a really young age. I really like the style and the process of making a mixtape its not only fun and interesting but incredibly gratifying when you get to listen to your favorite music like queen or Jim crose!
i am 14 and cant agree more so many people my age a really lazy i have a reel to reel and have used cassettes before really great audio formats
Even if what you're saying is based in a great truth, when you start saying things like "you youngsters need to learn to enjoy the process as much as..." Eh, on second thought, nevermind this comment. Carry on...
As I am sitting here hand folding Jcards for my next release, this is exactly the advice I need.
As I bumped into my "first" cassette player back in 2015, I fall in love with the hissing Hi-Fi sound immediately.
In conclusion, if you have decent gear (e.g. SONY DD series or Walkman Professional series) even rec./playback on mediocre type I tapes can sound great.
2:01 SONY Metal-ES 90s are selling for way more than $24 now-a-days.
In 2022 they are selling for $60-100 EACH.
tech moan is great!
Agree.... I look forward to his vids... have learned a lot from him
He's constantly moaning! But yes, he's great!
Technoman sucks, all he ever does is talk about old expensive things and dash cams, what a nerd, lol. ;)
***** It was a joke, I would have thought calling him technoman and the wink would have given it away. Bad insulting youtube comments are a running joke in his videos, it was a play on that. I actually am a huge fan of his stuff.
+Kandi Gloss 😜😅😅😜!
The video about the how to comment on TH-cam is absolute gem!
Dude i grew up in the 80's they suck there is almost always a background noise, plus finding your song sucked snd tape rolling out, stop romanticizing crap technology.
I’m 15 and I listen to wax cylinders and shellac records and idk y i am addicted to it
That's because you're licking them. Stop.
Dagny Taggart *it tastes good*
OK, not joking: I had six 78s but they fell and broke... One was 'Dream of Olwen' And I have a Webster Chicago dictating machine with 'natural voice playback' from 1949. It is a wire recorder and it's about my age ;)
weirdo
Zemzem Dağdelen dude if you hate old tech then why tf are you here?
When i first started collecting, i bought cassettes from my local thrift shop for 10 cents cad each, and my buddy found a GE portable player from 76 in great condition for 10 dollars cad.
No I am not telling anyone where i go
I hear a song on the radio in my car, it sounds pretty weak. I play that same tape in my car, it's on a rare level you almost never get to hear.
Hey man! I completely agree with you about sound quality. I used to repair and maintain hundreds of cassette deck in the past years. I still have my Nakamichi BX150 that sound just great and is not for sell! Not like vinyl or CD but quite close and much better that average people thing.
You just forgot a VERY important thing: KEEP THE HEADS CLEAN ! A dirty head will gradually erase the recording. Use a cotton swab imbibed with alcohol or acetone (be careful with acetone, do not let it come in contact with plastic). Clean the head and all the tape path at least every 25 hours of playing time. If you do it, your cassettes will last for lllllllong!
And keep the heads demagnetized!
Thumbs up regarding the Nakamichi. Love mine from the early nineties. Still in mint condition and performs perfectly ! And in addition to cleaning the heads, periodically demagnetizing is a good idea as well. Cheers !
Christian Forget Oh my god, the second paragraphs take me back to the 70’s when I used to clean heads with meth spirit and cotton buds. A question for you, being very impressed with your knowledge on matters related to cassettes. I have also been ‘de-magnetising’ player heads regularly, with a plug in device for 3 decades now, and the players have served me well. Would you recommend this? I would really like your input.
I know you also remember how we "downloaded" music in the 90s and early 2000s. Recording off of the radio, cd etc. Good times!
6:38 actually, I have a copy of the colour and the shape on cd and it’s about as scratched as that, and it plays fine.
Not necessarily true. I have cassettes that are 20-30 years old and they are well looked after and have a fantastic quality sound. These are the basics cassettes too. If you look after your cassettes, cassette decks etc, then you will not have a problem.
I bought a cassette player too, because I didn’t even know Vinyl was a big thing until after I had a ton. I wanted to explore all kinds of music, and feel closer to me.
I lived through the 80's and 90's, and trust me, you aint missing out on anything nowadays.
i do just about all... I'm a super old-timer lol. Cassettes, Vinyl, VHS, 8-Tracks, even reel to reel. Gotta love em! ❤❤😁😁
By the way, metal was all I ever bought. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think what degraded tape sound was stretching. The metal tapes were better because they didn't stretch.
