You don’t need a password to play a cassette. You don’t get hounded to upgrade the version of your player. The buttons don’t suddenly change orientation out of the blue because behind the scenes, your tape player “upgraded.” Simplicity is a wonderful thing. Do I love my Apple Music? Of course, but the “nostalgia” a lot of people crave is merely a desire to have things just do what they’re supposed to do.
And most importantly your music does not suddenly disappear because Spotify lost the rights. But again I would prefer some digital recording either on CD or computer.
I completely agree. I guess I’d add that actually owning music I’m enjoying makes it a more rewarding experience also. The number of times Tidal would remove albums from my playlists because, suddenly, ‘this track/album isn’t streamable” 😑 🫠.
@@CraigPMiller I too have lost some music on tapes, but a tape can be repaired and you get to save most of the tracks, and in the case where a tape melted and deformed in the hot interior of my car only needed to be opened and swapped into another cassette shell to get it working again! But since I always format shifted my music onto tape, the good brands of blank tape never deformed and I never had that problem... Even when CD burning became cheap enough for home and I had a CD player in my car, I would always make a copy of it for car use and archive the original... Just as I did with all my vinyl records... But if your tapes are getting chewed! You should have invested in a much better cassette deck, you get what you pay for! No different to today with phones and other products... I can't believe that there are people who complain about how bad cassettes were and when questioned about the equipment used, they purchased the cheapest junk that was available back then... Yeah, no kidding it's of course going to be bad. To my ears, using a good quality tape on a good quality tape deck is as good as CD... And I find that to be acceptable.
@@deadandburied7626 Who makes the best tape nowadays? Looking back at my Reel-to-Reel collection "Audiotape" has proved the best, but also I found the "Realistic" tapes from Tandy in the 1970s and back in the day they were very well priced too. For Cassettes BASF Chrome, TDK SA & D and Maxell have all proved to stand the test of time. Today ATR Magnetics look to be good (from reviews), but I have no experience with them.
@@deadandburied7626 With a good, at least midrange 3-head deck (Sony TC-K511S, Technics RS-B626, Sony TC-K711S), a good quality ferric tape can sound really good. Especially a low noise type, like TDK AD-X. Avoid true chrome tapes for recording these days, at least the ones that are older than 25 years, even if NOS. They are degrading (depending on the storage conditions, but how do you know their storage conditions for the last 30years?), and if you try to record on such a degraded chrome tape, you will get awful distortion well below 0dB, and lack of high frequencies. Type II ('Chrome class") ferro-cobalt tapes are better in that aspect, they don't age this way, but they are worse at the same time for their higher noise floor. If you have old chrome cassettes that you just want to listen to, they're fine for that, even if the tape is degraded. This type of tape degradation barely affects existing recording on the tape, it will sound almost the same as when they were recorded. Only new recordings can not be made on them.
@@mrnmrn1some of the SA’s were prone to this. You might get a five pack NOS from the early 90’s and two are good, three are bad. So I definitely agree with your comment.
@@RB-xm3ed That's interesting, because I was commenting about true chrome tapes, but TDK SA contains NO chrome. It is a *Chrome Class* tape, but contains only ferric oxides and cobalt. I have never seen a cobalt doped ferric tape going bad, unless it was stored very badly, but even then the failure mode is completely different compared to degrading true chrome tapes. What kind of issues have you experienced with said '90s SA tapes?
yes which makes them ideal for speech-based material like audio books and talking newspapers for the blind. You can even take the tape out, put it in a completely different machine somewhere else, and carry on listening from where you left off. Its taken the digital world right up until the last few years to reach this level of transportability across devices and they all rely on internet connectivity. What if you haven't got that? Cassettes did it perfectly in the 1960s! I'm a bit irked by the ever-present "music this" and "music that"... there are other things to listen to that are not music, and don't require high fidelity. The whole listening world is not all about music. I listen to my radio a lot, and to podcasts a lot, and I haven't listened to any music for years. (Apart from the stuff piped at me in shopping malls etc...). My life is full of entertaining, informative and creative material and I never have to worry about whether the snare drums have exactly the right dynamic profundity, or whether the second fiddle is flowing enough in the spectral expanse...
Oddly enough I started making mix tapes of streamed music. It is somehow more convenient (and fun) than a playlist. And because anything and everything internet-based can, and will, disappear at some point. The nature of the internet is you 'consume' something and then move on and forget about it. Sure you can download and save files on your device, but there's just something about having an object with visual and tactile cues that make it real. These mix tapes, like the ones I saved from my youth in the 80s, will still be listenable long after I'm gone, a moment in time preserved
@@AudioMasterclass Yes this is something my 13-year-old daughter does. Spotify playlist (Apple iMac Line Out) to a recently serviced Denon cassette Deck (Circa 1987). She just likes the sound of it compared to digital she says. Go Figure!!!
I want to point out something that I think you hi fi people have not quite grasped yet concerning the cassette comeback. You are so convinced that low fidelity is objectively bad, and high fidelity is objectively good. I’m going to assume this is because you are a professional audio engineer and have spend a half of a century or thereabouts trying to record the most pristine audio that you possibly can, in an attempt to have it played on radio or television, or what have you. You’re a part of the industry, and that means you’re basically selling something. For myself and many other musicians and bedroom producers, “good” is subjective, and does not have to be synonymous with crispy, squeaky clean, hi fi digital audio. “Good” can be something that sounds fuzzy and warm, like a campfire on a cool summer night, crackles and all. It can be something that evokes a longing for simpler times, and it can be something that is deliberately counter to what the mainstream music industry considers “good”. Part of the appeal for many cassette enthusiasts including myself is precisely that it is rejected by professionals as sounding “bad”, or not professional. I think a lot of artists have simply had it with trying to impress record label executives, and the cassette is the independent musician’s way of saying “I’m just doing this for me”. It’s a reaction against the capitalist system that is no longer working for young people. You must know how unlikely it is for a young artist to land a fair record deal that launches a successful career, so what’s the point in playing that game anymore? The way I see it is: the recording industry is in full collapse, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that artists are now free to redefine “good”.
I agree. Lo-fi doesn't necessarily mean poor quality. Cassette does have a reduced frequency range compared to other formats, but I can use that to my advantage. Many modern CDs (and downloads) are poorly mastered (excessively loud/boosted) and I find my ears become fatigued after listening for a short while. Recording them to cassette seems to roll off the higher frequencies where much of the digital distortion lies, which is more pleasing to my ears. Sure, some tape hiss is introduced, but it's only really audible in quieter passages or between songs, and may be more preferable to pure but cold digital silence. As long as I use a decent cassette (I actually prefer the 'Super Ferric' Type I tapes) I get a pleasurable midrange and full deep bass. Or to put it another way, I love good music and enjoy listening to it on cassette, which I wouldn't do if it sounded like shit!
@@brianstuntman4368 it's only lo-fi if you want it to be, try having a listen to a compact cassette recorded using dbx noise reduction! In a blind listening test, most people wouldn't be able to pick what's tape or CD.... Dolby works well but the silence between tracks and quiet parts with dbx noise reduction is on another level, it works just as good on vinyl records, there's plenty of good videos showing what dbx noise reduction sounds like on tape and vinyl records, if you haven't already seen them, I highly recommend watching. With dbx noise reduction, there was no need to go to CDs, the only thing that the CD player offered over tape with dbx was instant track access...
Wow, you really put that well, sir. Lo-Fi is an interesting topic. My favourite Meshuggah cover happens to be a guy playing an old broken acoustic guitar and using pots and pans for drums, the way he manages to make these childish instruments still sound like the band is absolutely mindblowing to me. Simpler times indeed.
I couldn’t agree more I love cassettes full stop having owned 40 tape decks in 54 years being an ex audiophile beautiful things that’s just me mechanical music 😅
22 year old here, don’t have much memory with cassette but as a musician, the Rhodes sounds so beautiful through cassette. I’ve got my hands on an authentic Rhodes mk1 for the next few months and I wanted to record solo piano on it by cassette. Something about cassette has a warmth to it that can’t be described only experienced!
Hello. I was born in 1961 so I grew up with cassettetapes. I recorded LP's from my older brother and did radiorecordings. I loved it then and I still love it now. I still have some 150 tapes from the past.😃
Every time I find myself wishing that cassettes would just go away (and I often do), I have to remind myself what a great aid they were to songwriting. You could just sit in front of your (paper) notepad and cassette recorder (all the better once you got one with a built-in condenser mic), strum away and wail away, pausing occasionally to scribble down words and chords. Yes, you can do that with your phone now, but it's small and fiddly, and playback is too quiet (on the phone's speaker). Indeed, songwriting is a lot less 'fun' now.
You're so right that phones, and other digital devices for that matter, are fiddly. I liked my cassette dictation machine for writing in the past. Record, play, wind, rewind. All you need really. I speak as a person with a Casio four-function calculator ever-present on my desk.
Cassettes are something special, just like with vinyl, you have to think about what you’re going to listen to. When using a Walkman this means selecting the cassettes to put in you backpack for the day. A cassette is a physical thing, unlike an username or password or the data packets of a streaming service.
I enjoy using and listening to cassettes since I was 5 years old... I'm 52 now. I still use them in my car and at home. The nostalgic feeling is through the roof for me using this medium. On par with this is using Reel-to-reel machine. Yep, I have them too. I won't give this medium up ever.
what about ,the sound quality , don´t know if you play guitar or have notion of how it sounds but most of old cds don´t sound like old recorfds ,the guitars sound perfect not mufled due to digital compression
@@RUfromthe40s Using a well maintained quality tape deck with decent quality cassettes, the sound is fantastic. Using a very good noise reduction system on top of that makes it sound even better.
At 51, my cassette Luv has been lifelong. My earliest memories of tapes are from kindergarten. As I had a portable recorder and loads of self made mixtapes. That practice would follow into teenage years with recording Hip Hop DJs in NYC. Well into full adulthood, and producing my own music. Tapes have an undeniable quality to them. Those who experience it, typically come to luv the format. Obviously, they are FUN. My other favorites are MDs and Vinyl. I have an equally rich history in both. Keep up the great content. 👍🏾✌🏾✊🏾
These days I'm increasingly grateful for anything that entertains me that doesn't involve screens and passwords and accounts. Plus I grew up in the heyday of cassette and never gave them up. As for the sound quality I've always been very satisfied with it using even half-decent equipment, which until recent years was everywhere. You absolutely don't need a Nakamichi Dragon. A basic Sony Walkman with a good tape used to sound pretty darn good. Car cassette players sounded good. Admittedly nowadays it's not so easy to get clean sound from a cassette and it's a shame. Hopefully this resurgence will spark someone to make good players again.
I thnk it's like wine. A $20 bottle is a lot better than a $10 bottle, but a $50 bottle isn't much better than the $20 one. You hit a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly - I bet most audiophiles would fail a double-blind test of audio kit - after all, wine tasters can't distinguish pricy wines from affordable ones under those conditions.
@@richardcrook2112 Damn, lucky you. I'm hunting for a direct-drive Walkman but they're like £200+ and that's "I have to save up for it" money on my income.
I just rediscovered cassettes. It's fun, I have a good 3 head deck and it sounds great. And yes, the fact that you actually listen to a complete tape instead of skipping songs on a streaming service is a win.
I’ve recently been contracted by a local merchandising shop (for bands) to duplicate cassettes for them because they were getting so many requests. Personally I love doing it for them and in my head I imagine the Gen Z kid that goes to the show, buys the tape and is blown away that first time that they are “holding” the music of their new favorite band. Fun indeed.
I'm a cassette addict!! There's just something about peeling the wrapper off a 30 yo NOS cassette, tuning the bias and level to record one of my crackly vinyl records!! I'm 13 years old again!!
