The resurgence of cassette tapes

this is bizarre - i had loads of tape in the day, the most expensive metal ones and a decent tape deck - but the sound quality was awful compared to a half decent cd player.
 
aardvark said:
this is bizarre - i had loads of tape in the day, the most expensive metal ones and a decent tape deck - but the sound quality was awful compared to a half decent cd player.
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Your tape deck can't have been as good as you thought it was, as a decent deck doesn't sound awful. Without a doubt tapes used to suffer from hiss but they don't sound awful if the recording is good quality and on a decent quality tape.
 
titaniumx3 said:
Complete and total nonsense. Vinyl has solid technical grounds for staying around, compared to CD/digital, but tapes just sound crap full stop.
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I am willing to bet that if I dug out my old tape deck and tapes, it would sound better than the vast majority of the turd CD systems people have in their homes. If anyone lives in Bucks and wants me to prove it, they are welcome.

Note at no point am I championing tapes to make a come back, just that they can sound great.
 
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Lysander said:
They already exist I'm afraid. I see a lot of snobbery over on other forums about tape elitism.
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Vinyl sounds good where tapes sound like ass. I don't see how they can be snobbish about tapes. The only reason is nostalgia as it certainly has nothing to do with how they sound
 
Krisali said:
Vinyl sounds good where tapes sound like ass. I don't see how they can be snobbish about tapes. The only reason is nostalgia as it certainly has nothing to do with how they sound
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You might record the sounds of ass on your tapes, I prefer music!
 
I've never really been away from tapes so nostalgia is not really relevant. We are spoiled with all of the options we have these days. I know tapes have been important to me for 35 years or so, but I am now looking to de-clutter in general and I have a lot of tapes which have my personal music on them, and these need to be kept in an easier to share format, hence the digitising.

I do feel a bit split over the feeling of binning them.
 
I can't remember the figures now but I did a lot of studio recording during the 80s and even my very expensive mastering cassette deck could only record at up to (I think) 16khz.
I remember a new Dolby that came out which supposedly increased the top end so I bought one of those and also a gadget called an Enhancer just to try and get that top end back into the recordings.
It was all smoke & mirrors though.
 
Bear said:
Your tape deck can't have been as good as you thought it was, as a decent deck doesn't sound awful. Without a doubt tapes used to suffer from hiss but they don't sound awful if the recording is good quality and on a decent quality tape.
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well, it wasn't a dragon but it was a £200 separate, so better than most people.
switching to a decent cd player revealed how poor the sound quality was and i couldn't go back - cd was better in every respect, range, dynamics, clarity, everything.
 
A bit of an aside, I was in John Lewis yesterday. The 'techy' area was full of fancy TVs, computers, tablets... and very little high end hi-fi. Are people still spending the money on hi-fi they did a decade+ ago, or is hi-fi taking a back seat to IT and TVs?
 
Dimple said:
I can't remember the figures now but I did a lot of studio recording during the 80s and even my very expensive mastering cassette deck could only record at up to (I think) 16khz.
I remember a new Dolby that came out which supposedly increased the top end so I bought one of those and also a gadget called an Enhancer just to try and get that top end back into the recordings.
It was all smoke & mirrors though.
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The high quality decks were able to do the full 20Hz to 20kHz in the 70s using compact tape.
 
clv101 said:
A bit of an aside, I was in John Lewis yesterday. The 'techy' area was full of fancy TVs, computers, tablets... and very little high end hi-fi. Are people still spending the money on hi-fi they did a decade+ ago, or is hi-fi taking a back seat to IT and TVs?
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They are, but not from John Lewis. They are going to more specialist shops where you're buying separates or speakers in the £3000+ range.
 
clv101 said:
A bit of an aside, I was in John Lewis yesterday. The 'techy' area was full of fancy TVs, computers, tablets... and very little high end hi-fi. Are people still spending the money on hi-fi they did a decade+ ago, or is hi-fi taking a back seat to IT and TVs?
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Some people do, but it's getting less and less it would seem. The general public buy whatever the marketing tells them to. Plenty of advertising for visual products, but not much for audio, save Bose. Sonos are advertising quite a bit now, but it's still audio products that are fairly discreet. I don't watch a lot of TV these days, but I can't remember the last time I saw quality hi-fi products being advertised.

People want bigger and bigger TVs, and smaller and smaller sound systems. Maybe women have something do with that as well. Bigger TVs are seen as desirable, whereas larger sound systems are seen as ugly or undesirable. How many women say to their other half that they want a nice big TV, then tell him to get rid of his floor standing speakers in favour of something small and discreet? At one point, men used to impress women with quality hi-fi systems, now it's TV size. :p
 
MagicBoy said:
Must be an analogue thing - cassette quality varies and influences the sound. With a decent deck and tape the quality was OK. Ghetto blaster and ferric tape and it was gash.

/off to dig my Hi-Fi deck out of storage and find some cheesy 90s dance ;)
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Lol when I was a kid I had an aiwa ghetto blaster with ferric tapes. Haha.
 
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