cassette tapes are the new vinyl

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (71 of them)

The hard thing to resist when playing back tapes you'd recorded with Dolby was to disengage the NR; once done (wow, so much extra top end! All that clarity!) you never felt like pushing it back in again and listening to it 'properly'. A similar thing was achievable by recording on to chrome tape with the bias switched to Type II and playing back as if was ferric.

Dolby C was a disaster wasn't it? Dolby S was apparently the final decisive leap into high fidelity for 1.875ips/0.25in tape but by then no-one cared.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 08:45 (twenty years ago) link

Michael you are so right with your tales of disengaging trauma ("I know it's the wrong bias setting but it sounds sooo goood").

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 08:54 (twenty years ago) link

tapes cause more emotion - like fits of f***in' massive pique when they tangle up in your player, drive you crazy coz you can't hear anything on them properly, hiss horribly and stuff. they are without doubt the worst possible recording format ever and you're better off w/out them - anyone who likes them is f***in' mad and any nostalgia for them is totally misplaced...

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 09:02 (twenty years ago) link

Fucking minidisc, anyone? Kicks tape's ass.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 09:26 (twenty years ago) link

MD - yeah. I'm going on a trip & was about to make a bunch o' tapes .. then I realized that I can record 160 minutes in mono* on a minidisc & it takes up 1/3 the space... 15 MDs should hold me for a few days...

(I'll be on a boat with a cheapo tape deck - mono will be fine.)

So fuck tapes.

― dave225 (Dave225), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 10:39 (twenty years ago) link

but tapes = you can tape songs off the radio.

and for that, i will forever love tapes.

― lid, Wednesday, 6 August 2003 10:45 (twenty years ago) link

Ahhh .. radio. Great for Creed fans.

― dave225 (Dave225), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 10:47 (twenty years ago) link

look ppl wtf minidisc on LP4 setting = 5 hours (300 minutes) on one disc, sounds tip top

― Chip Morningstar (bob), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 11:42 (twenty years ago) link

Nobody needs to tell me and Dastoor about MD - unfortunately no one needs to tell us about the escalating miseries of MD hardware failure either. I may never field-record again.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 11:47 (twenty years ago) link

18 months ago I hankered after one of the new 4x minidiscs. But now 500 hours on an iPod seems more attractive..

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 11:55 (twenty years ago) link

I bought a portable MD player about five years ago [a sony mz-r50]. after a year, the door had begun to fall off and it stopped being able to record.

I have had my walkman for about three years.

― RJG (RJG), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 11:56 (twenty years ago) link

I've had my portable minidisc walkman since the second year at university. I garduated two years ago and it was a three-year course. I have never had any problems with it at all.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 11:59 (twenty years ago) link

My first md walkman had to go back the the shop when it started skipping, grinding and stopping even when left still on a solid surface. My replacement started doing the same within a few months and I have kind of given up on it.

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 12:08 (twenty years ago) link

I fall between the two Nicks. Sharp 702, late '98 - never liked recording on AC adaptor, always a bit fussy with blanks, dropped for the umpteenth time Oct '01, output stage conked out. Worked intermittently since, also started to fail on recordings late last year, laid to rest a couple of months ago.

Sony MD deck (summer '99) has been to the repair shop once (might've been my fault though - I used to 'overburn' 74min blanks to squeeze close to 80min on them, which probably didn't do the record head a lot of good).

Yes, better than tape, more convenient than DAT, but, no, I'm probably not going back.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 15:30 (twenty years ago) link

My Pioneer MD hifi deck has never caused me any problems, but then I haven't used it much. The NR is great, though.

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 15:58 (twenty years ago) link

Noise reduction on MD deck? Please explain.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 17:44 (twenty years ago) link

Tapes were always horrible, even when that was a good portion of what I owned and listened to: so prone to breakage, mediocre sound quality, time-consuming to forward through, etc.

That said, there's something very romantic and quaint about mixtapes that makes me miss listening to and making them. Mix cds seem to be a different animal.

― Larcole (Nicole), Wednesday, 6 August 2003 17:56 (twenty years ago) link

I've got so many tapes I don't know what to do with them. I started giving them away to people, until I noticed that I've got some wonderful things on tape, such as an original German copy of Trans Europa Express in a beige cassette case. I only realised just how obselete they were when a Japanese friend of my wife's saw my collection a couple of years ago and said: Wow I like tape! ...The implication being that she was struck by the quaint old heirloom that tape had become. I'm not in any way nostalgic for the format, myself. Its only real contribution being that oxidised shift from very muffled to very trebly and back and forth brought home recently on Kylie's Love At First Sight. The other characteristic of tape is the strange juxtapositions you put on either side of a 90 minute tape. Old thread on the subject: C90 strangeness

― Daniel (dancity), Thursday, 7 August 2003 07:20 (twenty years ago) link

Mike, I don't know - there's just this NR button (no branding) and it works really well both when recording and playing hissy old transfers. Doesn't really dull the sound much at all and unlike Dolby, you don't can use it whether or not the MD was recorded with it. I used it to great effect with my B&S radio sessions.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 August 2003 07:29 (twenty years ago) link

Take that 'don't' out of the 2nd sentence for maximum sense.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 August 2003 07:33 (twenty years ago) link

Ah right, it's on-the-fly digital hiss reduction for analogue transfers. Nice idea, I think someone (probably Pioneer again) used this feature on their cassette decks too instead of Dolby (kind of barmy to imagine an A/D-D/A chain inside a tape deck but that's what they did).

There was an audiophile fetish aspect to cassettes than doesn't really exist with MD or CD-R; the shexy ceramic shell of a Sony SMMST (with metal case!), the solid forest green edging of a TDK MA-XG, the gold-leaf letraset accessories of the Maxell Vertex. When was the last time you thought, "Now there's one handsome mf-ing CD blank"?

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Thursday, 7 August 2003 09:27 (twenty years ago) link

When I was last at your flat?

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 August 2003 09:49 (twenty years ago) link

What about Tascam 4-track cassette decks? Revolutionised home recording, they did. I made two albums on those buggers.

― colin s barrow (colin s barrow), Thursday, 7 August 2003 10:43 (twenty years ago) link

eleven years pass...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2_9L1Qp20#t=143

― how's life, Friday, 10 October 2014 15:06 (nine years ago) link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZyXwcsboGs

― sleeve, Friday, 10 October 2014 16:35 (nine years ago) link

This is an idea I can get behind

― calstars, Friday, 10 October 2014 18:40 (nine years ago) link

ha, that is extremely dope.

― festival culture (Jordan), Friday, 10 October 2014 18:57 (nine years ago) link

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.