CASSETTES SUCK! NO They DON'T! WHO Got It RIGHT?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 พ.ค. 2024
- Do you love the audio cassette format or do you hate it? Cassettes are having a moment right NOW! Is all of that attention from Cheap Audio Man and others warranted... or just a lot of hot air. I give all the pros and cons! And I'll reveal some of my personal cassette tape collection. Please leave ALL your comments below: Favorite cassettes and tape decks! If you can't be bothered with them... just tell me that, too. Thanks for joining me! PLEASE LIKE and SUBSCRIBE!!!
Everybody's talklin' about cassettes these days!
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In the late 80's, I bought a new Nakamichi CR-3A from High Fidelity here in Austin. It was loaded, digital readouts, 3 discrete tape heads, Dolby B and C, adjustable head bias. It was my most expensive component purchase to that point at $550. It sounded great and worked flawlessly. I sold it in 1996 when I transitioned to CD. I wish I still had it.
The one advantage of aging 63 my hearing now matches the fidelity of the cassette !! Still love the format also grew up with it . Have multiple decks because the belts can be a nightmare which makes them disposable ! Keep up the great content .
I should have talked more about the belts. Oh, the belts! Thanks for the watching!
Cassettes are complete trash! 🗑️😆
I just gave away all my cassettes to a good friend of mine who's just getting into the "audiophile" scene. He collects The Beatles on vinyl normally, so I was quite pleased when I had heard he was interested in what some old fart was listening to in the 80's and 90's.
I was listening to Country Joe and the Fish, AC/DC, Billy Idol - my tastes were (and still are) kind of all over the place. It makes me happy knowing someone much younger is getting into our little group.
I am also all over the place with music, from Jazz, Blues, Pop to Heavy right through with a little classical depending on mood and temperature 😂. I think it is normal that at a certain age we just love it all reminiscing on stages off our our lives 🎶✌🏼
We welcome everyone into our big circus tent! Thanks for watching!
Raise your hand if you remember that "boo boo de beep" tone sequence XDR tapes started with.
I don't remember that. Did it send a signal for the deck to calibrate itself???
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog th-cam.com/video/IjbhsFbvBUg/w-d-xo.html
I have exactly 111 cassette tapes in my collection. I still play them all in one of the 5 restored vintage decks I own. On my Nakamichi and Technic decks people don't believe its a tape playing.
As someone who came of age as vinyl was on the down side and cd's were on the rise, cassettes were the only real way to take your music with you. It's pure nostalgia, cassettes make me remember being on the bus going to school with my Walkman or listening to what I wanted to on long car rides to the Jersey shore. Learning how to make mix tapes, so that you had the proper timing on both sides of the cassette or just the thought of what kind of mix tape you were making from what cd's, other cassettes or even vinyl that you had. It was a really cool mental exercise, that taught you life skills that I still have to this day. But, 1989-1998 me would have been blown away with streaming and the quality that we have today and that we can recharge our devices.
Almost same experience here. For those of us that grew up with cassette tapes, most of us listened to them on cheap cassette decks (at home or in the car) or on our boom boxes. Fast forward to today, purchase a 1990's high-end audiophile cassette deck on the cheap...and it's a real treat to finally listen to tapes on a good system. Sidebar: I used to record my vinyl records on cassette tapes and then store the record away unless something happened to the tape. I owe cassette tapes for saving my vinyl records from wear and tear.
"Sound of the case"!!! Such a spot on comment!!!
I frequently re-visit some of my cassettes that were taped in the late 1980s - early to mid-90s!!! I witness no deterioration in their sound!!!
Back in the day my best friend put his cassette recorder next to his black and white TV speaker while "Imagine The Film" was on and boom!!! At the cost of a blank cassette, I had a full album at my disposal!!! Ooh, the memories!!!!! (Yes, I do play that cassette from time to time even in 2024!!! I now own multiple copies of the vinyl and the CD, but that crudely recorded cassette carries all the memories!!!)
Its not sbout fidelity, its about listening to an album in its entirety. These days we tend to pick and choose songs instead of sitting and listening to an album all the way through. When i was younger id often find the best songs where the ones that werent released as singles and the only way you came across them was by listening to an entire tape or cd.
I totally agree!
I loved cassettes. I had a cassette recorder like yours when I was a teen and would put the mic in front of the speakers just like you. I bought my first cassette deck in 1977. It was a Teac and the tapes sat vertically. My favorite was my Harman Kardon. I would make tapes from CDs and people couldn't tell the difference. I still have a Sony deck with Dolby B,C and S somewhere. I never bought pre recorded tapes. I would buy an album, record it and put it away.