Right on! Cassettes are fun, and many of us even like the lo-fi sound, warm and fuzzy, who cares about perfect sound anyway? A good song/good music is what’s important. And all the clackety-clack and pushing buttons. The ritual. I wished someone at Sony or Aiwa saw the potential and make some move to popularize it❤❤❤
@@gamingguy9006 True. When played/recorded on a decent quality cassette deck of course. I don't know why so many people think of cassettes as low fi, unless they use cheap portable cassette recorders.
A cassette if recorded on a good deck that is properly biased with the tape, recorded from vinyl or any digital source can get pretty close to the original especially with dbx or dolby s. The majority would not be able to tell the difference. Watch out also for the cheap new knock-off blank cassettes boating high dynamic range such as reshow. The new old stock of any Maxell UR (not the newer UR), TDK D and Sony HF where type I’s were concerned are a difference between night and day compared to what they offer now as new.
It was great fun loading up a shoebox of my favorite cassettes and going on a road trip in the car. Back in my day, cassettes were our form of "file sharing". And a lot of us recorded our vinyl (records) onto cassettes in order to preserve the LP.
@@carminedambrosio7 MP3s sound horrible. I can get perfectly identical sound as the source out of a Maxell XLII tape and my Nakamichi or 3-Head JVC decks.
@@AudioGuyBrian I don't doubt it. Being able to have a Nakamichi, and using good quality tapes; if I remember correctly the XLII were just before the metal tapes, in terms of quality, and in terms of price! However, many of us enthusiasts in the 80's had to make do with modest two head decks, and it was really hard to get anything good out of those units.
that's so interesting, I grew up in the 2010s and our prefered way of getting music was downloading youtube Videos of it and then converting it to mp3, still have files from back then and they go on every smartphone I own. I get my music like that to this day. these days there are even really convenient websites where you just put in the youtube URL and it lets you download an mp3 directly.
@@carminedambrosio7 There were plenty of good 2 head decks too. Like AIWA and some JVC units. As well as simple Nak's like the BX1, BX2, BX100 and BX150.
Streaming services ARE fun when you hear a song or get a recommendation and you can discover so much previously unknown music. Sometimes very obscure. I can like one track without buying the whole album. Having said that I am nostalgic for good cassette decks which I used back in the day. And using MD and DAT is fun for me because I could never afford them untill now, after completing repair projects. I don't get the fun of music carved into lumps of black plastic but each to their own.
I remember getting a cassette recorder as a kid (about 1970) and I had a blast with it. I would record off the radio, I'd record myself making music (which my mom encouraged as long as I "kept it down"). Within a few years, I would be writing scripts and recording myself doing "interviews" where the respondent would be clips from songs (a la Dickie Goodman). I'd record off of vinyl by holding the microphone in my hand near my little turntable's built in speakers. The sound quality was about as bad as it could be, but man oh man was it a lot of fun. I love the intricacies and options of recording today, but I doubt it will ever have the same joy as that.
I’ve begun cassette taping old John Peel Shows from TH-cam and enjoying playing them back just as I used to back in the late 70s!! Fun doesn’t even begin to describe it. So very satisfyingly fun and warmly nostalgic.
I know a bit about the music scene from the former Yugoslavia but nothing about the music scene from the former Czechoslovakia. What were you guys listening to when you were young and cool?
I love the different designs of tape cassettes companies used. I love picking up tapes and listen to the music that is recorded on it. I love hunting for tapes when i go thrift-shopping or go to fleamarkets.
I think a more accurate term to use is "rewarding". It's very satisfying to make excellent recordings on properly calibrated equipment using good quality cassettes, and cassettes CAN sound really good. Of course, cassettes aren't for everyone. Some people prioritize convenience and achieving the highest fidelity audio possible, and that's fine. Digital audio files and streaming does have its place. Whichever you prefer, just enjoy the music.
It’s a cassette adjacent I tell….a 5 year old, flung into daycare then bussed on a field trip to Lake Helena in 1975. Smaller than the other kids, picked on for the pecking order and forced to take naps that were foreign to me. The bus driver who had the Glen Campbell ‘Like a Rhinestone Cowboy’ 8 track single that flipped and played, flipped and played making me nostalgic for something that never was, so anger took its place and to this day….48 years later, I still can’t stand that song. Oh how music can inspire, make you feel and sometimes those feelings are just pure, distilled anger. First time I was ever conscious of being flat out annoyed, verging on only what I can now only identify as being pissed off! Why am I here…and who is responsible for flinging me amongst strangers in a bus to nowhere? Needless to say, I never went back. I must have raised hell about it for the very first time in this 5 year olds life. It must have been a reasonable temper tantrum. I was a pretty chill little boy as I couldn’t hear until I was 3 and as soon as I could, I keyed into the music….just not ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. It has never left me and the first time I heard music that didn’t come from a record, the radio or a TV.
The fun in cassettes for me is taking a cool-looking cassette that came with crap tape or whose tape is damaged, and replacing it with new tape. Got a bunch of ferric BASF cassettes that came with evangelical sermons recorded on them, and I've been putting the tapes from them in others for recording over with Vaporwave playlists and cool albums I like. But another fun thing to do is actually use the crappy/damaged tape. I have an album on tape (Smile, by Princex) that was made when the artist was in a bad living situation so it wasn't perfectly recorded (the tape has dropouts, the ending of one song repeats for some reason, and on top of that, it got chewed by one of my tape players at one point), and it's my absolute favorite album. So, to make a copy for listening that was as authentic as possible, I bought a lot of 22 Disney kids story tapes and recorded the album on a red one (same color as the original) off TH-cam Music, and the crappy old tape actually captured the vibe from the original tape perfectly. I've listened to it like 50 times since I recorded it a couple weeks ago hahaha
cassettes are fun for me because they tend to be the much more affordable form of physical media. Vinyls retain their value really well but cassettes you can for really cheap. a while ago I got about 60 cassettes for $10 and I really enjoy listening to music ive never heard before on this slow, combursome, but tactile form of music. What can i say, I find it very satisfying and stimulating, but I presume we all have our own unique quirks lol. And yes im only 20 hence why I haven't heard any of these songs before.
If you're discovering unknown albums for the first time, you don't even need instant track skip. Just put it on, and let the vibe wash over you til the album's done.
In the late 80s tapes were awesome. As a guitar player in Bands and a home recording enthusiast, giving tapes to girls of my bands and music……sweeet memories.
Always fun with the biro to rewind stuck tapes and the way the sound completely changed when the cassette heads got dirty with the added bonus of speed variations as the tapes got tighter and tighter. Somewhere I’ve still got the little tape splicer gizmo for when the tape leader snapped off the tape. The good old days maybe not but I still can not bring myself to chuck my tapes away many of which are replicated in cd form 😂
I love making my own cassettes. All you need is a decent cassette deck w/ record level control, hook it up to your computer's 3.5mm audio output jack & record anything you like 4 FREE!!! Mixtapes are a complete enjoyment to create & share w/ friends.Recordings sound great when played back on a decent decks or a vintage walkman on powered speakers or headphones. You can even play cassettes back in your car using the aux input & male 2 male 3.5mm cord (keep your cellphone away from the walkman as it will cause interference).
The ubiquitous presence of tape plug-in vsts, bit-reducing plugins, saturation boosting plug-ins, and I would also argue gear like the Empiric Labs' Distressor that is able to introduce pleasing levels of distortion into compression, demonstrate that high fidelity capture of audio is not the be-all-end-all of what constitutes a great recording of a performance/composition. Degradation and modification of audio signal is fun. I have listened multiple times to Mr. Mellor's Tascam dbx recording (a couple of posts back), and I detect a pleasing quality I recognize: modern daws can center the snare forward, spread the space of the Casio, lay-back the dreaming single-coil strat with a vintage vibe, but I believe it would take a very good emulation vst duplicated on all channels and again on master to produce how it is specifically glued together in toto. Perhaps it is the absence of effects, ducking, over-compression, but the recording sounds honest and pleasing to my ears, and I choose to believe tape four track tech is that little extra something I detect and enjoy. I also believe the making of that recording was likely "fun" in a way that sitting before a daw screen can never be. That said, I would never give up daw for tape. It is a nostalgic novelty. And tapes are maddeningly finicky.
" I believe it would take a very good emulation vst duplicated on all channels and again on master to produce how it is specifically glued together in toto." Harrison Mixbus DAW software offers exactly that! It can be used in any arbitrary modern production style, but by default it replicates the signal path, workflow, and subtle analog warm-up effects of a high end analog console. Also, SSL and Abbey Road offer plugins replicating both channel strips and glue-adding mix stages of meticulously modeled analog consoles.
I grew up with LPs and vinyl, but my main days were during the cassette days, and later on CDs. Engaging with a cassette to hear “a song” is an event. It requires intent and effort. You have to either just resign yourself to listening to the album up to the song you want, or you have to seek through the album to find the spot you want. Get there, hear the song in all its glory, and then have to rewind back through it to listen again, giving you that downtime between listens, again, requiring engagement and intent. It’s a subtle thing that I wonder if future generations will even wonder about, but it was how I discovered all the formative music of my life. All that said… don’t discount Spotify. Sharing playlists with my friends and family, to me, hearkens right back to the days when I would make a mix tape of the most life shattering caliber that everyone would have to have a copy. I miss that about cassettes, and I think Spotify has done a decent job of making that experience accessible to the modern age. Also, Spotify does an annual breakdown of the songs, artists, and musical styles you listened to the most in a given year. I ALWAYS look forward to this now, and love sharing it with close ones. Spotify, and it’s ilk, are alright in my book.
Now that I cannot hear above 10 KHz, I have revisited cassettes recently. I bought the best portable cassette recorders made by Sony and Marantz and tried every kind of tape and noise reduction. My late father had recorded many TDK SA C90s of a broadcaster called Barnesy (at the Beeb) and spend pleasant evenings listeninng to them. I still continue to collect, restore, use and sometimes resell tape recorders.
As a teenager I had a hifi with casette auto-reverse. It made an awful lot of clunking noises when it did so and made me wonder what exactly was going on within. Did work effectively though and I was spared the inconvenience of turning tapes over.
My memory is hazy but I remember auto-stop being a thing. But did a deck without auto-stop keep on trying to turn the tape at the end? My memory is blank on that. DM
@@AudioMasterclass I did a quick search on that. Apparently all decks stop automatically at end of normal play, however auto stop is for fast forwarding and rewinding, to stop the tape getting stretched by accident. Or so the interweb says.
@@mattylamb658 Not all cassette decks would auto stop at the end of rew or ffw. I can't say if some home stereo component decks didn't. But what I can tell you is, I used some portable and/or walkman-type back then and some of them did not auto stop after rew/ffd. The ones that didn't I had to wait and stop it manually, doing it either before, for example, going to the bathroom or doing it when I came back so that the tape didn't get stretched in my absence. Those applicable decks weren't broken, they just simply didn't have auto stop for the rew/ffd.
And if you have a high end deck with a good quality cassette...........the performance can be surprisingly good, (adding a little analogue warmth if you are recording a digital source!).
I like the sound cassettes make in their cases as I pick my way through a bunch of them. They also make a nice rattle if you give them a good shake. :D !
Thank bloody god im not the only one. Shame a lot of them was released useing cardboard selves around here so no maracas for those few, but they where often bundle releases and demos ect.