Although metal tapes were the BEST to record on, they were also the most abrasive on the tape deck heads. I had worn a noticeable depression in the head by using metal tapes. I also purchased 2 or 3 replacement heads for the deck just for that reason.
+Corson Wyman i got dropouts
yes it is stretching and also it holds the patterns magnetized into the tape better, basically its a better conductor of magnetism without spreading. However they still had these same issues any tape had, just much less.
***** very true that the tape material can wear out but if you have 50 tapes each played about 10 times, that's 500 plays on the one head. That's why I say the head wears out more than the tapes do.
Corson Wyman - I never had a head wear out, it may get a little worse but then a headcleaner would take care of it.
Im sure it can easily happen, but would take lots more than hundreds of tape plays from my experience.
I got my first CD player in 1995 when I was 29 years old. I have hundreds of cassettes.
Eric Jensen good times
Nice!
Same here! (Hear?) 😀
You've got four years on me, and a lot fewer cassettes than I do, but otherwise ditto.
I purchased my first CDs in 1994 when I was 40. And later purchased my first CD player. I purchased my first vinyl player and records last year at 63
I have about a thousand cassettes, possibly more. My favourite brand was TDK. I've got loads of records on cassette that I haven't heard for years, some of which are now unavailable. I recently got my old cassette deck out of storage, for the first time in about fifteen years and it didn't work. Aaargh. I was disappointed, to say the least. Now I'll have to look around for a second hand one. You talked about buying old albums on cassette. Strangely enough, many of the prerecorded cassettes that I bought were of worse quality than the ones I recorded myself. The tape was poor and it stretched and snapped easily. Anyone buying old prerecorded tapes should prepare to be disappointed quite regularly.
Pre-recorded cassettes are duplicated at a very high rate on specialized reel-reel machines and then loaded into the cassettes. There are several problems with this.
The frequency response of the high speed duplication machines is very poor as is the signal to noise ratio.
The cassettes tended to be very cheap welded shells with poor internal lubrication.
Also, the cheap cassette shells tended to skew the azimuth of the tape.
One can do much better by real time duplication and using a high quality cassette cartridge.
My cassettes made from vinyl sounded much better than the Pre-recorded cassettes of the same material.
Yes! TDK was the best!,, Maxell's XL line was good too
There is places that still fix the old cassette players, you should check it out. fix it instead of replacing it if you can and that way you know it's your original player.
Pwecko, I have that same problem, or did have. I have well over a thousand cassettes in my music collection along with reel-to-reel, 8-track, vinyl and the soon to be dead CD's. One point that Vinyl Eyezz brought out is absolutely true. The newer decks with all of their whiz-bang gadgets are junk looking for a house to land in. I bought one of the last top-of-the line decks only to have it die shortly after the warranty expired (naturally!). Rather than make that mistake again, I started looking for older units with a solid reputation for reliability and landed with a Pioneer deck that just keeps going, and going, and...well, you get the picture. The more gadgets a deck has the better the probability that you will probably have a good paperweight soon. Stick with the sturdier ones with fewer things to break. TDK and Maxell were two of the best brands of tape and still hold up well.
I liked TDK's and Maxell's
As someone who's been buying and listening to music since the mid 70's, I must say that almost no one back in the 70's and pre-CD 80's listened to cassettes on home stereos. Sure, you could make great sounding cassettes for your own use, to play in the car, for instance, and the ones you bought at the store were fine for that purpose and for boom-boxes, but very few people listened to cassettes for true sonic purposes. They were made for portability and convenience, not for sound quality.
Also, as far as durability goes, CD's are inherently more durable. Cassettes will eventually wear out, and the cheaper ones like they used for general release music are subject to jamming as well. So as a nostalgic thing, cassettes are fine. But as a way to listen to quality music, not so much. And I say this as someone who used to put every LP I bought onto high quality chrome tape to listen to in the car!
I've always just loved the look and feel of the cassettes themselves. What other medium can you just flip around in your palm like that? so satisfying.
UMDs. DS games. Juicebox carts.
+WebVMan ds carts are too small.
UMDs are irrelevant.
juiceboxes, yes.
minidisc..
strictlysega touché
Yes, MD, huge fan!!