CDs really taped alot better than vinyl as the sorce. I still do use cassette to record TH-cam music . A good deck makes all the difference and three heads doesn't guarantee good. Certainly helps though. Really like the early eighties decks. My JVC DD-7 has been nice and that is a second ( at least ) hand . Definitely the best in a long short lived series of belt drive 3 head decks. It got used daily at work in a bicycle shop it got few hours a day use for 15 years five days a week. It still is working....thank to it's trendieness those 39 cents a pound cassettes mixed in with the toys at St Vincent pound store are always gone in the first hour of the day. Plenty of empty cassette carriers. Those radio series programs would often yield 10 nice TDK D-90s (simular sony and maxell) that probably were played one or two times so they recorded like new. The DD-7 really did a nice job with these. That DD-7 could have replaced maybe 2 years ago for $150 this year I'm looking at $450. I didn't have the 150$ at the time.... now I do but don't have the $450 available. Hopefully this will be short lived since there aren't new machines and decent low priced blanks.
My first deck was a Toshiba top loader with VU meters. Its was my favorite thing!
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog my first cassette deck was a Marantz SD 1000 . It had two speeds. I could record at 3.75 ips with a TDK D-90 and usually get each side of an album to fit on each side of a tape.so it was like playing a vinyl album. The advantage in sound quality was easily noticed. For a two head deck the high frequency didn't roll off and the low end was solid.
I had a Nakamchi cassette deck, thing of beauty. But I would never never never pay a pre-record tape. I would use mine to make “off site backups” for my friends LP’s. Using high bias tapes, good quality tape and Dolby-C you were never lacking for highs, but took care of the hiss. I would A B the orignal vinyl, and the version I record, you could not tell the difference.
When I was a young adult, all of my friends had cassette decks, but I can't think of anyone who bought pre-recorded cassettes. If we wanted a tape to play in the car, we'd just record it from the record album. 45 minutes a side corresponded nicely with the length of most albums but I'd usually have a few 100 minute tapes on hand for the few albums that required the extra time.
Recording was somewhat of an art form; setting the levels to match tape type (VU meters were cooler than light indicators) and choosing Dolby On/Off and B/C. We usually shunned high speed dubbing if avoidable. My Sony ES had a headphone jack with volume control, which came in handy. Then you'd knock out the tab to prevent accidentally recording over something. If you change your mind, a strategically- applied piece of scotch tape allows recording again.
You're right that the physical nature of the medum; i e., the case, dropping the cassette into the player, etc. is kinda cool.
Yeah... it was/is such a great total experience, and we had to learn how to become little recording engineers!!!
Yup. Same as I said on Randy's post. Cassettes are a pure nostalgia play for me. Takes me back to waiting for that song to come on the radio so I could catch it and record it with my old GE cassette player as a teen, and how my Aiwa player and suitcase full of cassettes got me through 10 years on a ships in the Navy.
Pure nostalgia. And the sound was good enough considering the quality of the headphones that they came with.
Think I might get a player just to blow my daughter's minds.
I also carried a box of cassettes on my ship and a crappy little mono cassette player. It did get me through some lonely times too.
I guarantee it won't blow anyone's mind 😊
I remember my two favorite tapes out at sea were Document by REM and Ghost in the Machine by The Police. Dang I want to order those albums now.
I taped a lot of King Biscuit Flower Hours!
@@mikecampbell5856Hey, Man... if it got you through then it has to be alright!
I have two Optimus SCT series dual-well units, a Tascam 112, and a B&O 1900 with a very important stash of brand new Type II, and Type I tapes. My plan is to maximize my FM Stereo selections big time.
You're INTO IT!!!
Remember the smell of those 80's WEA tapes? Maxell blanks had a distinct smell as well.
I have a distinct smell.
I got a decent, late 80's, dual cassette Onkyo deck earlier this year. I've been using it quite a bit lately. Picked up some used cassettes at my local record store. Since I couldn't play them at the store, getting them home and finding out how good the tape sounds is part of the fun, as long as the tapes are only a buck or so a piece.
I was a little hard on cassette sound... some people have indicated I got it wrong.
I started getting cassettes again six months ago or so. There are tons of albums I’ll never be able to find or afford. So I started looking for them on tape. I also found a really nice Yamaha tape deck. And I have to say I’ve been incredibly impressed with how good they sound. I’m running the player through a Marantz EQ-20 and a Marantz 2226b receiver into Kenwood speakers and it sounds fantastic. So now I’m just buying the hell out of tapes whenever I can find them.
Where is your Reel to Reel? I have Vinyl, Cassettes, 8 Track, Reel to Reel… I love cassettes, have boombox in kitchen, Tape deck in room, Double tape deck in basement to make your own comp… My teen days were cassettes, waiting for the top 6 @ 6 with fingers on play/record… Nostalgia
My reel to reel is done busted!!! It was a Sony Quadaphonic!
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog You kept your reels?
My Madness One Step Beyond just broke after 40 years. Everything else still plays, even after a long break! Had some fun!