Yes, I like cassette tapes for all the reasons mentioned on this video and some reasons of mine. I rarely bought prerecorded cassette tapes. For this I always prefered vinyl records. I do enjoy the devices to reproduce cassette tapes (the cassette decks / the cassette players) because they're small studios and unlike CD players *you can actually do something with them,* namely to adjust close to everything on them, you can take care of them (maintenance), you can even fix them sometimes. I have some cassette decks, some good ones too, that are in a very good shape. I do record new tapes from time to time and I do listen to my old tapes, the ones I made, but it has more to do with the music rather than with nostalgia. I listen to mixtapes I recorded and it makes sense bcoz they keep the music I liked during the period I recorded them, tapes that I for example recorded with sound adjustments I prefered for these songs (bass, treble - - - > even adjustments with an equalizer - yes, I did that < - - - ie a small studio in your home). I still very much like this music, because *it comes from the late 70s, the 80s and the 90s,* not the 60s or the early-mid 70s most of which I consider dead music (dead *in the sense* that unlike the former periods I mentioned, the latters you cant listen to a whole LP except for historical reasons and with very few bands as an exception), whereas I still discover music from the late 70s and mostly the 80s that amazes me. The late 70s and the 80s music endured the test of time (my opinion) and not a comment about the 90s music on this.. I still record tapes because Im a cassette generation boy stuck with some hundreds of CDs most of which I now dont want to listen to. *Curiously enough* this never happened with the music I have on Vinyl and cassettes. Strange isnt it? I mean, I was very excited with the CD as a media, only to realize that it doesnt suit the way I want to listen to music. *EDIT:* there's also the matter of the poor sound quality, which largely is true, but as you said a good deck minimizes this issue. But when you're a fun of music genre known as "Lo Fi", as I am, you easily overcome these issues. Large part of my music is Lo Fi artists and bands. Conclusion: cassette tapes are in every way more fun than CDs and other digital media. My hopes: with the vinyl revival a fact, at least some of the companies that produced blank cassettes to start producing them again. I mean, depending on the seller today you need up to 10€ for normal position tape or up to 50€ or more for a chrome and a fortune for a metal tape... PS: I did tried to keep this comment to a reasonable size
I love this take on cassettes! I will say that when I hold a tape in my hands I don't worry about beating it up like a vinyl, and that removes a lot of stress, thus opening the door to fun !!
The thing that was fun about the Philips EL3301 recorder was hidden inside the case - its circuit diagram. As we had young eyes back then we could unfold this tiny bit of paper and copy out the circuitry. I then bought the much cheaper Philips cassette player and added the record circuitry as a plug-in addition, made from various cheap transistors and other bits. The only thing missing was a means of erasing tapes. This could be made from any junked mains transformer with E and I laminations. The "I" lams were removed and the "E" lams arranged the same way round. This generated a nice magnetic field, heat, vibration and humming noises and wasn't exactly "safe" but it did the job. Cotton buds were needed to clean the loose oxide, that some tapes left behind, from the head, pinch roller, tape guides and the general insides of the deck. These cassette player could be used in our cars, which was wonderful. Some of the more adventurous built a DC/AC converter to power a Collaro Studio deck so they could play 1/4 inch tape on 7 inch reels in their cars. Fun days.
I don't know if they're fun, but their unique ability to bring you back from the upside-down is important. I remember enjoying both my waterproof Sony Walkman as a kid and the Sony Discman as a teenager equally.
I am 82, still listen to cassettes, and love them. Back in the day, my cassettes were recorded on a State of the Art three head deck either with Dolby C or Dolby S. Now years later they still sound good even though my three-head deck is long gone and I only have a Panasonic Walkman (like new) and a Onkya two well deck with Dolby B and C. I have around 150 cassettes, most 40+ years old and they still play well. To my knowledge, I have not had one of those cassettes give up the ghost because of age. There is a warmth you get from a well-recorded cassette you don't get from digital music, CDs, or streaming venues. Yes, they are fun and there are hundreds of thousands of music fans that still love them.
I really like this post. There's nothing like a nakamichi tape deck which has stood the test of time and is beyond cool. Music is to be enjoyed where it emotionally moves you and is not analyzed. I have always felt the industry always pushed vinyl sales because they are still manufacturing everything from turn tables, cartridges, phono amps etc so there's big bucks involved in all this. No one makes a deck so there's no money for the industry. I will never forget the first time I heard the nakamichi deck in my teens at their showroom. There's a warmness and spaciousness which truly moves you and that's what music is all about. It's clear and simple.❤
The big thing with casette is actually that you can record your own. Also they have all the downsides of physical format (need to rewind, specific "sound") which can be interesting alternative to all digital world of today. Listening of casette can be seen as special occasion.
Turns out, the compact disc is also fun. Turns out, physical media is quite simply fun, as tangibility with the medium is ever so slightly more engaging than clicking through a glorified file picker Online distribution is fundamentally soulless.
I have a high end deck from the 90's that still works as good as new, and it can record almost CD quality audio on a type 1 cassette. I even made my own mono deck just for the fun reasons, it also records really well. (I even came up with the schematics for playback and recording).
Cassettes are fun. For me, it's the hardware. I have great fun restoring old decks AIWA, Denon and a Hitach 3D woofer boombox are my recent projects. Some of it is nostalgia but it is also the challenge of fixing a 30+ year-old piece of gear and making it sound as good as new or sometimes better!
Your channel is definitely fun. What is fun is hearing recordings of myself and my brother when I was 8 or an audio tour of the house I grew up in, but not so much audio recordings of TV shows.
On my nice small personal stereo, not much bigger than the cassette, you could skip tracks thanks to AMS (though you had to wait) and the buttons were nice and soft and not clunky. They were big controls, so you could operate them through your jeans. It also had dolby, which I had switched on. You could listen to the whole tape in one go too, thanks to auto reverse. These players from my late teenage years were much better than thr clunky ones I'd had in earlier years. Still, having to carry 12 cassettes in a box when you went on holiday did spoil the portability compared to taking it out just for the day. Actually the most fun part was deciding which songs by an artist were best and belonged on the tape - copied from the CD. Most of my tapes were single artist compilations. When going on holiday I could take 12 best-ofs.
i use them pretty frequently but don't really rely on them for critical applications, if i want to record a sound but dont care about how good the sound is necessarily they're really fun, i mostly use them for studio effects
My love for this format started very young, around 7 or 8 years old. My father had a top-loading Technics tape recorder and I loved playing with it so much that my father challenged me and explained to me how to record: He was very surprised a few days later because I had discovered how 'Dolby NR' worked which he didn't know and when I explained it to him and made him hear how it worked he said to me: "Hey! Well! You've made a great discovery!" I have always loved cassettes and always will!
One thing to remember is in an odd way reliability. I have cassettes that go back to the 80s that all still play and some live recordings done on a Sony Walkman that sound great still. I have many DATS and cassettes that do not play.
I would expect that if a DAT doesn't play, it's the tape that has degraded and unless parts of it are still OK the recording is lost. A cassette however - If it doesn't play then it's more likely to be a mechanical problem that can be resolved. Of course, there's no guarantee that the tape itself is still OK but a mechanical problem would be my first assumption, resolved by transferring the tape into a new shell. DM
The advantage with cassette is that you start again next time at the point where you left off last time. Very practical mainly when listening to speeches as by trial and error you can rewind the tape and pinpoint the part that you would like to repeat. Digital audio players also allow you to do so but not as easily and precisely. There is still a place for audio cassettes. I've never given up on cassette recorders and players. I've still got two Sony WM D6C and a few others. To this day I've kept my Professional Tascam 122 MK11 mastering cassette recorder.
Back in the heyday of cassettes, I bought and installed the top-of-the-line Pioneer car cassette player in my company cars. Dual capstan, three motors, microprocessor controlled soft touch buttons. I spent a lot of time on the road and had a pretty darn bitchin' sound system. I also copied over my record albums to metal and high-quality chromium dioxide tapes. I seldom bought pre-recorded cassettes because the quality just wasn't there. Over time, my cassette library grew to a somewhat ridiculous degree and I still play these tapes once in awhile. My home cassette recorder was an almost top-of-the-line JVC unit with ANRS noise reduction. Were they fun to play? Definitely. I made cassette inserts using my computer when computers were not commonly found in the home. It was all cutting edge stuff. I even use an Android app that simulates playing cassette tapes. It's pure nostalgia and I love it. I would disagree that CDs are where "fun goes to die". They are still a viable medium and much of their problem lies in poor mastering practices taken on by the music industry with their stupid brickwalling ideas. A fifty dollar Blu-ray player blows away any $500 turntable in terms of audio specs any day. And it's capable for displaying great quality video and surround sound content to boot!
It’s fun because you could record the radio with it with your favourite song. Even my parents have these memories. The noise, the touch. The not skip or fast forward are also fun. It’s a more mindful way of enjoying music. I also found many recordings of me playing guitar. Huge nostalgia factor. Creating a mix tape is also nice
Most fun of all is when the drive belt on your deck melts😉Apart from that design flaw I do still love cassettes. The twin decks took things to a whole new level.
I agree, cassettes are fun! :-) I'm looking at my 39 year old Twisted Sister Stay Hungry cassette right now in fact! I have no idea if it will play or fall apart though... lol
Part of the fun was actually shopping and hunting for your LP, 12" single, import copy..... I don't spend much time shopping on Spotify. Record stores were FUN! I didn't get into pre-recorded cassettes but I loved making mix tapes for me and my friends. I still have my early-90s Denon cassette deck.
My first cassette deck was the Advent 201! I thought it was fun to use. Simple layout. A Wolensack transport mechanism that rewound a 90 minute cassette in about 45 seconds. Simple controls , Dolby B, Bias selector for Chrome tapes. Great sound. Fun!
Since i have a high end cassette deck and can record my favourites from digital to good quality tape, yes i think cassettes are fun. Just pop in a cassette and listen to the music without any screens to distract me.
@@AudioMasterclass I talked with a Pro Tools instructor at NAB who uses the big control consoles. He said by the end of the second day his students don't realize he's switched off the screens, because they are LISTENING rather than looking at the grid!
I love the premise of fun. I was always trying to find the next cassette deck. I had to laugh because I remember how dreadful I was at trying to create playlists using cassettes. I never got the motor spin up time right so there was always this whooop sound. I finally bought an Akai reel to reel hoping I’d be better at it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t!
I have not the heart to dispose of my cassette collection. I still have a Walkman professional kicking around somewhere along with its microphone! But all my decks are gone. I had a love hate relationship with cassettes because of the efforts needed to get decent sound from them. I have fond memories of the mixtapes I was given and made for others. Recording FM radio, especially live gigs.
The MOST fun was buying an album on vinyl, immediately recording it to a high bias cassette while listening to the whole thing for the first time (and while the record was in it's best shape), THEN listening over and over again in my car where the engine and road noise made "ultimate high fidelity" not that big of a deal. Vinyl was for home listening, cassettes for portability, And let's not forget making our own mix tapes. Much more fun than dragging and dropping titles into a playlist. For the TRUE experience, back in the day we could buy concert tickets for $15 a piece for stadium shows and hear true high fidelity - live.
For me it's an enjoyable, nostalgic hobby. I like to discover new music and bands, maybe on the radio or through social media, then make a cassette recording of it from a streaming service. I like the process of choosing a blank tape and trying to get the best from it. I have to wait and monitor the recording in real time (no drag & drop) so I actually get to listen to the album. At the end, I have a physical, collectable item to come back to. Tapes aren't perfect, but neither is my 50 year old hearing. And I'm far more likely to peruse my recordings 6 months later and replay an album, whereas with streaming I just forget about it.
Yes. I get great enjoyment of getting a perfect Type II or Type iV tape copy of a new vinyl record I purchased so I can play the record one time, put it away, maybe later sell it in Mint of Mint- condition to get the biggest return on it. I have over 760 cassettes that I bought high quality still sealed Maxell XLII or XLIIS blanks for. My entire 1,000+ vinyl albums are now on tapes. I have 12 quality cassette decks with a few non-working parts decks of the same models for spare parts if ever needed. It is a very enjoyable hobby and the sound can be so good it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the source (CD, LP, or Digital) and the tape you recorded it on.
