Tapes

iamstop

Man, tapes get a bad rap, but the truth is tapes were pretty awesome.

I just got a whole nostalgic buzz for tapes. I think it was because I saw something about Richer Sounds and it reminded me of days where I'd go in to town and buy some "That's" tapes to expand my ever growing collection of portable music. Back when the Walkman was king of the portable person music playing.

Regular, Chrome or even Metal tapes! 60 minutes or 90? There was even 100 minute tapes if you knew where to look.

The old dilemma of having a track get cut half way at the end of one side. Do you rewind and start it from the start on side B or do you start recording from where it left off?

What about if you're recording a 45 minute album to a 60 minute tape? What do you do with the extra space at the end?

Make sure you bring spare batteries with you for those long trips!

Cassettes were great for making compilations and mixtapes.

Whenever I bought a new album (on vinyl) I would record it onto a blank cassette for playing on my Walkman.

I hardly ever bought albums on cassette though - maybe 10 in my lifetime.

Cassettes did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards though - that's one thing I really resent about them - as they're much inferior to either vinyl or CD as a listening format.

In 1988, four out of every six new albums sold was on cassette. Shocking.

o1s1n

I had a red Sony CFS 201L that I got for my communion back in '89 / '90, used to tape my dad's vinyl to play on it.

Thing is, the vinyl was all about 20-30 years old at that stage, so it was warts n'all! I actually still expect to hear scratches at certain parts of Dark Side of the Moon when I listen to it to this day and am a tad disappointed when they're not there.

Flinty997

While cassettes are noisy and wear. They actually like vinyl have a decent dynamic range. When we first had CD's they were clipped so badly that I preferred the cassette. The CDs sounded lifeless in comparison. Now so bands have gone back and remastered their CDs, those new versions of CDs sound amazing.

I digitized my own cassettes to high bitrate MP3s before dumping them. What I noticed though on some cassettes the pitch was off, because of wear on the cassette but also the belts on my cassette player needed replacing. I had to readjust to the correct pitch on remastered CDs. Played havoc tuning the guitar to it.

Flinty997

When I switched from cassettes I disliked the quality of CDs at that time. So I switched to MiniDisc. Which obviously is lossy, but I found ATRAC very musical vs early mp3. Mp3 is much improved now and my ears have disimproved.

This channel is great for retro audio especially cassettes.

https://www.youtube.com/%40Techmoan

iamstop

This is the beast I had for most of my teenage years. Traded copious amounts of hip hop tapes back in the day.

Flinty997

I had a walkman that took 4xAAs. It didn't last my 3hr coach to college. I used to bring spare batteries and then rechargeables. Multiple tapes aswell. In the latter years I had some really nice walkman. The slim modern ones all broke eventually though.

I have my audio cassettes as MP3 on my phone. All the hiss and crackle still there. So nice.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120850211#Comment_120850211

Funny - I have the opposite view re CDs.

I love the sound of early CDs (1983-1993 or so) as many of them were flat transfers / quiet pressings with plenty dynamic range.

The loudness wars saw some terrible remasters in the 1990s and 2000s. Really compressed and brickwalled.

Flinty997

Some debate on it here...

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/why-do-older-cds-tend-to-have-a-colder-harsh-sound.342519/page-2

Some of it probably the player. I had an early Discman (now desirable for collectors) that sounded great but was replaced with succession of unsatisfactory sounding (to my ear) models. It's was that which lead me to HeadFi and realising about SQ.

Montage of Feck

Early MP3 sounded awful, like music played through a metal pipe.

iamstop

I wasn't trying to get into a fidelity war with this thread. I was just tripping down a nostalgia buzz about going and buying tapes, making the labels, copying from mates, copying for mates, making my first mix tapes, using some of the stickers to put on my early skratch records, having literally 2 black bags of tapes in the back of my first car when I finally got one and it had a tape deck.

All great memories. I regret not digitizing my tapes. Now they're gone forever. :-(

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120850211#Comment_120850211

CDs have a vastly higher dynamic range than both vinyl and tape. 50dB for tape, 60dB for vinyl, 96dB for CD. dB is logarithmic, 3dB is double.