When I was 12 my Walkman was my favorite thing. One day at school my batteries died, I didn't have money so I stole some from the store and got busted. Instead of getting the beating I expected my dad didn't look or speak to me. It was so impactful that I have never stolen anything since.
I was way more afraid of my dad than any store owner or cop, that's for sure!
You're a liar, you just stole my heart. 😂
Great video, I really enjoyed this one and identified with a lot of your comments. I still have a couple of thousand cassettes but the biggest problem that I have found is that the cassette decks don’t last forever and I have several broken down ones in my garden shed that are uneconomical to repair.
My man! I had a cassette recorder just like that. I would stick it under the big console TV speaker and record songs off MTV. I also recorded my friends while we played in my room. Some great memories got captured as a result.
I have all my cassettes hanging on the wall, basically for decoration, though I do have a quality player. I'm mostly afraid of damaging them. My first purchase was Madonna's "Like A Virgin". For a young boy that cover was all I needed 😂
Yep... keep those good memories comin'!
I used to use a LOT of cassettes - and all of them were cassettes that I recorded. Mostly from LPs - to be able to listen to the music w/o wearing my LPs. I also made a lot of mixed music tapes - because we only had cassettes in our cars for our own music. I included songs from CDs on the mixed tapes.
I *never* bought prerecorded cassettes - because the tapes themselves were not very good - the oxides sometimes visibly came off the tape each time you played them. And they were mostly high-speed duplicates.
I always used high bias or metal tapes, and I always used Dolby B or Dolby C if I had it. My first cassette deck was a B.I.C. - and it didn't last long in my system. From then on, I only owned Nakamichi decks - the 480Z lasted me a looooooong time. I cleaned it regularly, and later I checked the azimuth. Two capstans and 2 heads never sounded better.
So, I don't use cassettes any more - no cassette players in cars, and most of the time I stream my music. I do play LPs occasionally - so no worries about wearing them out.
Thanks for the memories, Neil! Cassettes are a big part of past, as well!
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog Yes - a lot of music memories involve cassettes. I still have my mixed music cassettes - I have been hoping to put together playlists based on those tapes - because the order that I chose to put songs in - are a big part of my memories.
I like the Phil Collins image - well done!
When recorded well a chrome tape with dolby B can sound amazing, with less disturbances than vinyl for way less money. I do tend to play vinyl more though.
I loved cassettes! I wore out my Walkman in high school and college. Not sure if I'll get get back to them - I already have too much gear!
It's a disease... be glad you don't have it!
Great video Bob! They were never meant to be audiophile quality. Just good enough and versatile. All my favorites on a mixed tape....and enough room for an album on each side. What's not to love
Plus a tape fit nicely in your back jeans pocket!
I have it easy here because I don't consider myself an audiophile. Such a relief just leaving that word behind. I just like to listen to music. Back in 2007 I inherited a Ford pickup with a cassette deck. So I bought some used cassettes at a yard sale and on Ebay. Then I found a Sony dual cassette deck at a yardsale. The Ford is long gone but I just replaced the belts in the Sony last year and I still play my Eagle's and Little Feat and Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix and etc etc. Most important thing with cassettes is having the right noise reduction for the tape. Some prerecorded tapes have Dolby and some don't and it makes a huge difference. Especially trying to play a tape recorded in Dolby on a deck that doesn't have it, which is what I suspect our boy Randy was doing.
We had to be little recording engineers just to get our stuff to play right!
It's the only portable analog hif-fi format that allows you to take the experience with you. If sound quality is an issue, you're not doing it right. Cassettes can literally go from pure shit to sky's the limit in terms of sound quality. It also gives you the satisfaction of interacting with a physical format.
I dug out my few cassettes that I have from the late 80s and 90s. Pre-recorded ones had deteriorated but still listenable while the ones I recorded myself, mainly on TDK AD tape sound as perfect as they were back then with no noticeable loss of quality whatsoever. In the late 90s I couldn’t understand how cassettes were still so popular with the beginning of recordable CDs and Minidiscs and yet most stereos were still being made with double cassette decks and pre-recorded cassettes still being sold and never thought that cassettes I had then would still be playable 25 years into the future, as I didn’t have much confidence that a such a thin felexible tape with a magnetised pattern as a recording was going to stand the test of time, It’s also quite amazing that a humble tape format invented way back in 1963 would remain popularity into the new millennium at all, let alone regain popularity in the 2020s.
It was me, I cleaned out all the good tapes in Austin!
Pre recorded cassettes that tear up in car cassette players are usually terrible. In home recording freed me of the tyranny of records. A good deck running Dolby C. If you pushed the VU meters, it would sound pdg. I bought a DBX noise reduction device. It really made them silent and enabled you to keep the highs.