Sounds like you're having a ball. I get buying the record, importing it once, and saving it. I personally can't imagine having a thousand cassettes and a dozen mechanical decks, rather than two hard drives (music library and backup) with one old laptop on a closet shelf as dedicated music player. And then remote controlling that by phone or tablet from any room. But if pulling the right cassette out of your archive and popping it into a working deck makes you happy, go for it!
I remember having recorded in TDK Metal cassettes and the sound is fantastic ! Crystal clear and in many ways better than CDs! i still have them although the sound quality has diminished a little bit.
I still use records, CD, cassettes and Minidisc. Records and CD for quality listening, cassette for the car and minidisc for fun. I like the nostalgia of cassette but they don't sound the best even on my nakamichi. So my favourite for fun would be minidisc all the benefits of cd and quality recording all the fun and nostalgia of cassettes without the bad sound and mechanical issues.
Nostalgic. Brings back memories. I remember the drive belts needed to be replaced after certain number of years, unless it is a direct drive unit. I've got to pull out my Nakamichi player and old tapes.
Great video. Cassettes were fun because you were given this blank slate to record mix tapes, then take markers/pens and do your own artwork & labeling across the blank inserts & stickers. Eventually you had these racks of colorful cassette cases, the art perhaps influenced by the images that came to mind from the music. It created a very personal connection to your collection.
I was suprised when getting a newer cassette deck with Dolby B NR on it. Those cassettes that were recorded for it sound soooo extremely good, almost as quiet as a cd
I think you'd love listening to the tapes I listen to in my car. Old rave mixtape with loud crusty electronic music uploaded to TH-cam in iffy quality that I then ripped with TH-cam dl and recorded to another tape 😂.
I still have hundreds of recordings made in the 1970's 80's and 90's which sound new. I'd always made high quality recordings on good tape medium, so they always sound great. This is all fun to me.
There were so many high quality cassette decks out there throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s besides Nakamichi. I've always maintained my decks properly and used high-quality Tapes. Therefore i never experienced Cassettes as a low fidelity format.
I still own and use 2 cassette decks. An ariston and a marantz. With care, using the right tape, recordings can get very close in sound quality to the original. I can make my own playlists easily. These decks do need regular maintenance. Head cleaning demagnetizing etc but it's great when you record to tape and get great results. I can then play them in my aiwa Walkman player. This machine sounds amazing when used with good headphones.
Today it's so difficult to find an headphone with a retro style and not crappy. When I was young, any regular headphone was amazing sound quality and solid as a rock.
from 1979 till 2002, Cassettes was the convenient way to transport and record music. And I used to have my recorder on standby when I rehearsed with one of my bands. The cassette was easy and durable. and you could listen to your rehearsal in the car driving home. I bougt many pre-recorded tapes during those days, because you could play them at home and on the go. But the most important thing if you are planning to get into cassettes: buy a good deck. With a good deck, cassettes can get close to the quality of any other format avaliable. A good ferric will often do, but If you want an upgrade, a type 2 of different formulas can still be avaliable in old stock unopened. The prices on unopened metal-tapes these days are insane, så get a good cheap quality ferric like maxell UR, then you are good to go.
I have on Sony boombox in late 80's and it comes with Automatic Music Search, while playing, you can press rewind or fastforward and seek a silent part of thr tape for at least 4 seconds and automatically resume playing. It potentially wearing out your tape and tape heads, but it is the closest thing to a digital player skip button.
Cassettes were the first format for music that I ever used, as we didn’t get our first CD player until 1992. I recently got back into using cassettes a few years ago, and have acquired a few high end 3 head cassette decks. I have a Luxman K-250, an AIWA AD 3800 and I also have a Harman/Kardon CD 191 2 head deck as well. It wasn’t until I got decks like this that I discovered how good tapes can sound. Still not sonically accurate as far as sound quality goes, but it’s not very far off. Cassettes like vinyl (which I also use) have a sound that no other music formats can replicate. They have a warm and engaging sound and also adds nostalgia from a simpler time. One thing I also love about cassettes is that they are the most complex music format. Compared to CD’s where you just put the disc in and press play, with cassettes you have to make sure you have the deck set to the right bias (ferric, chrome, ferric-chrome and metal) which is even more important for recording, and you also have to make sure that the Dolby NR is on or off depending on if it was recorded with it or not. If these settings for the tape aren’t correct, then the tape isn’t going to sound right. I also find it really fun to make mixtapes from different eras, and I believe that this is a lost art. There is a bit of skill required to get the best sound out of a cassette. Not all cassettes can take the same amount of record level so you have to make sure you don’t push the levels too hard, but at the same time get as much signal onto the tape without over saturation.
Like an old fashioned film camera without autofocus and without even auto exposure, there can be pleasure in operating something that requires human skills. I draw the line though at a vintage car with a crash gearbox and manual advance and retard.
The nice thing about a cassette is that it's easier to get it signed by the artist at a gig. CDs and even worse, vinyl is a nightmare to drag to a gig with you, whereas the cassette liner easily goes in your pocket. And to be fair, cassettes were my era... listening to dad's mixes in the car in the 70s, recording the top 40 from the radio on Sunday evening for loading into my first SANYO personal stereo in the early 80s (4xAA batteries!), the cassette player in my first car through the 90s. Even when I moved to the US in 2010, the car I bought there came with a factory cassette deck.
I signed a few CD booklets back in what I like to think of as my heyday. When the fan is prepared with booklet at the ready and a Sharpie, it's easy enough. But it was all a long time ago... DM
I've loved cassette's since I was a kid and its an ever lasting enjoyment. I guess for me the difference between cassette's and vinyl/CDs is that it's recordable by the average person. Vinyl is pressed, CDs are hard coded, but a cassette is reusable, over and over. You can create something personal to you, that represents your personality. No fancy gear, just a deck and a cassette. I think that's why it hasn't died, like the iPod, its a format for you, the individual and it's personal.
There are some with high grade decks like myself, fanatical about tape recording and meticulous about cleaning and demagging them. If you want to get the most out, you must be willing to put out the effort. This is a hobby that can reward your effort. Dolby? I don’t think so, but that is my take on that. As far as I can tell, it dulls the sound and degrades the experience. The key is knowing what level to use with each brand and grade of tape and do not compromise on any of these. I know some will say no Dolby, he must be deaf or daff. It’s a choice and it has worked for more than decades. I don’t kick others for their choice. They will do me the same and we both will be happy. The recording level is critical, but the reward is a cleaner result and none of the residual issues of Dolby’s use. Two Revox B215s and an NAD 6300 make fabulous tapes as do Naks. To each their own. It is fun to me. So would reel to reels be, but way above my price point. Taking care of them is key to the experience. It isn’t a hobby for the lazy or the ones who only look for convenience. Physical media gives you that, but it requires a level of involvement most are not up to. The reward is worth the effort. Only you can decide if you are up to it.
(From David) we have several hundred (yes, 300-400) home recorded cassettes [mostly recorded directly from LP on a Technics turntable] to allow multiple listenings, & listening devices while limiting album wear. It is surprisingly "fun" to pull out a cassette from the case and listen to music "from another time"...
well i just started to record cassettes again in 2017 ,this started by restoring a pioneer CT-959 ,till today i already record 90 cassettes from cds and records i have , being my favorite songs, and what surprised me more was the sound with a good chrome cassette or cobalt sounded several times better than the cd i recorded from, the cassettes i had bought from a warehouse several years after stop seeing cassettes for sale anywhere and they sold me so cheap that i bought from TDK sa-x maybe 500 cassettes and from sony UX-pro maybe 200 of c-90 and other 200 of C-60, also some type I the SXI from maxell around a 100 cassettes of c-60 and another 100 from C-90 also some older BASF chrome maxima till 85 also super-chrome till 84,all costed me 100€ because if i didn´t take them they would throw them to the garbage, also bought around 150 Minidiscs from TDK all black , i remenber simpler times when hi-fi was hi-fi and one would listen to music whatever one had at home, i never thought that my first turntable a PL-43 from pioneer today it would deliver better sound than a 4.000€ pro-ject, it´s evolution
Great memories, as stated in comments under your previous videos on this topic, but I don’t see myself reaching back to this any time soon. Thanks for the video!
Cassette tapes are simultaneously the sweetest cat's meow, and also the biggest piece of shit. It's like taking a picture with a century old giant box camera with a cheap lens which uses 4 by 5 film. It works, most often beyond wonderfully, but sometimes only with the greatest time spent and effort made. Does anybody want to rebuild their old 1955 Chevy? - The same sort of idea -
Fun, fun!!!! Oh yes I had endless fun when my tape recorder chewed my newly purchased big country’s the crossing cassette twirling a bic pen around the little cog wheel for hours to wind the tape back in….only to find it was twisted and played fields of fire backwards. I’ll give you fun!!!!!!
I sold hi-fi in the 70s and early 80s. I still have thousands of LPS. And several turntables. Vinyl is awesome. I currently have about a thousand tapes. I have a couple of good cassette decks. I used to have some good nakamichi and Denon cassette decks and recorded every album I bought onto a cassette tape so I could play the tape rather than the record and wear out the record. I even have some of those tapes. TDK SA90's. And they still give records a run for their money. But I hang on the cassette for pure nostalgic value. Recordable CD's made them utterly obsolete.
Definitely fun to use , fun to search for and collect, I'm in france , I still manage to find new old stock , even chrome cassettes . Minidisc I also enjoy .
I think it is healthy to challenge the idea that absolutely everything has to be optimized for cost, convenience - or even quality. If it's about the enjoyment, the "surrounding aspects" can play a more important role.
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You don’t need a password to play a cassette. You don’t get hounded to upgrade the version of your player. The buttons don’t suddenly change orientation out of the blue because behind the scenes, your tape player “upgraded.”
Simplicity is a wonderful thing. Do I love my Apple Music? Of course, but the “nostalgia” a lot of people crave is merely a desire to have things just do what they’re supposed to do.
And most importantly your music does not suddenly disappear because Spotify lost the rights. But again I would prefer some digital recording either on CD or computer.
I completely agree. I guess I’d add that actually owning music I’m enjoying makes it a more rewarding experience also. The number of times Tidal would remove albums from my playlists because, suddenly, ‘this track/album isn’t streamable” 😑 🫠.
@@sonic2000gr 😀😁😃 Disappearing music? Huh! I've lost too many beloved tracks, munched by a voracious deck!
@@CraigPMiller shouldn´t feed the monster, it will ask for more
@@CraigPMiller I too have lost some music on tapes, but a tape can be repaired and you get to save most of the tracks, and in the case where a tape melted and deformed in the hot interior of my car only needed to be opened and swapped into another cassette shell to get it working again! But since I always format shifted my music onto tape, the good brands of blank tape never deformed and I never had that problem...
Even when CD burning became cheap enough for home and I had a CD player in my car, I would always make a copy of it for car use and archive the original... Just as I did with all my vinyl records...
But if your tapes are getting chewed! You should have invested in a much better cassette deck, you get what you pay for! No different to today with phones and other products...
I can't believe that there are people who complain about how bad cassettes were and when questioned about the equipment used, they purchased the cheapest junk that was available back then... Yeah, no kidding it's of course going to be bad.
To my ears, using a good quality tape on a good quality tape deck is as good as CD...
And I find that to be acceptable.
For those who appreciate the cassette format, use good quality tapes and equipment. Proper maintenance of equipment is absolutely essential too.
I always liked chrome rather than ferric.