As mentioned above, you may have your timings backwards and be remembering the loudness wars crap CDs of the early 00s, two decades after CDs first came out. 1980s CDs did not clip; but some people found the undistorted audio lifeless versus the various, potentially pleasing, distortions on vinyl or less often tape.

As for tapes - any new issues are inherently crap cause Dolby is dead. Can't licence the encoding for new recordings, and you can't get new kit that encodes or decodes it cause Dolby pulled licencing over a decade ago. To even get the best out of older tapes (which could be very, very good if recorded on good kit with good tape) you would want a late 90s deck, with new tapes and possibly new capacitors - a lot of money, time and effort.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058304925/tapes

There were even 120 and 150 minute tapes. They snapped. A lot.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120852828#Comment_120852828

I should have said when I first had CD's. Not we. I certainly wasn't buying CDs when they first came out. Anyway it was before the loudness wars.

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/1201/835827-virgin-megastore-opens-in-dublin/

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120852789#Comment_120852789

Putting the labels on the edge of the case or doing your own cassette art.

Then one would break and you'd cello-tape it back together and record it tape to tape to another. Double speed recording. Then those cases with the plastic trays.

MiniDisc and HiMD had the same buzz.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058304925/tapes

I remember C100s - they tended to be Type II

C120s were good for recording concerts off Radio 2 but you needed to handle with care.

If a track got cut off half way, I taped over it with silence and started fresh on the next side.

I always recorded 45 minute albums onto one side of a C90. The AGFAs usually came with 3 extra minutes per side.

For albums of 50/55 minutes, I used C60s but that caused a dilemma re the extra space - do you fill up the first side and put extra tracks on the end of the second side? Or do you preserve the original sides' integrity so have blank space on both sides?

Strumms

I found my old walkman last week. It’s 25 years old….. and dusty.

I found my collection of 204 tapes… dusty too. stuck a couple of batteries in and found all the radio presets were the French stations I was listening to over there. Sound is as impressively crystal clear as I remember….

Flinty997

Then Chrome tape.

Citizen Six

I used to have an amazing Aiwa walkman, made from titanium. It broke at some stage, and I kept it in a drawer for a few years, but I really regret throwing it out in a clear out.

I still have all my tapes, boxed away in my dads attic room.

magicbastarder

i recently sold a decent 90s sony tape deck; the belts had perished and i wasn't going to get a return on the €10 or so investment on replacing them. i still have dozens of old tapes i'd recorded from CD (lot of thats branded tapes) at home, i should find a home for them.

Citizen Six

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120856867#Comment_120856867

Mine will just end up in the bin, after I die. 😂

Flinty997

I ripped all mine using MD/HiND which was a super easy way to do it. All that gear is gone now.

Shakyfan

I was in town the other day and spotted something odd as I passed by a car! On the dashboard was one of those yokes that you could keep tapes in and there were about five or six tapes in it.

iamstop

Anyone else remember the lad (lads?) on the Ha'penny bridge that used to sell bootleg tapes?

I recall buying Energy Rush 6 and GnR - The Spaghetti Incident. Possibly more but those are the one I remember.

The mates bought a few and we all traded and recorded off each other. The days before Napster, LimeWire et al, lol.

Flinty997

Some awful quality recording quality. Lot of live recording.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121048648#Comment_121048648

Bought some live bootlegs off them.

Got a few in the Energy Rush series. Always bought dance compilations on CD from 1988 onwards - the vinyl versions had 30+ minutes per side and sounded like crap.

rolling boh

I think some of those concerts were recorded with a tape recorder outside because the sound was so muffled you barely make out which song it was on a couple I bought .

blackbox

I always hated vinyl. In theory the sound was great but in practice it was full of pops and scratches and so easily damaged.

Cassette tapes were a huge improvement on this with the only downside that there was always a background hiss (much reduced with Dolby). The fundamental problem was that the tape speed was too low. The other big advantage they had over vinyl was the ability to copy stuff.

When CDs came in they simply blew away everything else. Fabulous sound and almost indestructible.