Some of us just appreciate the good parts of cassettes Bob. I still love mine too.
"Sit back and listen keenly while I play for you a brand new musical biscuit." One the best opening lines in a song ever.
C'Mon Every Beatbox from B.A.D. is still a fantastic tune.
I like ""The Globe!"
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog Another excellent track. That "sneeze scream" and bless you at the open is a great beat set. Let's be honest B.A.D. were simply awesome.
LOL "where's the party officer?"
Sounds like I'm sitting on a gold mine of cassettes...somewhere in a case. I even have a Harman Kardon CD Transcription Quality tape deck in its box that I didn't bother to integrate into my system after my last move. It was great for creating portable mix tapes when I had something that still played them and lacked digital options. My nostalgia play is vinyl as I have better sounding portable options, including my iPhone. I can understand if tape plays a personal nostalgia role in your memory of music enjoyment, but I'd rather listen to better sounding music and apply that to my memories of what I was doing when I had a Walkman playing the soundtrack of my youth.
I own a Nakamich 580 that is in great shape & when I bias it with a Maxell XL II or TDK SA its sounds very close to CD quality to me. I use to have a Nakamich 600ii that I bought in the late 70's. The tapes I made from that have held up very well. I made mix tapes for friends & significant others & there was nothing more fun than putting those together. I have to often do a far amount of searching for NOS Chrome cassettes but have continued to find a supply to keep recording with. Cassettes were the first medium to bring high quality audio to portablity & I will never let mine go!
I don't think I've ever heard a quality factory recorded cassette but my home recorded tapes using high quality tape (Maxell, Memorex or TDK, chrome or metal) on my NAD or Tascam decks, rivals all my other formats.
Good home recordings definitely ruled!
I think your mind would change if u heard mazzy star so tonight I might see, particularly the hard to find promo cassette. Even played on a cheap Toshiba, stunning.
The issue for me wasn't about tapes, it was about hawking a $109 player when there's a $20 alternative that (probably) has the same innards with more functionality (auto stop, terrestrial radio). The cheap audioman should acknowledge the cheaper alternative. I use a component tape deck to record my vinyl to cassette, then listen to the cassette at the gym or while I'm out and about; you can't convince me that the $20 Jensen on Amazon isn't better than the $109 Amazon option he listed. The only advantage is the rechargeable battery, but you can buy a LOT of batteries for the $89 difference.
For sure!
In the before time in the long, long ago, cassettes were a means to an end. Mostly for making mix tapes for the car or home, and recording records so you could play the tape and not damage the vinyl. I got my first deck in 1977 and I still have it (a Teac A-106). I replaced the belts a couple years ago, and got a Tascam 122 a year after that. The 122 is a 3-head deck and much easier to use than my 2-head. In addition to new belts and idler, it needed some work which took me almost a year to do. Both decks run fine now but I just use them as nostalgic "toys" to play my old tapes and make a few new ones. I always liked cassettes and still do. Using good tape they sound quite good.
I had and still have a Nakamichi Dragon among many other decks I've owned or still own, I dreamed of owning one since reading about it as a high school kid in 1983 and finally realized my dream with a nice used one in 1995 and I'll NEVER part with it--and YES with the deck calibrated to the tape (an entirely manual process with this deck for both level and bias for each channel, after making sure both the bias and EQ switches are set correctly for the tape) tapes recorded in Dolby B or C sound GREAT and hard to discern from the source. And with a good deck I'd say the whole complexity of different tape types and calibration for them and different types of noise reduction, if you're as OCD as I am I'd say that is a PLUS because you're getting more fully involved in the recording and playback process! Just subscribed by the way! 🙂
A couple of positives that you missed. The gear was cool. The Sony Walkman and Boomboxes! The mix-tape was awesome. You could create your own custom hits tape by recording tracks from your records. Cassettes were great for playing in the car.
I have an Aiwa XKS 7000 - it sounds amazing - had it serviced now it sounds truly amazing
Cassettes were my favorite format...I had a car with a cassette player until 2013! The stereo ended up dying on me and I wanted another stereo for the car and I didn't want a cheap ass $20 cassette deck from Walmart or something. I wanted something high quality....but obviously, that wasn't easy to find (I didn't have an ebay account at the time, I probably could have gotten a nice Sony, JVC or Pioneer from eBay). But I ended up getting a CD player for my car. Also got a couple subwoofers :)
I had a 1 hour freeway commute and I needed some music to keep me awake. I recorded my records onto cassettes out of necessity and they sounded good in my car. When car makers stopped installing cassette players, all of my cassettes were put in a box in the garage. I never owned a Walkman, so no nostalgia for me.
But with all this talk about cassette tapes, I dug out my dad’s Sony Walkman F1 and with a little Deoxit, it sprang back to life (surprised that the belts hadn’t melted). It sounds fine and maybe I’ll be playing cassettes in the patio this summer.