@@deadandburied7626 Who makes the best tape nowadays? Looking back at my Reel-to-Reel collection "Audiotape" has proved the best, but also I found the "Realistic" tapes from Tandy in the 1970s and back in the day they were very well priced too. For Cassettes BASF Chrome, TDK SA & D and Maxell have all proved to stand the test of time. Today ATR Magnetics look to be good (from reviews), but I have no experience with them.
@@deadandburied7626 With a good, at least midrange 3-head deck (Sony TC-K511S, Technics RS-B626, Sony TC-K711S), a good quality ferric tape can sound really good. Especially a low noise type, like TDK AD-X. Avoid true chrome tapes for recording these days, at least the ones that are older than 25 years, even if NOS. They are degrading (depending on the storage conditions, but how do you know their storage conditions for the last 30years?), and if you try to record on such a degraded chrome tape, you will get awful distortion well below 0dB, and lack of high frequencies. Type II ('Chrome class") ferro-cobalt tapes are better in that aspect, they don't age this way, but they are worse at the same time for their higher noise floor. If you have old chrome cassettes that you just want to listen to, they're fine for that, even if the tape is degraded. This type of tape degradation barely affects existing recording on the tape, it will sound almost the same as when they were recorded. Only new recordings can not be made on them.
@@mrnmrn1some of the SA’s were prone to this. You might get a five pack NOS from the early 90’s and two are good, three are bad. So I definitely agree with your comment.
@@RB-xm3ed That's interesting, because I was commenting about true chrome tapes, but TDK SA contains NO chrome. It is a *Chrome Class* tape, but contains only ferric oxides and cobalt. I have never seen a cobalt doped ferric tape going bad, unless it was stored very badly, but even then the failure mode is completely different compared to degrading true chrome tapes.
What kind of issues have you experienced with said '90s SA tapes?
And another thing about a cassette is they play back again from the precise place where you'd pressed the stop button 40 years ago.
I concur. DM
LOL! Best comment; absolutely right!🤣
yes which makes them ideal for speech-based material like audio books and talking newspapers for the blind. You can even take the tape out, put it in a completely different machine somewhere else, and carry on listening from where you left off. Its taken the digital world right up until the last few years to reach this level of transportability across devices and they all rely on internet connectivity. What if you haven't got that?
Cassettes did it perfectly in the 1960s!
I'm a bit irked by the ever-present "music this" and "music that"... there are other things to listen to that are not music, and don't require high fidelity. The whole listening world is not all about music.
I listen to my radio a lot, and to podcasts a lot, and I haven't listened to any music for years. (Apart from the stuff piped at me in shopping malls etc...). My life is full of entertaining, informative and creative material and I never have to worry about whether the snare drums have exactly the right dynamic profundity, or whether the second fiddle is flowing enough in the spectral expanse...
You can love other formats but only cassettes will love you back, they're loyal.
Oddly enough I started making mix tapes of streamed music. It is somehow more convenient (and fun) than a playlist. And because anything and everything internet-based can, and will, disappear at some point. The nature of the internet is you 'consume' something and then move on and forget about it. Sure you can download and save files on your device, but there's just something about having an object with visual and tactile cues that make it real. These mix tapes, like the ones I saved from my youth in the 80s, will still be listenable long after I'm gone, a moment in time preserved
Mix tapes of streamed music. Who'd have thought it? Clearly you're having fun to the max. DM
Yes, I too enjoy making mix tapes from my Tidal playlists.
@@AudioMasterclass Yes this is something my 13-year-old daughter does. Spotify playlist (Apple iMac Line Out) to a recently serviced Denon cassette Deck (Circa 1987). She just likes the sound of it compared to digital she says. Go Figure!!!
I do much the same thing, but with minidiscs
i just started doing the same thing, i also repair cassette decks because i find it interesting how they work.
I want to point out something that I think you hi fi people have not quite grasped yet concerning the cassette comeback. You are so convinced that low fidelity is objectively bad, and high fidelity is objectively good. I’m going to assume this is because you are a professional audio engineer and have spend a half of a century or thereabouts trying to record the most pristine audio that you possibly can, in an attempt to have it played on radio or television, or what have you. You’re a part of the industry, and that means you’re basically selling something. For myself and many other musicians and bedroom producers, “good” is subjective, and does not have to be synonymous with crispy, squeaky clean, hi fi digital audio. “Good” can be something that sounds fuzzy and warm, like a campfire on a cool summer night, crackles and all. It can be something that evokes a longing for simpler times, and it can be something that is deliberately counter to what the mainstream music industry considers “good”. Part of the appeal for many cassette enthusiasts including myself is precisely that it is rejected by professionals as sounding “bad”, or not professional. I think a lot of artists have simply had it with trying to impress record label executives, and the cassette is the independent musician’s way of saying “I’m just doing this for me”. It’s a reaction against the capitalist system that is no longer working for young people. You must know how unlikely it is for a young artist to land a fair record deal that launches a successful career, so what’s the point in playing that game anymore? The way I see it is: the recording industry is in full collapse, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that artists are now free to redefine “good”.
I agree. Lo-fi doesn't necessarily mean poor quality. Cassette does have a reduced frequency range compared to other formats, but I can use that to my advantage. Many modern CDs (and downloads) are poorly mastered (excessively loud/boosted) and I find my ears become fatigued after listening for a short while. Recording them to cassette seems to roll off the higher frequencies where much of the digital distortion lies, which is more pleasing to my ears. Sure, some tape hiss is introduced, but it's only really audible in quieter passages or between songs, and may be more preferable to pure but cold digital silence. As long as I use a decent cassette (I actually prefer the 'Super Ferric' Type I tapes) I get a pleasurable midrange and full deep bass. Or to put it another way, I love good music and enjoy listening to it on cassette, which I wouldn't do if it sounded like shit!
@@brianstuntman4368 it's only lo-fi if you want it to be, try having a listen to a compact cassette recorded using dbx noise reduction!
In a blind listening test, most people wouldn't be able to pick what's tape or CD....
Dolby works well but the silence between tracks and quiet parts with dbx noise reduction is on another level, it works just as good on vinyl records, there's plenty of good videos showing what dbx noise reduction sounds like on tape and vinyl records, if you haven't already seen them, I highly recommend watching.
With dbx noise reduction, there was no need to go to CDs, the only thing that the CD player offered over tape with dbx was instant track access...
Wow, you really put that well, sir. Lo-Fi is an interesting topic. My favourite Meshuggah cover happens to be a guy playing an old broken acoustic guitar and using pots and pans for drums, the way he manages to make these childish instruments still sound like the band is absolutely mindblowing to me. Simpler times indeed.
Well said!
I couldn’t agree more
I love cassettes full stop having owned 40 tape decks in 54 years being an ex audiophile beautiful things that’s just me mechanical music 😅
22 year old here, don’t have much memory with cassette but as a musician, the Rhodes sounds so beautiful through cassette. I’ve got my hands on an authentic Rhodes mk1 for the next few months and I wanted to record solo piano on it by cassette. Something about cassette has a warmth to it that can’t be described only experienced!
I'm 51 and I can confirm that you indeed get it.
Biggest plus is giving a mixtape to ones mates and potential partners 😊
Hello. I was born in 1961 so I grew up with cassettetapes. I recorded LP's from my older brother and did radiorecordings. I loved it then and I still love it now. I still have some 150 tapes from the past.😃
Every time I find myself wishing that cassettes would just go away (and I often do), I have to remind myself what a great aid they were to songwriting. You could just sit in front of your (paper) notepad and cassette recorder (all the better once you got one with a built-in condenser mic), strum away and wail away, pausing occasionally to scribble down words and chords. Yes, you can do that with your phone now, but it's small and fiddly, and playback is too quiet (on the phone's speaker). Indeed, songwriting is a lot less 'fun' now.
You're so right that phones, and other digital devices for that matter, are fiddly. I liked my cassette dictation machine for writing in the past. Record, play, wind, rewind. All you need really. I speak as a person with a Casio four-function calculator ever-present on my desk.
Cassettes are something special, just like with vinyl, you have to think about what you’re going to listen to. When using a Walkman this means selecting the cassettes to put in you backpack for the day. A cassette is a physical thing, unlike an username or password or the data packets of a streaming service.
I enjoy using and listening to cassettes since I was 5 years old... I'm 52 now. I still use them in my car and at home. The nostalgic feeling is through the roof for me using this medium. On par with this is using Reel-to-reel machine. Yep, I have them too. I won't give this medium up ever.
what about ,the sound quality , don´t know if you play guitar or have notion of how it sounds but most of old cds don´t sound like old recorfds ,the guitars sound perfect not mufled due to digital compression
@@RUfromthe40s Using a well maintained quality tape deck with decent quality cassettes, the sound is fantastic. Using a very good noise reduction system on top of that makes it sound even better.
@@MrPitatom i agree with you but i never used a noise reduction system i prefer the full quality of the cassette deck ,and no noise is heard
At 51, my cassette Luv has been lifelong. My earliest memories of tapes are from kindergarten. As I had a portable recorder and loads of self made mixtapes. That practice would follow into teenage years with recording Hip Hop DJs in NYC. Well into full adulthood, and producing my own music. Tapes have an undeniable quality to them. Those who experience it, typically come to luv the format. Obviously, they are FUN. My other favorites are MDs and Vinyl. I have an equally rich history in both. Keep up the great content. 👍🏾✌🏾✊🏾
These days I'm increasingly grateful for anything that entertains me that doesn't involve screens and passwords and accounts. Plus I grew up in the heyday of cassette and never gave them up. As for the sound quality I've always been very satisfied with it using even half-decent equipment, which until recent years was everywhere. You absolutely don't need a Nakamichi Dragon. A basic Sony Walkman with a good tape used to sound pretty darn good. Car cassette players sounded good. Admittedly nowadays it's not so easy to get clean sound from a cassette and it's a shame. Hopefully this resurgence will spark someone to make good players again.
I thnk it's like wine. A $20 bottle is a lot better than a $10 bottle, but a $50 bottle isn't much better than the $20 one.
You hit a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly - I bet most audiophiles would fail a double-blind test of audio kit - after all, wine tasters can't distinguish pricy wines from affordable ones under those conditions.
I bought a Sony Walkman in 1998, the metal one, and it sounded better than my Goodmans CD player.
@@richardcrook2112 Damn, lucky you. I'm hunting for a direct-drive Walkman but they're like £200+ and that's "I have to save up for it" money on my income.
I just rediscovered cassettes. It's fun, I have a good 3 head deck and it sounds great. And yes, the fact that you actually listen to a complete tape instead of skipping songs on a streaming service is a win.
I’ve recently been contracted by a local merchandising shop (for bands) to duplicate cassettes for them because they were getting so many requests. Personally I love doing it for them and in my head I imagine the Gen Z kid that goes to the show, buys the tape and is blown away that first time that they are “holding” the music of their new favorite band. Fun indeed.
May cassettes never die!
I'm a cassette addict!! There's just something about peeling the wrapper off a 30 yo NOS cassette, tuning the bias and level to record one of my crackly vinyl records!! I'm 13 years old again!!
Congratulations, you're having fun! DM
@@AudioMasterclass And that's what it's all about!
Right on! Cassettes are fun, and many of us even like the lo-fi sound, warm and fuzzy, who cares about perfect sound anyway? A good song/good music is what’s important. And all the clackety-clack and pushing buttons. The ritual. I wished someone at Sony or Aiwa saw the potential and make some move to popularize it❤❤❤
Actually, cassettes can sound pretty amazing!
@@gamingguy9006 True. When played/recorded on a decent quality cassette deck of course. I don't know why so many people think of cassettes as low fi, unless they use cheap portable cassette recorders.
