A thread for cassettes

why not just put it out on CDR

tapes can last a long time. cdrs dont.

not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience

just checking - did yr "line out thingy" incorporate a phono preamp stage with RIAA curve equalisation? sry if teaching grandmother to suck eggs

― dimension hatris (a passing spacecadet), 2011年03月17日 星期四 下午5:33 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I build the thing here, can't remember what I did with the signal after the pre-amp...maybe fed it into a receiver? Sony? maybe I should try a proper poweramp.

http://www.hagtech.com/bugle.html

oh, well I've never seen/heard that kit preamp but in theory it should have been fine, so no idea. just checking since plugging a phono-level output straight into line in will indeed sound thin and scratchy and generally ass-like in the extreme. it seemed pretty unlikely, but!

has anyone used one of those ION tape-to-mp3 devices? I was always pretty skeptical like "why would I buy this plasticky do-it-for-you thing when I can just plug a real cassette deck into my good soundcard and set the levels myself and actually know what it's doing", but since I'm finding it hard to buy a real, good cassette deck for even twice the price...

man, you guys are all so weird! i can't understand how scientific everything's become when it comes to how we receive whatever it is we're consuming. it's like there was a huge shark-jump ten years ago, probably after vhs frazzled away. there are so many factors that contribute to how you receive something, and there's still this weird attempt to try to compile hierarchies based on the mathematics involved; something has the highest pixel ratio and is thus the most enjoyable presentation of something. with movies, the way they're presented, and the fidelity to the original source material, sure it can be important, but other times your experience can be as affected by like, are you sitting comfortably? are you tired? you aren't always sat there wishing that the female romantic lead's face was rendered better, and situations in which it was don't necessarily boost your understanding of a thing. the idea that we can plot a line-graph of ENJOYMENT, correlating with SCREEN RESOLUTION, for sex and the city ii, is nuts. and with music, maybe everyone goes home and sits in living rooms carefully arranged so as to minimise impedence and listens to a SACD of kind of blue from their sweet stereo and it's ideal, but similarly maybe they don't; maybe the first time you heard it and the first time it pricked up your ears was when you were clunking a walkman around, or someone gave you a copy of it on a cassette and you could hear parts of the other side playing backwards during the silent parts, but still you're pretty sure there was some trumpet playing throughout and it was pretty moving. i don't say this in favour of nostalgia - remember when!, you were so young!, lol @ walkmans! - but in favour of the fact that we don't listen so mechanically, and the time we heard something in a car might have been better than at home, the time we danced to something blaring out of a shitty speaker had the edge on the time we bought the LP, and the time we spend listening to the radio in the kitchen sometimes beats our attentive quiet-time with headphones. tapes are nice objects, and do sound good; they have a different sound; kind of particularly, but not fetishistically, the kind that have given up some of their potential crisp fidelity in favour of a blocky, clunky, overloading fullness. to put out tapes now: why the fuck not? if you don't have a tape player then - you are kind of a musical judas tbh, but anyway - fine, don't buy one, you probably realistically have options in terms of getting this music; or go buy a boombox (because why wouldn't you? do they not receive the radio? is the FM radio news vaguer and more profane than digital radio news, or is it just that if you don't get your shit together and put your aerial in the right spot, it could crackle? (like a digital radio could gurgle (we blank out the flaws of new things))). they still play the songs out and that is kind of the point. it isn't that i have never had the experience of hearing a thing - autumn's child, on good headphones - and appreciating what good representation can do for a piece of art; of course i have, and of course that's worth pursuing, and preserving, i guess. but similarly i can't forget about the fact that it is all just music, and for all our qualms over how to receive it, a $3 shittily-mastered BILLIE HOLIDAY HITS compilation from a service station still has a whole lot of billie holiday songs on.

all of this is different from tape releases; maybe they're fetishistic or ironic or whatever. but they're still giving you music and you're still playing it in your house and that is the point. i'm not even getting into the virtues of tapes themselves, vs cds (you get two track ones, and two final songs!, vs one track one and one final song), terrible & lifeless objects that cds are. but it's fine to just sell a thing or buy a thing, free of the weird sense that we should be pursuing it to its platonic ideal of listenability.

Case in point:

In a Sherlock holmes story, the detective retires to his drawing room to play the violin a bit.

Meanwhile, the two 'villains' are left alone in his dining room, and discuss in whispers the entire details of their crime and guilt.

At which point the detective appears from behind the curtain, having heard the whole thing AHA!!

But.. you were playing the violin in there! How?

They all go into the other room, and lo there is a windy up gramophone playing the music off a new 78rpm record.

Now, you might think that it was unlikely that they'd mistake a real performance for something off a 78rpm record through a funnel.

But that's the only format they know: Live performance. So, this new-fangled invention at this point would seem to be "as good as live"...

I remember spending gobs of money on those TDK metal tapes, only to use them to record my vinyl blaring from shitty speakers. The irony.