As always, your video was entertaining and somewhat informative. Thanks!
Cassettes have a full bodied solid sound reflecting the sound acoustics of a music hall studio or concert hall. The 'secret' is that they must be played on good vintage players and the tape path must be cleaned and demagnetized now and then. The heads also must be aligned and the rubber bands must be in good condition. People forget that live music venues do not follow the guidelines of measuring instruments
Tom Jones is amazing. Nobody has a voice like his.
Found a Rotel cassette player on Austin Craigslist for $80 a couple of months ago to replace my old player (belts and rollers were terminal). I have a small collection of old Austin punk rock cassettes, a couple of Daniel Johnson cassettes, etc. Stuff that I can not find on other formats.
I grew up in the 70s. I bought prerecorded cassettes here and there, but I preferred to buy the vinyl and roll my own, usually on TDK AD or SA, and used Dolby B. Today, I wish I hadn't used Dolby because of the potential for mistracking, but I can fix all that today with software. I also have a JVC deck with a pitch control. BTW, Dolby got a bad rap because so many decks weren't properly aligned. If you heard a dull sound from Dolby, it wasn't the Dolby's fault.
I agree. I have a three head onkyo deck with Dolby C and HX Pro. I recorded Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs LPs on Metal and Chrome Maxell tapes and they still sound wonderful. The problem is that they do not sound great on older decks. Example, I have an Old Pioneer top of the line deck from 1976 (CT-F9191) along with my Pioneer SX-1250 and Old Pioneer HPM 1100 speakers. Tapes made on the Onkyo Deck either with Dolby B or C (I made Dolby B tapes for my boom boxes and car stereos in 80s) and both sound poor on the old pioneer. With that said, when recording directly on Pioneer tapes with dolby enabled sound OK, but I agree, on the old pioneer, defeating the dolby switch does help in the highs. Great video.
Just can't agree with the sonic inferiority part. Yeah, some prerecorded tapes don't sound great, especially if they've haven't been stored properly i.e the car etc. However, cassettes that I've recorded from high-quality analog or digital sources sound amazing. Eating tapes has never been an issue for me, as I have always kept the tape path of my decks clean. Demagnetizing tape heads regularly will also prevent high frequency loss in many cases. Confusion about tape types? Most decks build in the mid to late 80s, 90s, and early 2000s had automatic tape type detection and selection, taking the guesswork out of it. Even a deck with manual tape type selection wasn't that complicated to operate. I think if one gets poor quality sound from a tape deck, it's either an inferior machine to begin with, a poorly maintained machine, poorly stored cassettes, or operator error.
What's next? Waxing nostalgic for 96kbps MP3 and how magical it was to download music for free and infect your computer with downloads from Limewire?? I had a ton of tapes when I was young. Yes they were convenient, they sounded fine(ish). I spent ages listening to them with those awful orange foam headphones, and that's exactly why I don't give the kids grief about their listening habits.
Loved the bit about the tape recorder. I remember splicing the wire from my mono headphone output to drive two mono hospital earbuds!!!
It takes money and effort to buy super expensive cassette recorders, metal tapes and DBX noise reduction gear to satisfy all set personal requirements . . Today I use cheapest cassettes because it is fantastic medium. Even cheapest TDK ferro cassettes from 30 years ago plus generaly popular Hi fi two head good aligned cassette recorder can equal in listening any other medium - depending only on technical condition of tapes and alignment of gear according to used cassette. This requires knowledge which many users do not expect. ,.
Few years ago I started doubt about my ears how much they lost some top harmonics but by working on speakers I found that I was wrong because even with limitation to some 12 kHz with the same gear, the same speakers I can still enjoy the same memorised sounding of the same recordings. In fact it is better now due to better setup and lowest range. I am not missing anything
For albums I can't find in vinyl or cd I have a nice 3-head deck that I can use to record it from Apple Music in lossless. That way even if I quit subscribing I have the music. This gives better sound quality than the commercial tapes.
I have NO prerecorded cassettes. Ever had about 4 or 5. Best was the original cassette release of The Beatles Red and Blue sets. No, I don't have that. Neither any of the few 45rpm singles I bought in the late 1970s. All my cassettes are 30-36 year old mixtapes. Note: I don't understand if Randy 'Cheapaudio..." means he will listen for fun to the little Fiio at home, or (seems unlikely) to use in 'on the road' traveling.
I have the 2nd cassette deck of my life in system now. First was modest Technic in 1985 or 1986. It got mechanically creaky after a few years, and bought used serviced (1988 make) NAD 3 head in early 90s as at that time I wanted to have a mostly NAD system. I had it serviced in 2 local shops late last year and early this year, $1k approx. Can't spend $2k t0 $5k for serviced higher-end deck (than I have) just to play old mixtapes.