Tapes got a bad rep, because duplicating standards were often poor, and most decks had improperly adjusted "azimuth" alignment on the playback head (even straight from the factory). Also, poorly made shells, caused more "wow and flutter", and the ferric oxide build up from the cheap quality store bought tapes would cause even more degradation in sound quality, not to mention residual magnetic fields on the play head that would actually cause pre-recorded tapes to be slowly "erased" over time. Cassette decks need periodic cleaning, maintenance and degaussing, to play back at consistent fidelity (and to prevent tapes being "eaten", pinch rollers and capstan, must be cleaned too). It only takes a few minutes to adjust azimuth, (or head alignment) on most tape decks with a mini (non magnetic) phillips screw driver, (even on the Walkman type). Another factor is that most decks do not have a proper speed adjustment (some modern ones are fixed, and often off-speed) Sony "Sport" Walkman had an easily accessed speed adjustment port, with a rubber seal, BTW . Add even more dirt and grime and problems to the typical car cassette, and you can see why people ditched them for CD a long time ago, but on a properly maintained deck, (or even a good quality Sony Walkman) a good cassette can far surpass CD quality (albeit with more 'hiss'), and come close to the quality of an LP recording.
In the specs for my Tascam DA-20 it says wow and flutter undetectable!
True, BUT, the DA 20 is not a cassette recorder, it be a DAT digital recorder, and dat makes a world of difference.;-)
You got DAT right!
The DA-20 can record directly from CD at 44.1 K and the copy protection can be turned off.
Are you aware of DCC as in Digital Compact Cassette?
Oh yeah!!!!;-) One of the biggest bombs in audio history!! Along with the El-cassette many moons ago. Analog is dead, even the growth in vinyl is being mostly sourced from digital sources. Any recording system is bound by the law of GIGO, and Hi-rez digital is virtually transparent in how well it reproduces what yuo feed it , again, garbage in, garbage out. I was born in the 78 RPM era, and I hated vinyl when digital was far off for consumer audio.
Did you hate shellac as much as vynal?
Being born in the late 90's I was growing up when old formats were dying, and honestly I don't remember them being as bad as people say, my sister's cassettes never crackled or anything, games on cartridges looked and sounded fine and my VHS tapes had no lines and the picture was absolutely fine.
It's all relative. Cassette tape can sound good but listen to a good recording on a CD then it is not so good. Same with watching a DVD and then watching VHS.
Uh no. I have clear memory of the year 2000-2004. By 2004 I was eight years old, and if it it took you until you were eight to develop memory and comprehension skills then your mother really should have stopped drinking during pregnancy. Also they were still making VHS tapes circa 2004-2005 most of the stuff I had on VHS was all stuff that was recent in it's time. And old games were far easier to come by back then, not to mention the GBA which still used carts.
Mantis128 I can confirm this
I still used my vhs all the time in the early 2000's and as a car stereo installer, Still installed a few new tape decks, So I can confirm it too!
Ro RoAteFiveSeven, or. Ruh-Roh Reorge857 doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. I do agree with the rest of y'all's comments here.
When I started collecting vinyl, I had a suitcase player and wasn’t satisfied. I planned on giving up on vinyl, but I decided to give TH-cam a look on what people say about vinyl. Your video came up and told me everything I needed to know. Immediately I bought an ATLP60X which I still use and am very happy with. Over two years later I own 100 records that I properly sleeve up and take care of thanks to you. When I went to my record store today I looked around longer and saw a fantastic selection in the tape section. I picked one up even though I don’t own a player knowing it was cheap and I wasn’t taking a big risk. This time I decided I wasn’t gonna make the same mistake and looked up “what to know about cassettes” and this video popped up. Feels like a full circle moment, and this time I’m going into it educated! Thank you, very much.
I've no idea how I've ended up here because I gave up collecting vinyls a long time ago and I've also sold most of my cassettes so really this isn't my topic YET I found this super interesting and informative to watch mostly because of your personality. You seem to be a nice guy and aren't the annoying average TH-cam person that's totally in your face and has to scream at you and what not. Keep up your friendly and leaned back attitude.
Wow! We may be leading parallel lives.
How did I get here? Why did I watch this? I sold my vinyl, gave away/lost my cassettes......curiously, I was remarkably interested in everything the nice man said. lol
+Wayne Brinker - I might hold on to my cd collection for 20 more years just because of this.
I always crack up when I watch videos of the past made by children who weren't alive then.
NO! Nothing I was told about cassettes was a lie.