"not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience"

i have tapes that are 20+ years old and they play fine. i have had plenty of cdrs that never lasted more than a year or two.

99% of the tapes i play all play fine no matter how old they are. if they are DIRTY then that is a different story. cuz most people treated their tapes like they treat their cds. like garbage. don't put them in the case, left on the floor of a car, etc.

i make tape mixes all the time and if i played one for you you would not be able to tell the difference from a cd as far as sound quality goes.

only the pungent smell of nostalgia, and scott's fixed, faraway gaze would tip you off that it was a cassette playing, triggering a montage of memories from long ago, the medium itself the message of memories.

schlump that is a good post - but I dunno if I buy your analogy to consuming movies

I feel like there are certain ways in which the consumption of music and the consumption of movies differ so that we can't draw a one to one analogy. for one, we listen to music repeatedly

any of you guys still play VHS?

I do.

Classic: That be-doo-doo-DOo-YEEP sound before and after most cassette albums released by Capitol in the eighties.

XDR !

wasn't it supposed to prove that the quality was higher and demonstrate the range of sonics ?

have a memory that The Dandy Warhols open one of their earlier albums with that noise.

y'huh; some things you can only get on vhs, or only easily get on vhs, or they come to you on vhs, etc. maybe watching a crackly video is a vivid example of dealing with the relative shortcomings of a format, but i think that limited aspect of watching a film - it's crackly, or whatever - is pretty minor, and again has to sit next to other considerations. i'm probably way more bummed out that what i'm watching on VHS has commercials, because it's taped off tv ten years ago, etc, than that there's some flickering at the bottom of the picture.

i think i am extra-pro-tapes, here, because i'm aware how ridiculous these arguments can get, how ridiculous my attempts at judging these things usually are; sticking to music, i will rep pretty hard for vinyl over anything else - i think it somehow 'projects' better, is 'fuller', sounds more like real instruments, and all sorts of other nebulous praises. but while i sit at home, really pleased to be playing something on record on my crappy second hand stereo, there are other people who are listening to a CD in their ridiculous music den, each constituent part connected with well-insulated components, music booming out of five speakers, and having a way better sounding experience. it's weird to be so locked into the statistics of the format thing when there are all of these other variables floating around, because it's only in that sense of mathematic comparison - 1600 vs 800, 'running groove' vs binary dots, etc - that we can really, objectively 'compare'. it doesn't take into account that we are hearing stuff, not somehow processing it. maybe you reach a point where it's legitimate to compare, and maybe it is those people who are already there who are voicing concerns about the insufficiency of tapes.

going back to video (sorry!, dayo, i totally get that & can appreciate that how a thing is conveyed is more significant if it's going round and round), it reminds me of digital vs analogue arguments. i would take the zapruder film, or technicolour film stock production cf midnight cowboy, over anything contemporary. it has a transformative power and it renders light beautifully and there's the weird mechanics of it being made by light burned onto material. but that is old & superseded technology and its emotional impact isn't factored into its statistical analysis.

I'm totally with you on the video front there schlump! and there are certain types of sound and genres of music which definitely do sound better through lo-fi equipment. I guess on the sound front I am biased towards hi-fidelity reproduction though, since I mainly listen to R&B and hip hop and contemporary pop and other genres which are mastered to increasingly sound better as you ramp up the equipment.

I think one thing I would like to do, is to find a friend who has a really good vinyl setup, and go to their house, and sit down and listen to his setup like I am the maxell man.

people still swear by betamax. or at least that guy at sony who just died never got over the use of vhs over beta.

i, personally, have never heard more amazing sound than the brief time that i had a laserdisc player in the 90's. suspiria soundtrack on laserdisc with huge speaker system ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, so amazing.

momentarily confused there because what r&b & cassettes have in common is maxwell

but yeah!, i guess you should check out someone's system. do you still have the turntables you bought & everything? if they're just sat there, and all. all of this is maybe just a recipe for becoming a vinyl geek and then getting really bummed out that shit doesn't come out on wax anymore, btw.

Xpost. Yup, first Dandy Warhols album does that. Still think that one is pretty great, and remain amazed that they were ever more than a WFMU favorite (even though I listen to some of the later albums on occasion). In some alternate reality, they opened for The Kiss Offs/Black Lipstick.

I think that 'bleep' was an instruction to the cutting mechanism to stop spinning tape into the cassette shell and seal the cut end into the other spool.

^ a translation is available for younger readers

I remember being in the music dept of WHSmiths in high Street Kensington, where a very confused and lost old German couple needed help.

Thanks to my rudimentary german, I was able to explain that where they were standing was not a shop filled with lots and lots of brightly decorated packs of playing cards, but "musikassetten!"

and directed them to the games dept.

(That was an xpost, funnily enough)

That Ralf and Florian eh? What are they like!

people still swear by betamax. or at least that guy at sony who just died never got over the use of vhs over beta.

