cassettes

[nashreed]

Okay, obviously cassettes suck.
But, all I have is a cassette player in the car- so I end up buying obscene amounts of cheap used cassettes to listen to once or twice (and then I get bored), and it's on to the next one.
Since they're used, I mainly end up with tapes made in the 80's and early 90's (anything older is very, very risky and squeaky :( ). Sometimes though, I'll get pretty recent cassettes made in the last 6 years or so, and some as recent as this year.

Now, tapes are inferior sound quality wise to CD's, yet they may be preferable to someone like, say Neil Young; they should have those missing frequencies and all that Neil misses with digital and CD's, right?
Well, the tapes I play from the 80's sound pretty good, when they don't squeak, and tapes from the early 90's have really impressed me. I can crank them up and they sound awesome. Now, of course, I don't have a very good system in the car- but it's decent and music sounds good on it for the most part. Now, I have noticed when playing tapes of much newer vintage that I can hear the same sonic limitations that I hear in new CD's. I can hear the same over-amped-sounds-like- your-speakers-are- shot sound that make new CD's terrible on cassettes. Some of them sound like very bad CD to tape transfers. I have several 80's tapes that never came out on CD, but somewhere down the line, it looks like tapes just became copied from the CD- with all the same compression, etc. Would this actually maybe make a tape sound better than the same CD though? Probably not, but I'm curious...

nashreed

[Grant]

I don't normally deal with prerecorded cassettes but I noticed that inb the early 90s the WEA group switched to Dolby "S" along with thier "Digalog" copying technique. The sound was improved. I also noticed that when Sony took over CBS they stopped using Dolby alltogether. It was a time when they were trying to save the cassette from demise, claiming that older people were reluctant to switch to CD.

Having said all that, I always bought TDK, Sony, or Maxell tape and rolled my own for the car.

[Sckott]

All I gotta say is just be careful buying tapes for the car. I thought I was clever just taping my own from CD while the cassette player was #1 since my car stereo only had cassette and my commute time was long.

Before 1997 commenced, I had a collection of TDK, Maxell and BASF tapes enough to build another house out of, literally. Ouch.

But then again, that's me. I could have bought a whole other car with that money, little by little.

[Dan C]

Originally posted by Grant
I don't normally deal with prerecorded cassettes but I noticed that inb the early 90s the WEA group switched to Dolby "S" along with thier "Digalog" copying technique. The sound was improved. I also noticed that when Sony took over CBS they stopped using Dolby alltogether. It was a time when they were trying to save the cassette from demise, claiming that older people were reluctant to switch to CD.

Having said all that, I always bought TDK, Sony, or Maxell tape and rolled my own for the car.

You won't see the Dolby logo on many of the new cassettes being pressed now, I've noticed.
I bought a couple of Sony tapes that they were practically giving away at Tower, and while they don't have the Dolby logo on the case, they certainly sound Dolbyized. Weird. But yeah, the cassette is on it's death bed. BTW, BMG was using Dolby S around the early 90's as well. That and the chrome formulation they used made for some pretty decent sounding tapes, mostly of their classical artists.

I have a lot of good memories of the cassette. I still have dozens of 'jam' tapes I made from radio and such. But now my trusty old Nak only gets used when I'm burning a CD-R from a tape.
Dan C