Patrick EH
There is little if any interaction involved in digital music. We used to have to get a cassette out of its box, press play and record. Pause at the end of the track to put on a different record and after the tape was made, sometimes we'd take it with us to a friend's ( actual friend, not virtual friend) house to give him/her the mix and enjoy the company of a living, breathing human. Now it's press a button or swipe a screen for a playlist. No need to see a living person. Sometimes the longest way round is the best.
+JAZZ MAN Hey, physical friends aren't obsolete, gramps.
No but you are a watermelon. He's also black so be prepared to get double fisted by him.
nahh.. we can still have a human interaction through digital medium. me and my friend still sit in front of computer and share our new finding from the web. sometimes it is an obscure band on youtube or a new releases in bandcamp, spotify. we would sit together and discuss about it without even spending a dime on buying the physical releases (the best part of this shit). it depend on your set of friends really.. for me human interaction is not really that relevant in comparing the digital and tape. sharing and interaction still exist in digital world if you find a way to do it.
tape on the other hand is shit.. trying to repeat a song is shitty as fuck. and i have a stash of damaged cassettes in my collection. i had stop buying for quite a while now especially with the new rise of cassettes cultures that cause the price to increase especially with the international releases ( i'm not from america btw -a tape from america and Europe can be as pricey as the vynil version)
Stop typing. You are making my ears bleed.
Technics makes an awesome cassette deck. I still have mine that I purchased in 1995. Also always look for a record volume control so that you may control the volume of your mix tape recordings as well. Cassettes were/are always the easiest way to record music, especially for me as a vinyl DJ.
Older prerecorded casette tapes were almost exclusively sold on low bias type I tapes that really did sound horrible. There are a few exceptions to this.
The tape decks from back in the day were a beauty from both an engineering point and also aesthetics.
Absolutely. There is a vintage Hifi store near my house-get lost in there looking at all the old beautiful Marantz, Denon, Pioneer, Nakamichi, etc tape decks and receivers. They wouldn't look out of place next to a high end guitar or piece of artwork.
I run a Pioneer SX-850, (Jamo Millenium speakers with a Cambridge Azure CD deck...) I rarely run it, because the neighbours would riot... the kid next door thinks his POS stereo is Audio armageddon... it isn't in the same league... just listening to SPECTRE or Planet of the Apes through this thing is breathtaking... warmer, richer sound than anything I've seen today...
My 1974 pioneer system is stunning and still sounds great
When I was a teenager in the mid 90s, I used type II CrO2 tapes. They're good quality.
We just dreamed about CrO2 tapes in the communism :)
Lol
I worked in a music shop in my 20s and was once paid with a big box of blank CrO2 tapes, most people would be like " where's my money!?" I was pretty damn pleased.
Heheheh :))) I just bought now two box CrO2 and one box Metal II. For reel to reel I realized, the best sounding is the EII or old master tapes. I still have a unopened new mastering tape. Maybe I will do a comparation video about new produced masteing tape vs old BASF mastering tape....
Yeah, and have you seen the price of 'em?!
I used to buy the chrome tapes at Richer Sounds. Their own brand - That's - for £1 each.
Shoot me in the face if I didn't just see for of them on ebay - FOR £100!
Still have tons of cassettes and started regularly recording lps onto them starting in the early 80s. Used to be a lot of fun and most of them still sound good. Maxell and TDK were especially good.
Cassette recording was an art. I owned a Nakamichi 3 Head cassette deck and my recordings on Maxell tape could never tell the difference between vinyl and the recording.
Such was the passion in recording with perfect azimuth alignment and correct biaz.
I was lucky to experience this.
The Walkman by Sony was a revolution.
The 15 inch spool machines showed you as a high end audiophile and unit playing displayed clarity at its best, besides the machine looked impressive, sexy, and romantic. It simply displayed ones personality.
One day all this will return as the effects of radiation in smartphones has begun to show.
I just don't understand... I have FLAC compression and CD's... why choose anything else?
I'm musician and audio engineer... there's just no technical point to vinyl or cassette. I'm also a electronic design engineer by trade so trust me, I know my stuff regarding the technology.
Is imperfect audio reproduction so much better? Or are you people just gotten fed up with loudness war and you escape to vinyl since loudness war doesn't work with vinyl and they need to be mastered better?
i think it might be the thing about the loudness war. i personaly also like the imperfections for example the little needle noises from the vinyl player. also compare the artists: compare fredie mercury with lady gaga or katy perry, there is simply no effort put into music nowdays!