Cassettes were essential for in-car music in the UK. We had but a few radio stations and no stereo radio until the mid 80s.
With cassettes, you could either copy your vinyl or create mixtapes. And play them in the car or on a boombox. MP3s changed it all eventually but from the 70s through the mid 90s cassettes filled a huge gap in music listening
The hiss and other downsides were irrelevant in a car!!
I spent much of my available cash on good quality blank tapes. And I had a good tape machine with Dolby C.
Loved them.
Still have many mix tapes.
We have moved on. But cassettes had a real space in music history.
My Walkman went everywhere with me in HS and college
I had the very first Walkman model! One of the happiest days of my life!
Of course a cassette sounds good on what was (and still is), back in its day, a stupid expensive tape deck (almost too expensive to call it a tape deck).
Back in the day, I had a 3-head deck with Dolby C, HX-Pro, used premium blanks (type-2, type-4 - chrome was for chumps). I stopped buying new releases on cassette (bought CDs).
Cassette releases were mass produced using high speed dubbing, sometimes up to 4x normal speed. I had a buddy with a descent home system. I was complaining to him about my store-bought copy of Sting's Nothing Like The Sun. My friend looked at my cassette, saw that it was really dark colored and said it could sound better. So, he took it home. He brought it back a week later and told me to play it in my car (Nak TD-500 deck). It sounded incredible. He had re-recorded it from his CD. That was the day I stopped buying prerecorded tapes.
Fun episode!
Don’t forget collecting Nikes and Casios
The thing about Cassette tape, is the prerecorded stuff for the most part is crap. The highend machines were all about copying your records from a good turntable on high quality tape. In the heyday of cassettes. I heard demonstrations at one of my local specialists where a recording engineer would bring his professional open reel machine into the shop with original master tapes; made on these machines like Studer Revox, Nagra, and copy direct to something like a Studer Revox B-215 or 710 cassette deck or even better, a Tandberg 3014 cassette deck, probably the three best cassette decks ever made, and that would outperform anything else at the time and that included the best turntable, tonearm and MC cartridge setup in the shop. The thing was making cassettes for the general market that way would be impractical as they would require one to one tape dubbing in real time from masters, first generation copies of the master tape, a room full of high quality casstette decks, cabling etc. I still own a few of these tapes recorded on Maxell metal vertex and TDK maxg tape(these have the metal, not plastic shells), plus a Sony ceramic porcelain-like body. Unfortunately, no proper machine to play them back on.
Love cassettes!
What's NOT to love! Well, a lot... but we do it anyway! Thanks for watching!
Only “love letter” from C.A.M would be to chi-fi. Seems he just cant resist all the free gear. If you just love cassettes then you aint someone who spent hours extracting the chewed up tape from yer player!
Go easy now! Thanks!
Love Randy and this channel as well, but cassettes, particularly pre-recorded ones issued by studios like the ones highlighted here? I tried a few back in the day but I got much better sound quality by purchasing records and copying them to my high-quality blank cassettes I purchased, from TDK and Maxell - that's what a high end tape deck like Nakamichi was used for. For the most part pre-recorded cassettes used the poorest quality tape they could find, which resulted in inferior sound and other longevity issues, along with leaving residue on your tape heads when you played them (which then required you to clean them more frequently). Vinyl copied onto top-quality cassettes did sound very good indeed, and its all analog :)
I hated cassettes. Buying pre-recorded cassettes was too expensive, so I recorded my own. Recording was stressful: either record live radio (classical music, well advertised schedule), record from other cassette (need to find another player--I did not have a double deck), or record from a LP. Since recording was at normal play speed, the whole affaire could take a long time. Mistakes happen and your have to start over. Then my BASF chrome cassettes went bad (distorsion after the tapes elongate a bit). So many hassles that I don't want to experience again.. I am a computer programmer by trade: the musical world changed for the better when the first reasonably priced CD recorder appeared. I never used cassettes ever again.
"slow speed"yes thats thie major problem, which is why all my cassette players are modded by me to run at x2 and x4 speed. once you hear a cassette playing at 4x speed you will never go back to standard speed again. i record my tapes at x4 on a modded 3 head tape deck and play them on a home made tape player that i built optimized for running tapes at speeds up to x6 and the sound is better than the original recording because the frequencies above 10 kilohertz is louder and clearer and this boost matches our ear high frequency drop off allowing even older people to hear the high frequencies they havent heard in years.
my tape player also has a spectrum analyser i designed so not only do you hear the music, you see it too.
the point of it was how the tape format allowed music to be copied ...i have my entire tape collection digitally transfered and they were 30+yrs old and the format held up just fine ...robust sounds fine to me ..we were born into portible audio ..so we always had to accept limitations ..but i never careed and i still dont care ..tape collecting and tape tradeing allowed so many to hear what they wanted..before mtv ..we need better quality tape mechs before they revive anything ...