A cassette if recorded on a good deck that is properly biased with the tape, recorded from vinyl or any digital source can get pretty close to the original especially with dbx or dolby s. The majority would not be able to tell the difference. Watch out also for the cheap new knock-off blank cassettes boating high dynamic range such as reshow. The new old stock of any Maxell UR (not the newer UR), TDK D and Sony HF where type I’s were concerned are a difference between night and day compared to what they offer now as new.
It was great fun loading up a shoebox of my favorite cassettes and going on a road trip in the car. Back in my day, cassettes were our form of "file sharing". And a lot of us recorded our vinyl (records) onto cassettes in order to preserve the LP.
They were the mp3s of the eighties ; even as a sound, they were quite similar.
@@carminedambrosio7 MP3s sound horrible. I can get perfectly identical sound as the source out of a Maxell XLII tape and my Nakamichi or 3-Head JVC decks.
@@AudioGuyBrian I don't doubt it. Being able to have a Nakamichi, and using good quality tapes; if I remember correctly the XLII were just before the metal tapes, in terms of quality, and in terms of price! However, many of us enthusiasts in the 80's had to make do with modest two head decks, and it was really hard to get anything good out of those units.
that's so interesting, I grew up in the 2010s and our prefered way of getting music was downloading youtube Videos of it and then converting it to mp3, still have files from back then and they go on every smartphone I own. I get my music like that to this day. these days there are even really convenient websites where you just put in the youtube URL and it lets you download an mp3 directly.
@@carminedambrosio7 There were plenty of good 2 head decks too. Like AIWA and some JVC units. As well as simple Nak's like the BX1, BX2, BX100 and BX150.
The fun part IS the music.
Streaming services ARE fun when you hear a song or get a recommendation and you can discover so much previously unknown music. Sometimes very obscure. I can like one track without buying the whole album. Having said that I am nostalgic for good cassette decks which I used back in the day. And using MD and DAT is fun for me because I could never afford them untill now, after completing repair projects. I don't get the fun of music carved into lumps of black plastic but each to their own.
I remember getting a cassette recorder as a kid (about 1970) and I had a blast with it. I would record off the radio, I'd record myself making music (which my mom encouraged as long as I "kept it down"). Within a few years, I would be writing scripts and recording myself doing "interviews" where the respondent would be clips from songs (a la Dickie Goodman). I'd record off of vinyl by holding the microphone in my hand near my little turntable's built in speakers. The sound quality was about as bad as it could be, but man oh man was it a lot of fun. I love the intricacies and options of recording today, but I doubt it will ever have the same joy as that.
I’ve begun cassette taping old John Peel Shows from TH-cam and enjoying playing them back just as I used to back in the late 70s!! Fun doesn’t even begin to describe it. So very satisfyingly fun and warmly nostalgic.
For me, cassettes are nostalgia. I’m in my early 50s. Greetings from 🇦🇹/🇸🇰!
I know a bit about the music scene from the former Yugoslavia but nothing about the music scene from the former Czechoslovakia. What were you guys listening to when you were young and cool?
I love the different designs of tape cassettes companies used. I love picking up tapes and listen to the music that is recorded on it. I love hunting for tapes when i go thrift-shopping or go to fleamarkets.
I think a more accurate term to use is "rewarding". It's very satisfying to make excellent recordings on properly calibrated equipment using good quality cassettes, and cassettes CAN sound really good.
Of course, cassettes aren't for everyone. Some people prioritize convenience and achieving the highest fidelity audio possible, and that's fine. Digital audio files and streaming does have its place. Whichever you prefer, just enjoy the music.
It’s a cassette adjacent I tell….a 5 year old, flung into daycare then bussed on a field trip to Lake Helena in 1975. Smaller than the other kids, picked on for the pecking order and forced to take naps that were foreign to me. The bus driver who had the Glen Campbell ‘Like a Rhinestone Cowboy’ 8 track single that flipped and played, flipped and played making me nostalgic for something that never was, so anger took its place and to this day….48 years later, I still can’t stand that song. Oh how music can inspire, make you feel and sometimes those feelings are just pure, distilled anger. First time I was ever conscious of being flat out annoyed, verging on only what I can now only identify as being pissed off! Why am I here…and who is responsible for flinging me amongst strangers in a bus to nowhere? Needless to say, I never went back. I must have raised hell about it for the very first time in this 5 year olds life. It must have been a reasonable temper tantrum.
I was a pretty chill little boy as I couldn’t hear until I was 3 and as soon as I could, I keyed into the music….just not ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. It has never left me and the first time I heard music that didn’t come from a record, the radio or a TV.
The fun in cassettes for me is taking a cool-looking cassette that came with crap tape or whose tape is damaged, and replacing it with new tape. Got a bunch of ferric BASF cassettes that came with evangelical sermons recorded on them, and I've been putting the tapes from them in others for recording over with Vaporwave playlists and cool albums I like.
But another fun thing to do is actually use the crappy/damaged tape.
I have an album on tape (Smile, by Princex) that was made when the artist was in a bad living situation so it wasn't perfectly recorded (the tape has dropouts, the ending of one song repeats for some reason, and on top of that, it got chewed by one of my tape players at one point), and it's my absolute favorite album. So, to make a copy for listening that was as authentic as possible, I bought a lot of 22 Disney kids story tapes and recorded the album on a red one (same color as the original) off TH-cam Music, and the crappy old tape actually captured the vibe from the original tape perfectly.
I've listened to it like 50 times since I recorded it a couple weeks ago hahaha
cassettes are fun for me because they tend to be the much more affordable form of physical media. Vinyls retain their value really well but cassettes you can for really cheap. a while ago I got about 60 cassettes for $10 and I really enjoy listening to music ive never heard before on this slow, combursome, but tactile form of music. What can i say, I find it very satisfying and stimulating, but I presume we all have our own unique quirks lol. And yes im only 20 hence why I haven't heard any of these songs before.
If you're discovering unknown albums for the first time, you don't even need instant track skip. Just put it on, and let the vibe wash over you til the album's done.
In the late 80s tapes were awesome. As a guitar player in Bands and a home recording enthusiast, giving tapes to girls of my bands and music……sweeet memories.
Always fun with the biro to rewind stuck tapes and the way the sound completely changed when the cassette heads got dirty with the added bonus of speed variations as the tapes got tighter and tighter. Somewhere I’ve still got the little tape splicer gizmo for when the tape leader snapped off the tape. The good old days maybe not but I still can not bring myself to chuck my tapes away many of which are replicated in cd form 😂
David my ears love the sound of casettes and nothing will persuade me otherwise 😊
If you're getting the sound you want and the 'cassette fun' then it's win-win. DM
I love making my own cassettes. All you need is a decent cassette deck w/ record level control, hook it up to your computer's 3.5mm audio output jack & record anything you like 4 FREE!!! Mixtapes are a complete enjoyment to create & share w/ friends.Recordings sound great when played back on a decent decks or a vintage walkman on powered speakers or headphones. You can even play cassettes back in your car using the aux input & male 2 male 3.5mm cord (keep your cellphone away from the walkman as it will cause interference).
The ubiquitous presence of tape plug-in vsts, bit-reducing plugins, saturation boosting plug-ins, and I would also argue gear like the Empiric Labs' Distressor that is able to introduce pleasing levels of distortion into compression, demonstrate that high fidelity capture of audio is not the be-all-end-all of what constitutes a great recording of a performance/composition. Degradation and modification of audio signal is fun. I have listened multiple times to Mr. Mellor's Tascam dbx recording (a couple of posts back), and I detect a pleasing quality I recognize: modern daws can center the snare forward, spread the space of the Casio, lay-back the dreaming single-coil strat with a vintage vibe, but I believe it would take a very good emulation vst duplicated on all channels and again on master to produce how it is specifically glued together in toto. Perhaps it is the absence of effects, ducking, over-compression, but the recording sounds honest and pleasing to my ears, and I choose to believe tape four track tech is that little extra something I detect and enjoy. I also believe the making of that recording was likely "fun" in a way that sitting before a daw screen can never be. That said, I would never give up daw for tape. It is a nostalgic novelty. And tapes are maddeningly finicky.
Yes it was fun, which I remember from close to 40 years ago. If I tried to do it today it would be work. DM
" I believe it would take a very good emulation vst duplicated on all channels and again on master to produce how it is specifically glued together in toto." Harrison Mixbus DAW software offers exactly that! It can be used in any arbitrary modern production style, but by default it replicates the signal path, workflow, and subtle analog warm-up effects of a high end analog console. Also, SSL and Abbey Road offer plugins replicating both channel strips and glue-adding mix stages of meticulously modeled analog consoles.
I grew up with LPs and vinyl, but my main days were during the cassette days, and later on CDs. Engaging with a cassette to hear “a song” is an event. It requires intent and effort. You have to either just resign yourself to listening to the album up to the song you want, or you have to seek through the album to find the spot you want.
Get there, hear the song in all its glory, and then have to rewind back through it to listen again, giving you that downtime between listens, again, requiring engagement and intent.
It’s a subtle thing that I wonder if future generations will even wonder about, but it was how I discovered all the formative music of my life.
All that said… don’t discount Spotify. Sharing playlists with my friends and family, to me, hearkens right back to the days when I would make a mix tape of the most life shattering caliber that everyone would have to have a copy. I miss that about cassettes, and I think Spotify has done a decent job of making that experience accessible to the modern age.
Also, Spotify does an annual breakdown of the songs, artists, and musical styles you listened to the most in a given year. I ALWAYS look forward to this now, and love sharing it with close ones. Spotify, and it’s ilk, are alright in my book.
Now that I cannot hear above 10 KHz, I have revisited cassettes recently. I bought the best portable cassette recorders made by Sony and Marantz and tried every kind of tape and noise reduction. My late father had recorded many TDK SA C90s of a broadcaster called Barnesy (at the Beeb) and spend pleasant evenings listeninng to them. I still continue to collect, restore, use and sometimes resell tape recorders.
As a teenager I had a hifi with casette auto-reverse. It made an awful lot of clunking noises when it did so and made me wonder what exactly was going on within. Did work effectively though and I was spared the inconvenience of turning tapes over.
My memory is hazy but I remember auto-stop being a thing. But did a deck without auto-stop keep on trying to turn the tape at the end? My memory is blank on that. DM
@@AudioMasterclass I did a quick search on that. Apparently all decks stop automatically at end of normal play, however auto stop is for fast forwarding and rewinding, to stop the tape getting stretched by accident. Or so the interweb says.
@@mattylamb658 Aha, if I ever knew that, I'd completely forgotten it. Thank you for the reminder. DM
@@AudioMasterclass My pleasure! 🙂
@@mattylamb658 Not all cassette decks would auto stop at the end of rew or ffw. I can't say if some home stereo component decks didn't. But what I can tell you is, I used some portable and/or walkman-type back then and some of them did not auto stop after rew/ffd. The ones that didn't I had to wait and stop it manually, doing it either before, for example, going to the bathroom or doing it when I came back so that the tape didn't get stretched in my absence. Those applicable decks weren't broken, they just simply didn't have auto stop for the rew/ffd.
And if you have a high end deck with a good quality cassette...........the performance can be surprisingly good, (adding a little analogue warmth if you are recording a digital source!).
Thank you very refreshing video ... Cassette tapes were and are a fun and quality way to enjoy your music...
I like the sound cassettes make in their cases as I pick my way through a bunch of them. They also make a nice rattle if you give them a good shake. :D !
y e s
Thank bloody god im not the only one. Shame a lot of them was released useing cardboard selves around here so no maracas for those few, but they where often bundle releases and demos ect.