Why do people collect or own older cars rather than by the newest model which are safer and very much more technically advanced. There are many reasons people why people do things. Nostalgia for one. Does the average listener actually care about the technical data concerning fidelity. You'd have to hit the bottom range of the fidelity spectrum for a listener to really care. You said it yourself that you are an expert in the field. Most audio fans are not. There is a certain quality; a "warmth", if you will; that digital media cannot duplicate. I think analog audio will always have a place in music and with fans.
The loudness war _does_ work on vinyl. You can cut a dynamically compressed track as easily as an uncompressed one. In both cases you just have to observe reasonable cutting levels.
Shhh... Stop making sense, people don't like it.
+Arpad Zakar It is mainly the loudness war. A lot of the albums in my iTunes library are recorded from vinyl as well as rips from cd. Comparing Amy Winehouse track for track, the mastering is much louder on the CD and gets a little fatiguing after a couple of tracks I find myself easing the volume down. The same album recorded from vinyl, I can keep turning up the volume up and it stays smooth.
Totally correct,they sound great. I have hundreds i recorded in the 70's & they still play great,I also collect vinyl also. Like your channel mate.
+kerry mcmanus thank you for watching! :)
Don't forget... in the studio... that amazing vinyl record... was recorded on TAPE. Like a 24 track... So, if "TAPE SUX and is INFERIOR!!", then guess what... that vinyl... is a RECORDING made from >>>TAPE
Tapes are great for making original recordings to be transferred to a metal press. They don't get repeated use. They are not is a cassette but reel. Once complete studios usually put them in a can and in a climate controlled storage vault. Studios rarely use tape decks any more for recording. They can get many more tracks digitally.
Robert Schuster... weird... I thought we were talking about the past.
We were. In the past that's how it worked with up to so many tracks ( I think 16 or less for tape) but tape gave way to digital for a number of reasons, one being the track limit not just the sound quality. There are a few companies that make vinyl records still. The press is made out of metal and the biscuit is pressed onto it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_press In the past the they made the press from the master tape but I'm not sure if they still do it that way or make it from a master digital recording. The couple of studios I've seen were all digital and only made cd's.
You are literally not telling me anything i do not know. My point was this. The "vinyl purists" who feel that vinyl sound reproduction is superior to tape, don't seem to think about that fact that that vinyl was produced from a magnetic tape MASTER -- DURING the era we're talking about (compact cassette). And back then, DAWs were NOT 32bit float 192HKz, or 5MHz 1bit. Back then the first digital recorders were nowhere near that quality. When vinyl was in it's highest prevalence, it was typically created from TAPE sources. So, if the vinyl of the day was superior, it lost it's superiority by having been sourced from an inferior medium. Somewhat like playing a million dollar recording through $10 speakers. If the music comes through an inferior medium, any the quality before it, or after it in the audio chain is thrown away.
OK I guess I didn't get what you were saying before. Right, the press for the vinyl record was made from a tape except for some of the earliest recordings which were scored right into the acetate and sounded like crap.
As someone who lived through the cassette era I always loved them and boomboxes. Sound was incredible. I have cassettes that I play on stereo which sound awesome. Glad you're getting up to speak.
Two thumbs up for cassette tapes!! Ive had cds skip on me time and time again, which makes the rest of playback of the cd fail!
If you actually have a good CD player and also don't let the CD get scratched, that skipping won't happen.
CRAP, they rot and deteriorate
I'm glad you made this video, I'm glad the kiddies are finally learning :) Great vid, subscribed.
+DoctorBlankenstein thanks for watching!
DoctorBlankenstein cassettes are crap.
Surely the best cassette decks of the time were Nakamichi.
mica steph don’t forget Aiwa!
The Naka Dragon was their best model.
Their “cassette deck 2” was the last of a kind although it had 2 heads. I have one .
Still have my 90s era Technics dual deck, and don't call me Shirley.
mica steph / Tandberg was my favorite...
I watched this vid 4 years ago. I am back for the 2nd viewing. I loved your beginning. I laughed so hard. I could hear alot of people yelling exactly what you said.
I used tapes to record all my vinyl on and played the tapes to save wear and tear on my records.
Frank Cannon Sr. That's what Computers are for! Lol
yep we all did that
jussayin mipeece You did that, and I did that, but a lot of people watching this video have no idea!