U need a reel-to-reel as well! 🤓
Fortunately, I have enough old cassettes I don’t need to buy any more…many survived the great tape purge of 1999😂
Unless I see a good one…
Save an artist/band playing live in my living room, cassettes have been, do now & forever will be my most favourite format to listen to the music I dig most on. And quite frankly the competition in that regard, ain’t even close. Just sayin.’
I saw Randy's take on cassettes, and now l've seen yours. He was closer to the truth.
He's always closer to the truth... he's Randy!
Sold all my cassettes in a yard sale years ago. Kind of regret it now. But i still have a stack of Laserdisc 's, lol.
Terrence Trent Darby
The one and only!
Hey, incredible video! Your passion for sound is inspiring. We'd be interested in exploring a collaboration. Would you be open to connecting further?
Dolby S is your best friend. Dolby S allows Cassettes to kick the life out of CD's and MP3's.
But FLAC 192kHz 24bit is best of the bunch (so long as from a proper source such as original 2" tape from the studio the audio was recorded in).
Roberta FLAC ?
@@TrueAudio That's a good one! Just in case you weren't doing the same joking around as I do: FLAC is a non-lossy audio file type of extremely high resolution and quality. 192kHz 24bit is the best currently available for FLAC and it's great.
Dude, that live Tom Jones is a barn burner. No shame in his game.
Cassettes are not really back. No new decks that bad enough because the used market went through the roof. But the real problem is there aren't any affordable blank cassettes available . It doesn't matter if you live in a hip city or not there isn't anything in the thrift stores anymore. Those were my go to for blanks ...well slightly used tapes that radio series were recorded on and played back one or two times if any. A dozen like new TDK Ds for a couple bucks. My go to tape sans Dolby...no problem with high frequency and decent dynamics...not much tape hiss when you're amplifiers power meter is registering 0.1 watt peaks. I've also found that digital sources record much better than vinyl on a cassette. In some ways TH-cam sounds better on a cassette than it does directly...maybe the compression helps?
Good 80s and 90s Recordings are great Recordings done with Dolby B and C, I have a Pioneer CT-A9X Cassette Deck that plays Awesome, Sounds Awesome and it's another good Format to Find, I also have a Great Selection of New Sealed Blank High Quality Cassettes from when they were Great Saturation and all the way from High Bias to Metal.
Love Cassettes and there are Still great Deals to be had on Classic older Cassettes!
Great Video - But quit Telling people about them.
The New Recordings are Terrible by the way.
Mixed Tape off the radio Knackers. I rest my case.
Tom Jones did a great cover with the Cardigans a while back of "Burning Down the House" You should give it a listen. I don't agree at all you can't get good recordings with something other than a Dragon. Also, as I said before if you treat you cassettes well the will last, I have dozens that are proof of that. I also live in a hipster town, Boulder & last week I saw a very good Denon tape deck at a thrift store for a good price. So don't agree with you on most of your negatives!
I guess I'm wrong on all accounts, then!😩
@@UnitedStatesofAnalogonly disagree on the Dragon ( it's high maintenance and not many technicians that can do it ) . The hip thing is true and keep the tapes away from the speakers. Anyway the JVC DD-7 is the best and most reliable deck I have. The quartz locked direct drive single capstan and Sendust Alloy heads are very nice. A TDK D series from a digital source is good. Yeah skip the Dolby ( JVC has Super ANRS but never used it can't say how well it works) . No bias adjustment either but all the oriental tape formulas are close to each other and the deck is set for them . The high frequency EQ is nice and generally is set at two O'clock. I don't tape vinyl it has too much noise and distortion to make a good tape and it only gets worse. I'm not knocking vinyl as it's what I play most...it just doesn't tape well. The head alignment is still factory set as the little dots of paint still line up...not bad for four decades old and heavy daily use for the last two decades ( that's about how long I've had it ) ...it does need a new slide potentiometer , but I've gotten around that and it's too bad they used a belt for the counter...I've gotten around that too...literally.
5:00 I'm an auiopile because I've bought so much sh*t to try and have the best, most accurate sound.
I reckon this cassette tape collecting craze will be gone by next year, given the inferior sound quality.
Probably correct!
They still sound like crap. EVEN after I superglued the felt pads back on.
Heard!
Problem with cassettes, is that all new players use the same cheap chinesium tanashin clone mechs, with bad wow and flutter.
hi stopped buying them years ago because i never ever use pre recorded one's i have gone back because low cost decks i can jazz up to the next speed
and now i have alot of gear the analog ones can't get hold of i record all my cassette at 7 1/2 on a otari mtr 12 that has be jazz up
they use this model to make alot of the test cassette i used to know a man that was in the cassette game he passed away now
Streaming and vinyl suck! CD for the win 👍
Why are you making fun of Tom Jones? I have the guy's entire catalog on either vinyl or cd. Also, the trick to preserving treble content while recording vinyl to tape is to (with Dolby engaged) let the meters go into the red about 4db. The signal is actually being recorded well below that level (6-10db depending on frequency) and re-engaging the dolby NR on playback that signal will appear to peak above zero, but undistorted and with full treble.