Yes, I like cassette tapes for all the reasons mentioned on this video and some reasons of mine. I rarely bought prerecorded cassette tapes. For this I always prefered vinyl records. I do enjoy the devices to reproduce cassette tapes (the cassette decks / the cassette players) because they're small studios and unlike CD players *you can actually do something with them,* namely to adjust close to everything on them, you can take care of them (maintenance), you can even fix them sometimes.
I have some cassette decks, some good ones too, that are in a very good shape.
I do record new tapes from time to time and I do listen to my old tapes, the ones I made, but it has more to do with the music rather than with nostalgia. I listen to mixtapes I recorded and it makes sense bcoz they keep the music I liked during the period I recorded them, tapes that I for example recorded with sound adjustments I prefered for these songs (bass, treble - - - > even adjustments with an equalizer - yes, I did that < - - - ie a small studio in your home).
I still very much like this music, because *it comes from the late 70s, the 80s and the 90s,* not the 60s or the early-mid 70s most of which I consider dead music (dead *in the sense* that unlike the former periods I mentioned, the latters you cant listen to a whole LP except for historical reasons and with very few bands as an exception), whereas I still discover music from the late 70s and mostly the 80s that amazes me. The late 70s and the 80s music endured the test of time (my opinion) and not a comment about the 90s music on this..
I still record tapes because Im a cassette generation boy stuck with some hundreds of CDs most of which I now dont want to listen to.
*Curiously enough* this never happened with the music I have on Vinyl and cassettes. Strange isnt it? I mean, I was very excited with the CD as a media, only to realize that it doesnt suit the way I want to listen to music.
*EDIT:* there's also the matter of the poor sound quality, which largely is true, but as you said a good deck minimizes this issue. But when you're a fun of music genre known as "Lo Fi", as I am, you easily overcome these issues. Large part of my music is Lo Fi artists and bands.
Conclusion: cassette tapes are in every way more fun than CDs and other digital media.
My hopes: with the vinyl revival a fact, at least some of the companies that produced blank cassettes to start producing them again. I mean, depending on the seller today you need up to 10€ for normal position tape or up to 50€ or more for a chrome and a fortune for a metal tape...
PS: I did tried to keep this comment to a reasonable size
I love this take on cassettes! I will say that when I hold a tape in my hands I don't worry about beating it up like a vinyl, and that removes a lot of stress, thus opening the door to fun !!
The thing that was fun about the Philips EL3301 recorder was hidden inside the case - its circuit diagram. As we had young eyes back then we could unfold this tiny bit of paper and copy out the circuitry. I then bought the much cheaper Philips cassette player and added the record circuitry as a plug-in addition, made from various cheap transistors and other bits. The only thing missing was a means of erasing tapes. This could be made from any junked mains transformer with E and I laminations. The "I" lams were removed and the "E" lams arranged the same way round. This generated a nice magnetic field, heat, vibration and humming noises and wasn't exactly "safe" but it did the job.
Cotton buds were needed to clean the loose oxide, that some tapes left behind, from the head, pinch roller, tape guides and the general insides of the deck. These cassette player could be used in our cars, which was wonderful. Some of the more adventurous built a DC/AC converter to power a Collaro Studio deck so they could play 1/4 inch tape on 7 inch reels in their cars. Fun days.
You're clearly having the most fun of anyone. DM
Cassettes were fun until 1982 when I grew up and accepted CDs.
I don't know if they're fun, but their unique ability to bring you back from the upside-down is important.
I remember enjoying both my waterproof Sony Walkman as a kid and the Sony Discman as a teenager equally.
I am 82, still listen to cassettes, and love them. Back in the day, my cassettes were recorded on a State of the Art three head deck either with Dolby C or Dolby S. Now years later they still sound good even though my three-head deck is long gone and I only have a Panasonic Walkman (like new) and a Onkya two well deck with Dolby B and C. I have around 150 cassettes, most 40+ years old and they still play well. To my knowledge, I have not had one of those cassettes give up the ghost because of age. There is a warmth you get from a well-recorded cassette you don't get from digital music, CDs, or streaming venues. Yes, they are fun and there are hundreds of thousands of music fans that still love them.
I really like this post. There's nothing like a nakamichi tape deck which has stood the test of time and is beyond cool. Music is to be enjoyed where it emotionally moves you and is not analyzed. I have always felt the industry always pushed vinyl sales because they are still manufacturing everything from turn tables, cartridges, phono amps etc so there's big bucks involved in all this.
No one makes a deck so there's no money for the industry.
I will never forget the first time I heard the nakamichi deck in my teens at their showroom. There's a warmness and spaciousness which truly moves you and that's what music is all about. It's clear and simple.❤
The big thing with casette is actually that you can record your own.
Also they have all the downsides of physical format (need to rewind, specific "sound") which can be interesting alternative to all digital world of today. Listening of casette can be seen as special occasion.
Turns out, the compact disc is also fun.
Turns out, physical media is quite simply fun, as tangibility with the medium is ever so slightly more engaging than clicking through a glorified file picker
Online distribution is fundamentally soulless.
In an era of instant gratification, what makes cassette tapes/vinyl records fun, is the feeling of anticipation.
I have a high end deck from the 90's that still works as good as new, and it can record almost CD quality audio on a type 1 cassette. I even made my own mono deck just for the fun reasons, it also records really well. (I even came up with the schematics for playback and recording).
Cassettes are fun. For me, it's the hardware. I have great fun restoring old decks AIWA, Denon and a Hitach 3D woofer boombox are my recent projects. Some of it is nostalgia but it is also the challenge of fixing a 30+ year-old piece of gear and making it sound as good as new or sometimes better!
Your kind of fun wouldn't be for everyone, but it's an admirable thing to do in its own right. DM
Your channel is definitely fun. What is fun is hearing recordings of myself and my brother when I was 8 or an audio tour of the house I grew up in, but not so much audio recordings of TV shows.
On my nice small personal stereo, not much bigger than the cassette, you could skip tracks thanks to AMS (though you had to wait) and the buttons were nice and soft and not clunky. They were big controls, so you could operate them through your jeans. It also had dolby, which I had switched on. You could listen to the whole tape in one go too, thanks to auto reverse. These players from my late teenage years were much better than thr clunky ones I'd had in earlier years. Still, having to carry 12 cassettes in a box when you went on holiday did spoil the portability compared to taking it out just for the day. Actually the most fun part was deciding which songs by an artist were best and belonged on the tape - copied from the CD. Most of my tapes were single artist compilations. When going on holiday I could take 12 best-ofs.
i use them pretty frequently but don't really rely on them for critical applications, if i want to record a sound but dont care about how good the sound is necessarily they're really fun, i mostly use them for studio effects
My love for this format started very young, around 7 or 8 years old. My father had a top-loading Technics tape recorder and I loved playing with it so much that my father challenged me and explained to me how to record: He was very surprised a few days later because I had discovered how 'Dolby NR' worked which he didn't know and when I explained it to him and made him hear how it worked he said to me: "Hey! Well! You've made a great discovery!" I have always loved cassettes and always will!
One thing to remember is in an odd way reliability. I have cassettes that go back to the 80s that all still play and some live recordings done on a Sony Walkman that sound great still. I have many DATS and cassettes that do not play.
I would expect that if a DAT doesn't play, it's the tape that has degraded and unless parts of it are still OK the recording is lost. A cassette however - If it doesn't play then it's more likely to be a mechanical problem that can be resolved. Of course, there's no guarantee that the tape itself is still OK but a mechanical problem would be my first assumption, resolved by transferring the tape into a new shell. DM
I miss them. Portable cassette players especially. Two ended 3.5 m plug in into my stereo & portable cassette player MAGIC!!
The advantage with cassette is that you start again next time at the point where you left off last time. Very practical mainly when listening to speeches as by trial and error you can rewind the tape and pinpoint the part that you would like to repeat. Digital audio players also allow you to do so but not as easily and precisely. There is still a place for audio cassettes. I've never given up on cassette recorders and players. I've still got two Sony WM D6C and a few others. To this day I've kept my Professional Tascam 122 MK11 mastering cassette recorder.
Back in the heyday of cassettes, I bought and installed the top-of-the-line Pioneer car cassette player in my company cars. Dual capstan, three motors, microprocessor controlled soft touch buttons.
I spent a lot of time on the road and had a pretty darn bitchin' sound system. I also copied over my record albums to metal and high-quality chromium dioxide tapes. I seldom bought pre-recorded cassettes because the quality just wasn't there.
Over time, my cassette library grew to a somewhat ridiculous degree and I still play these tapes once in awhile. My home cassette recorder was an almost top-of-the-line JVC unit with ANRS noise reduction.
Were they fun to play? Definitely. I made cassette inserts using my computer when computers were not commonly found in the home. It was all cutting edge stuff.
I even use an Android app that simulates playing cassette tapes. It's pure nostalgia and I love it.
I would disagree that CDs are where "fun goes to die". They are still a viable medium and much of their problem lies in poor mastering practices taken on by the music industry with their stupid brickwalling ideas.
A fifty dollar Blu-ray player blows away any $500 turntable in terms of audio specs any day. And it's capable for displaying great quality video and surround sound content to boot!
It’s fun because you could record the radio with it with your favourite song. Even my parents have these memories. The noise, the touch. The not skip or fast forward are also fun. It’s a more mindful way of enjoying music. I also found many recordings of me playing guitar. Huge nostalgia factor. Creating a mix tape is also nice
Most fun of all is when the drive belt on your deck melts😉Apart from that design flaw I do still love cassettes. The twin decks took things to a whole new level.
I agree, cassettes are fun! :-) I'm looking at my 39 year old Twisted Sister Stay Hungry cassette right now in fact! I have no idea if it will play or fall apart though... lol
It's not going to take it any more!
Part of the fun was actually shopping and hunting for your LP, 12" single, import copy..... I don't spend much time shopping on Spotify. Record stores were FUN! I didn't get into pre-recorded cassettes but I loved making mix tapes for me and my friends. I still have my early-90s Denon cassette deck.
My first cassette deck was the Advent 201! I thought it was fun to use. Simple layout. A Wolensack transport mechanism that rewound a 90 minute cassette in about 45 seconds. Simple controls , Dolby B, Bias selector for Chrome tapes. Great sound. Fun!
Since i have a high end cassette deck and can record my favourites from digital to good quality tape, yes i think cassettes are fun. Just pop in a cassette and listen to the music without any screens to distract me.
"Without any screens" - I concur. DM
Ecatly the same for me. Dońt get spoiled by the screen and wait for the next song to come …
@@AudioMasterclass I talked with a Pro Tools instructor at NAB who uses the big control consoles. He said by the end of the second day his students don't realize he's switched off the screens, because they are LISTENING rather than looking at the grid!
I love the premise of fun. I was always trying to find the next cassette deck. I had to laugh because I remember how dreadful I was at trying to create playlists using cassettes. I never got the motor spin up time right so there was always this whooop sound. I finally bought an Akai reel to reel hoping I’d be better at it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t!
I had a party about ten years ago that people brought there fav mixed tapes from back in the day🎉. I still have about 150 tapes.
Being a basic sort of bloke, all I can say is that tapes need the love. Collecting them is "fun" . Great video by the way.
Oh, please!!! CD's and their booklets were PLENTY of FUN!
I have not the heart to dispose of my cassette collection. I still have a Walkman professional kicking around somewhere along with its microphone! But all my decks are gone.
I had a love hate relationship with cassettes because of the efforts needed to get decent sound from them.
I have fond memories of the mixtapes I was given and made for others. Recording FM radio, especially live gigs.