I think my dad is STILL pissed about vhs winning this one! he was griping about how better blade runner looked on beta for a not insignificant portion of my childhood.

I love how the criterion videodrome dvd comes in a case that looks like a beta tape.

http://www.planete-hd.com/web/images/divers_sup_tests/videodrome_criterion_vhs_cover.jpg

aha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_(audio)

Recording a short test toneburst at the beginning and end of the program material on the cassette, to detect for any loss of audio frequencies in the audio spectrum. The toneburst consists of 11 tones about .127 seconds in length (with .023 seconds of silence in-between each tone), from 32 to 18,000 Hz. These tones are recorded on the cassette, and are read during the duplication process to detect if there is any loss of any audio information.[4]

seem to recall this being mentioned somewhere on my Flat Earth cassette - which sounded like shit, as the bass distorted. replaced it for a different cassette copy, and that was the same.

so i believe i never bought another XDR marked tape after that.

i always thought the tone was to tell auto-reverse players to flip over before hitting the end of the side to reduce tape wear

I Love Tapes

we have a combo CD/cassette radio in our main car so I've been listening to mainly tapes while driving around. kept most of my tapes from back in the day so i've been having lots of fun revisiting albums I had ignored for years. I've found that buying used tapes from thrift stores is a total crap-shoot since, like Scott said, most people didn't think you had to take care of them, so I have a handy cleaning cassette in the glove box for when the heads get all gunked up.

I still play VHS tapes too (never throw media away, huge collection). got back into it a couple years ago and had trouble playing alot of them - wavy lines, stuttering, sound cutting out. almost believed the stories from pro 'digitize your VHS' sites that tape disintegrates after X years and was thinking of finally tossing them out, then found a tutorial on how you can manually clean the head drum (http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/ - how to repair anything). Carefully followed the steps and voila!, tapes look great again, even old SLP shit from the TV (i have a box of 6 hour tapes of random cut-ups from 88-92 as sample fodder, lots of preachers, Geraldo and Morton Downey Jr. lol)

I have a big box of old mix-tapes, sometimes pick one at random for the journey...

Which is why I'd get people asking why A&A were singing "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, and I'll punch the man who says I'm not.." back in the day.

herb, you don't have a reel to reel do you? got all these cool tapes i kinda wanna hear before i sell them to japan. bitches brew on reel to reel!

wish I did...my very first recorder as a kid was my parents' portable reel-to-reel w/ a built-in speaker. remember making little 'radio plays' and recording monster movies off tv.

remember making little 'radio plays'

I did this. The only one I can remember was a Sherlock Holmes, or Sherlock Holmes inspired one - set in Limehouse in London, I think I just liked that word, Limehouse.

i still have a book of K-Mart cassettes from a few years later, one is the epic 'Detroit Rock City' w/ me playing all four members of KISS

herb, i need to call you. i might need help with records. picking up a big load on sunday the 27th. how's your back? it IS world theatre day that sunday, so you might have plans... (i can give you many many many records in return for the favor)

no pressure though...

sounds like a total blast, I'll bring the vicodin

mmmm, now yer speaking my language. i'm gonna ask tattooed love boy S.G. if he wants to come too. so it would be me, you, S, and Maria. and we would get some help on the other end. could be close to 8k or more records. and i probably won't need 2 or 3k of those. so you will have plenty to feed on before i call in my local hoarders who will take care of the rest for me.

herb, you don't have a reel to reel do you? got all these cool tapes i kinda wanna hear before i sell them to japan. bitches brew on reel to reel!

may not be timely enough if you need to ship your reels, but there are TONS of reel to reel players on ebay for dirt cheap.

or there were a few years ago anyway

if anybody owns the bonus tape of blank unstaring heirs of doom pls webmail me. peace.

― plax (ico), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 10:10 PM (Yesterday)

now you have me intrigued. if you know your way around torrent programs (I don't), you may be able to download it via this Russian site.

(it's listed there as "Blank Unstaring Heirs Of Doom (2006) EP")

ok, never mind the torrent thing: I found it somewhere else. check your webmail :)

i love you

bought my first cassette in prolly 20 years and it arrived today (gonna play it soon)!: Zoom Zoom - the best of Louis Prima.
i enjoy being a Luddite of sorts

http://www.tonepublications.com/old-school/nakamichi-dragon/

A number of non-audiophile friends couldn’t believe I was listening to a lowly cassette, and a pre-recorded one at that. Our resident HMEC (human musical encyclopedia & collector) Tom Casselli sent me a MoFi recording of Dark Side of the Moon. “Dude, if you have a Dragon, you should be the keeper of this tape.” Yeah, it was cool and now the hunt for a few more MoFi cassettes is on.

good read! that's such a cool machine...

Today’s haul:
Toto IV
Pointer Sisters Break Out
Little Feat Waiting For Columbus