Tapes were ok, but CD's are the best.
Cassettes suck plain and simple. I had cheap decks, good decks, tried all.the Dolby noise reductions, etc. I had long battles with them in terms of cassette cartridge build issues, tape phasing, dropouts, etc. And yes, I used good cassettes too. There isn't a force on this planet that would EVER have me go back...EVER. When the CDR and Sony MiniDisc came out, that sealed the coffin for me in regards to all analog tape formats with the exception of reel to reel decks. That was the best analog tape format. However, these days, you really pay for it. It is bulky and there is still the need to align the machines properly. If you have the time and money, then this is the way to go. For me, when it comes to recording, my advice would be to throw those casettes.and tapes away and stick with digital formats. Although, I hear the Sony Elcasette format was good, it came a bit late, and didn't catch on.
Wrong. They sound HIFI. Guality highend deck (AiwA adf 770 from kentucky ,usa) and good used tdk D tape from 1985. I bet,u can no hear any difference versus source. Yamaha amp and Dali speakers, VanDen Hul cables. My friends did no hear diff either,when using tape/source button while recording. If ur naka is way out spcks,i suppose. Greets from finland !!!
Hi,
Where to begin.....
Your cons are invalid.
1) if your tapedeck sucks - ok deal with it but don't blame that tape. Over here in Germany we used chrome or metal type. No tape his if you can't calibrate you deck you better of using cassettes recommended by your decks vendor. If I encountered tape hiss... I redo the recording, nothing is more annoying than distorted heights...calribrate your deck to the used tape and use at least good cassettes (Sony ux-pro, that's (Taiyo yuden) EM-X, BASF super/Maxima, TDK Sa-x, Maxwell XL-II(s)) or metal...
I buy cassettes since I was 8 (around 1978) an I still buy them new (RTM) or NOS. I own several decks (akai gx-r88, gx-75, gx-9, gxc730, demon drm-800a, tascam 234, 238) closed loop double capstan is the key to separate the tape from the reels and also overcome the need of that tape pressure pad.
2) no for the good/best cassettes.
3) no, they never will be hip again. Pre recorded cassettes are had been crap and will be in the future....only type-I and lousy mechanics compared to even standard type-I blank cassettes
Go to a nice flea market and you'll find plenty of cassettes.
If you are an audiofile, please stay away from cassettes. The hiss will drive you cazy. And you will never those bat calls.
Well thank God I am not an audiophile!! I truly enjoy cassettes. My nakamichi does a great job and keeps the hiss down to where you hardly hear it.
Only pipe smoking hipsters buy these things in this century
I wish a sudden demise to ALL tape formats, including VHS, Beta, cassette and video camera tape along with reel to reel, and 8 track, they were all a mechanical and finicky nightmare to begin with, even a nakamichi dragon using the best tapes wont be a patch on the sound from a £20 cd player from wallmart (ASDA here in the UK) truth hurts i know but its true 100%
dolby was a sh**show of problems as well, along with the gradual degredation of the tapes and anything recorded in dbx sounded absolutely awful on playback of any none dbx machine, tape mechanisms in general were about as stable as Madonna.
And yes "audiophiles" are full of C**P if they think this 1960s technology sounds better than a bitperfect compact disc.
Cassettes suck, this isn't even an argument, it's a fact it has been for a long time.
That's coming from someone who's father was a security guard at a Sony warehouse and would bring bags full of all the latest Sony walkman's home, top of line mega bass and all the top shelf tapes and headphones as well.
A Lotta moaning about tapes going on here. I never had a quarter of the issues people are talking about. Tapes were OK. CDs are infinitely superior. Streaming is convenient. Vinyl is not.
I have no interest in ever seeing or hearing a cassette tape again. Got rid of all of them when CDs came out. No reason at all to go back to an inferior format that is even worse than vinyl records. I will never understand nostalgia for bad things.
The music industry is pushing vinyl. Sick of going into retail stores and the only choice for physical media is overpriced vinyl. It's bullshit and we should have a choice. We shouldn't be forced just to buy vinyl because of the hipsters.
Memories, Sir, Memories! That's my guess, anyway!
no.
MD is better.
MD for sure... says the guy from United States of ANALOG!
@@UnitedStatesofAnalog recording playlists from Tidal, with track names and custom labels, it's no contest!
No gracias. records are my money pit. lol
Cassettes are complete junk in 2024! 🗑️😆