Preserving live concerts does seem to be a legitimate use as much broadcast material was disposed of by broadcasters. DM
The MOST fun was buying an album on vinyl, immediately recording it to a high bias cassette while listening to the whole thing for the first time (and while the record was in it's best shape), THEN listening over and over again in my car where the engine and road noise made "ultimate high fidelity" not that big of a deal. Vinyl was for home listening, cassettes for portability,
And let's not forget making our own mix tapes. Much more fun than dragging and dropping titles into a playlist.
For the TRUE experience, back in the day we could buy concert tickets for $15 a piece for stadium shows and hear true high fidelity - live.
For me it's an enjoyable, nostalgic hobby. I like to discover new music and bands, maybe on the radio or through social media, then make a cassette recording of it from a streaming service. I like the process of choosing a blank tape and trying to get the best from it. I have to wait and monitor the recording in real time (no drag & drop) so I actually get to listen to the album. At the end, I have a physical, collectable item to come back to. Tapes aren't perfect, but neither is my 50 year old hearing. And I'm far more likely to peruse my recordings 6 months later and replay an album, whereas with streaming I just forget about it.
Yes. I get great enjoyment of getting a perfect Type II or Type iV tape copy of a new vinyl record I purchased so I can play the record one time, put it away, maybe later sell it in Mint of Mint- condition to get the biggest return on it. I have over 760 cassettes that I bought high quality still sealed Maxell XLII or XLIIS blanks for. My entire 1,000+ vinyl albums are now on tapes. I have 12 quality cassette decks with a few non-working parts decks of the same models for spare parts if ever needed. It is a very enjoyable hobby and the sound can be so good it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the source (CD, LP, or Digital) and the tape you recorded it on.
Sounds like you're having a ball. I get buying the record, importing it once, and saving it. I personally can't imagine having a thousand cassettes and a dozen mechanical decks, rather than two hard drives (music library and backup) with one old laptop on a closet shelf as dedicated music player. And then remote controlling that by phone or tablet from any room. But if pulling the right cassette out of your archive and popping it into a working deck makes you happy, go for it!
I remember having recorded in TDK Metal cassettes and the sound is fantastic ! Crystal clear and in many ways better than CDs! i still have them although the sound quality has diminished a little bit.
I still use records, CD, cassettes and Minidisc. Records and CD for quality listening, cassette for the car and minidisc for fun. I like the nostalgia of cassette but they don't sound the best even on my nakamichi. So my favourite for fun would be minidisc all the benefits of cd and quality recording all the fun and nostalgia of cassettes without the bad sound and mechanical issues.
I liked transparent cassettes. I would watch the music move from one reel to the other, which was strangely satisfying.
Nostalgic. Brings back memories. I remember the drive belts needed to be replaced after certain number of years, unless it is a direct drive unit. I've got to pull out my Nakamichi player and old tapes.
I had a lot of fun taping cassettes, making up tapes to send to penpals, recording borrowed albums from friends and libraries - FUN!
Great video. Cassettes were fun because you were given this blank slate to record mix tapes, then take markers/pens and do your own artwork & labeling across the blank inserts & stickers. Eventually you had these racks of colorful cassette cases, the art perhaps influenced by the images that came to mind from the music. It created a very personal connection to your collection.
I was suprised when getting a newer cassette deck with Dolby B NR on it.
Those cassettes that were recorded for it sound soooo extremely good, almost as quiet as a cd
I think you'd love listening to the tapes I listen to in my car. Old rave mixtape with loud crusty electronic music uploaded to TH-cam in iffy quality that I then ripped with TH-cam dl and recorded to another tape 😂.
I still have hundreds of recordings made in the 1970's 80's and 90's which sound new. I'd always made high quality recordings on good tape medium, so they always sound great. This is all fun to me.
I'm not normal then.. I can get amazing sound from cassette with a Sony tc-s1 using Dolby S.. even on cheap Maxell's URs
There were so many high quality cassette decks out there throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s besides Nakamichi. I've always maintained my decks properly and used high-quality Tapes. Therefore i never experienced Cassettes as a low fidelity format.
I still own and use 2 cassette decks. An ariston and a marantz. With care, using the right tape, recordings can get very close in sound quality to the original. I can make my own playlists easily. These decks do need regular maintenance. Head cleaning demagnetizing etc but it's great when you record to tape and get great results. I can then play them in my aiwa Walkman player. This machine sounds amazing when used with good headphones.
Today it's so difficult to find an headphone with a retro style and not crappy. When I was young, any regular headphone was amazing sound quality and solid as a rock.
I agree with you, it's incredible how good decks could sound beautiful with such poor media
from 1979 till 2002, Cassettes was the convenient way to transport and record music. And I used to have my recorder on standby when I rehearsed with one of my bands. The cassette was easy and durable. and you could listen to your rehearsal in the car driving home. I bougt many pre-recorded tapes during those days, because you could play them at home and on the go. But the most important thing if you are planning to get into cassettes: buy a good deck. With a good deck, cassettes can get close to the quality of any other format avaliable. A good ferric will often do, but If you want an upgrade, a type 2 of different formulas can still be avaliable in old stock unopened. The prices on unopened metal-tapes these days are insane, så get a good cheap quality ferric like maxell UR, then you are good to go.
I have on Sony boombox in late 80's and it comes with Automatic Music Search, while playing, you can press rewind or fastforward and seek a silent part of thr tape for at least 4 seconds and automatically resume playing. It potentially wearing out your tape and tape heads, but it is the closest thing to a digital player skip button.
Cassettes were the first format for music that I ever used, as we didn’t get our first CD player until 1992. I recently got back into using cassettes a few years ago, and have acquired a few high end 3 head cassette decks. I have a Luxman K-250, an AIWA AD 3800 and I also have a Harman/Kardon CD 191 2 head deck as well. It wasn’t until I got decks like this that I discovered how good tapes can sound. Still not sonically accurate as far as sound quality goes, but it’s not very far off. Cassettes like vinyl (which I also use) have a sound that no other music formats can replicate. They have a warm and engaging sound and also adds nostalgia from a simpler time. One thing I also love about cassettes is that they are the most complex music format. Compared to CD’s where you just put the disc in and press play, with cassettes you have to make sure you have the deck set to the right bias (ferric, chrome, ferric-chrome and metal) which is even more important for recording, and you also have to make sure that the Dolby NR is on or off depending on if it was recorded with it or not. If these settings for the tape aren’t correct, then the tape isn’t going to sound right. I also find it really fun to make mixtapes from different eras, and I believe that this is a lost art. There is a bit of skill required to get the best sound out of a cassette. Not all cassettes can take the same amount of record level so you have to make sure you don’t push the levels too hard, but at the same time get as much signal onto the tape without over saturation.
Like an old fashioned film camera without autofocus and without even auto exposure, there can be pleasure in operating something that requires human skills. I draw the line though at a vintage car with a crash gearbox and manual advance and retard.
The nice thing about a cassette is that it's easier to get it signed by the artist at a gig. CDs and even worse, vinyl is a nightmare to drag to a gig with you, whereas the cassette liner easily goes in your pocket. And to be fair, cassettes were my era... listening to dad's mixes in the car in the 70s, recording the top 40 from the radio on Sunday evening for loading into my first SANYO personal stereo in the early 80s (4xAA batteries!), the cassette player in my first car through the 90s. Even when I moved to the US in 2010, the car I bought there came with a factory cassette deck.
I signed a few CD booklets back in what I like to think of as my heyday. When the fan is prepared with booklet at the ready and a Sharpie, it's easy enough. But it was all a long time ago... DM
I've loved cassette's since I was a kid and its an ever lasting enjoyment. I guess for me the difference between cassette's and vinyl/CDs is that it's recordable by the average person. Vinyl is pressed, CDs are hard coded, but a cassette is reusable, over and over. You can create something personal to you, that represents your personality. No fancy gear, just a deck and a cassette. I think that's why it hasn't died, like the iPod, its a format for you, the individual and it's personal.
There are some with high grade decks like myself, fanatical about tape recording and meticulous about cleaning and demagging them. If you want to get the most out, you must be willing to put out the effort. This is a hobby that can reward your effort. Dolby? I don’t think so, but that is my take on that. As far as I can tell, it dulls the sound and degrades the experience. The key is knowing what level to use with each brand and grade of tape and do not compromise on any of these. I know some will say no Dolby, he must be deaf or daff. It’s a choice and it has worked for more than decades. I don’t kick others for their choice. They will do me the same and we both will be happy. The recording level is critical, but the reward is a cleaner result and none of the residual issues of Dolby’s use. Two Revox B215s and an NAD 6300 make fabulous tapes as do Naks. To each their own. It is fun to me. So would reel to reels be, but way above my price point. Taking care of them is key to the experience. It isn’t a hobby for the lazy or the ones who only look for convenience. Physical media gives you that, but it requires a level of involvement most are not up to. The reward is worth the effort. Only you can decide if you are up to it.
(From David) we have several hundred (yes, 300-400) home recorded cassettes [mostly recorded directly from LP on a Technics turntable] to allow multiple listenings, & listening devices while limiting album wear. It is surprisingly "fun" to pull out a cassette from the case and listen to music "from another time"...
well i just started to record cassettes again in 2017 ,this started by restoring a pioneer CT-959 ,till today i already record 90 cassettes from cds and records i have , being my favorite songs, and what surprised me more was the sound with a good chrome cassette or cobalt sounded several times better than the cd i recorded from, the cassettes i had bought from a warehouse several years after stop seeing cassettes for sale anywhere and they sold me so cheap that i bought from TDK sa-x maybe 500 cassettes and from sony UX-pro maybe 200 of c-90 and other 200 of C-60, also some type I the SXI from maxell around a 100 cassettes of c-60 and another 100 from C-90 also some older BASF chrome maxima till 85 also super-chrome till 84,all costed me 100€ because if i didn´t take them they would throw them to the garbage, also bought around 150 Minidiscs from TDK all black , i remenber simpler times when hi-fi was hi-fi and one would listen to music whatever one had at home, i never thought that my first turntable a PL-43 from pioneer today it would deliver better sound than a 4.000€ pro-ject, it´s evolution
Great memories, as stated in comments under your previous videos on this topic, but I don’t see myself reaching back to this any time soon. Thanks for the video!
Cassette tapes are simultaneously the sweetest cat's meow, and also the biggest piece of shit. It's like taking a picture with a century old giant box camera with a cheap lens which uses 4 by 5 film. It works, most often beyond wonderfully, but sometimes only with the greatest time spent and effort made. Does anybody want to rebuild their old 1955 Chevy? - The same sort of idea -
Fun, fun!!!! Oh yes I had endless fun when my tape recorder chewed my newly purchased big country’s the crossing cassette twirling a bic pen around the little cog wheel for hours to wind the tape back in….only to find it was twisted and played fields of fire backwards. I’ll give you fun!!!!!!
I sold hi-fi in the 70s and early 80s. I still have thousands of LPS. And several turntables. Vinyl is awesome.
I currently have about a thousand tapes. I have a couple of good cassette decks. I used to have some good nakamichi and Denon cassette decks and recorded every album I bought onto a cassette tape so I could play the tape rather than the record and wear out the record. I even have some of those tapes. TDK SA90's. And they still give records a run for their money.
But I hang on the cassette for pure nostalgic value. Recordable CD's made them utterly obsolete.
Yes, recordable CDs. Perfect sound but were they fun? DM
@@AudioMasterclass more fun than a cassette. I didn't need to keep a pencil handy. 🤣
Nice one and nice channel too. I learn and have a laugh at the same price. 😊
Definitely fun to use , fun to search for and collect, I'm in france , I still manage to find new old stock , even chrome cassettes . Minidisc I also enjoy .
I think it is healthy to challenge the idea that absolutely everything has to be optimized for cost, convenience - or even quality. If it's about the enjoyment, the "surrounding aspects" can play a more important role.