I know. I went through a box this weekend and found about a hundred cassettes that my wife had from about TWENTY years ago. We hooked up the old Nakamichi and danced to stuff I didn't even know she listened to.
The look on my sons face was priceless. He looked at the cassettes like they were little green men from mars.
Frank Cannon Sr. I did exactly the same. Played the record once, as I recorded it, and then listened to the tapes. Still have many of them :-)
I went to a garage sale in hawaii and they gave me a bunch of cassettes with lynyrd skynyrd led zeppelin ccr and a whole bunch more for free
I always remembered an annoying background noise on cassettes
Great stuff! Good tape players are hard to find these days; I just had one of my old decks re-conditioned and am using it frequently and enjoying it. I love my old mix tapes, they sound great. Glad to see someone else thinks the tape format is worthwhile too. Keep up the great work, this site is a blast!
Good also in that you can sneak in poems to your loved one between tracks for her custom mixtape 💏
Very true! It’s fun slipping in personal messages into mixtapes! When I do that for friends, it makes me feel like I’m a radio Host haha.
I'd like to hear a females take on all this mixtape and sneaking in poetry bs.. have you found yourself to be perpetually single?
Yes. And the profit here is that it's harder to skip a track on tape than on CD!
@@vinyleyezz how do you do this?
Metal Rott beatamax
Cassettes were just fine during their period of ubiquity. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and used all different quality of tapes and players, including professional equipment costing hundreds of thousands. But I would not want to go back to it. They really require a lot of care. Like vinyl, tapes can warp in the heat of an automobile. Tape heads need regular degaussing. Tape does wear and once you get one little crinkle in it, it will be far more likely to get caught and make a terrible mess that you have to untangle, from which point it will be for all intents and purposes, useless. Unlike vinyl or a digital format, you cannot simply go to your desired track nearly instantaneously.
The only pro I ever saw of cassettes was how easily they were to overwrite, even the write protected ones, since all you have to do is stick tape over the hole or stuff some folded paper in there. By the same token though, down the road you might wish you hadn't been able to record over that old stuff so easily. It was also fairly easy to make somewhat professional looking commercial tapes... but still? I'd never go back, that shit sucks. Enjoy though if that's your thing.
Degaussing! HA, I remember that:.... the thing that almost no one did and almost all machines needed (badly). I used a Tascam 424 multi-track cassette recorder for guitars well into the computer DAW era because tape handled guitar recording better (to my ear) until the DAW software got better. DAW - digital audio workstation
Cassettes, vinyl and digital audio as well, I want everything!!
My Walkman got me through the 80's as a teenager just fine. So casettes rock.
I'd blow your mind because I have a vinyl, cassette and Open Reel Tape formats and all have their pluses and minuses!!
Same here. Although my favorite format is reel to reel tape played on my Akai gx-230d deck thru a BBE sonic maximizer and Altec-Lansing speakers.
*What do I do with my old 78's?*
+LightmanTruth keep them.
Give them to starving children in Africa.
Play them. There's still music in those grooves.
#AllSpeechesMatter
Record them to cassette tape!
Not being negative or anything but cassettes do have limited play after years of playing they do chew up.
Dirty pinch rollers on a cassette deck will chew the tapes up ,the heads and rollers have to be kept clean..I have a 45 year old factory cassette tape that plays fine..
It's all part of being a "tapehead" or tape collector. Caring for the gear. It's part of the soul in analog music collecting that it is all degradable and that we enjoy it while we have it. If it lasts forever, do we really respect having it?
Keep in mind also that little "sponge" you see at the bottom of the cassette. I forget what it's called, but if it falls off, you won't get any sort of playback aside from muffled gobbledegook. You can reapply it again, but I forget the compound you use to make it stay on there.
The cassette is one of the worst audio formats but one of the smartest. They interest me because its hard to believe that sound can come from a square box with tap in it very smart invention eventhough not the best sounding. Sorry if that affends any of you.
+Tricob1974
Out of all the cassettes I've gotten from various sources and since I was a kid, I haven't really run into issues involving the pressure pad very often. If something does happen however, you can always replace it from another cassette. That said, there are some tape decks that don't use the pad at all. Instead, they use a second capstan and pinch roller to put the right amount of tension on the tape. Since the pad isn't needed in this dual capstan configuration, the pad is lifted right off by a "cage" that surrounds the tape head. Nakamichi is one brand that uses this method.