Audio systems have not improved since the days of CDs (apart from convenience).

iamstop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121048784#Comment_121048784

We can't be friends, lol. I've about 12,000 records.

rolling boh

You can't beat opening a new vinyl record and putting on to play then looking at the cover and inside if it was a double .Just something about it magic .

Flinty997

I like a good quality CD. But I do like the analogue quality of tapes and vinyl. CDs and Vinyl just not as portable as tapes.

Favourite format was mini disc and HiMD.

iamstop

I did love the minidiscs for the brief time that they were the 'post tape - pre mp3' format. I think if they had taken off even 5 years earlier they would have had a much stronger foot hold and presence. They were barely gaining traction with the masses before iPods stormed the potable music domain.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121048648#Comment_121048648

They were actually raided by the Gardaí and shut down if I remember correctly.

It was a great place to drop in and pick up a tape of a concert you'd been to. At the stage I was buying in there, early 2000s, the guy would record gigs with a minidisc player.

iamstop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121052017#Comment_121052017

Drop in? The lad am talking about was out in the open streets.

Flinty997

There were a few different lads on the bridge over the years.

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121048784#Comment_121048784

Same, I have a very modest collection of vinyl…… too labor intensive and time consuming pricking around with turntables / record players….

tapes the same though, I’d say a lot of the ones I have in storage boxes will end up being binned.

iamstop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121052059#Comment_121052059

If the tapes are originals they might be worth something. At least donate them instead of chucking to landfill. One man's trash...

magicbastarder

You could also find that people are more interested in 'blank' tapes as they're more useful for recording your own stuff on (primarily because the length is known)

In 1988 four out of every six new albums sold were on cassette. It did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards.

If the CD hadn't come along the cassette's share of album sales would have increased.

Flinty997

Main issue with tapes and players these days they degrade with age. Much worse than Vinyl or CD.

rpirl

Lots of memories of tapes as a young fella but then had a kind of strange renaissance around 2004-2005 as I hadn't been finding a lot of good 'alternative' music the last couple of years, so ended up turning back on daytime radio for a spell

Then started taping songs, more than I thought I would, not sure I listened back to the tapes much but there was some half-decent artists on the radio at the time, like Lucie Silvas and The 411 !

rpirl

Got a lot of greatest hits tapes from the local electrical shop when I was properly getting into music, they had them locked up inside one of those rotating racks...

Used to pick up a few more on trips to the neighbouring towns but CD's started to take over very soon after

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121059626#Comment_121059626

Yeah, you need to have very good electronics knowledge to properly service an old high end tape player; and you can't get a new one of even the same quality as a low end one was 30 years ago.

Also the tapes themselves need either perfect storage or sheer luck to not go to **** within twenty years whereas I have 40 year old CDs and 50s year old records that play just as you'd expect (CD is absolutely 100% perfect, record still sounds good)

Flinty997

True.

magicbastarder

you've been lucky with CDs so. i've seen a fair few delaminate over the years.

i don't have any decent knowledge of tapes to draw on; ironically since i've just given 200 or so of them away. my (once good quality) tape deck was also sold for a song; the belts had perished and i wasn't going to invest in new ones. curious as to how much what i'd recorded on those tapes had degraded vs. how the tapes themselves physically had degraded. i.e. given that the recipient wants to record over them, i'd be curious as to how well they'll take those new recordings.

@magicbastarder

@magicbastarder I’ve had 30 CDs succumb to disc rot (out of thousands). All had the same thing in common- every one was pressed at PDO Blackburn between 1989 & 1993. Most were replaced over time with European pressings.

ruth...less

There was something not nice about cassette covers or cases. CD cases and Record Cases were nice and cool but the cases for tapes just felt cheap and flimsy.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121121691#Comment_121121691

I don't know. CD cases and inserts used to break constantly, worse than cassettes. Don't miss that.

ruth...less

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121122377#Comment_121122377

I think CDs cases were better able to store them. Cassette cases were too chunky and didn't look good piled on top of each other plus always without fail the card/whatever you call it would fall out. You had that with cds too but not as bad.

rpirl

I think you could get sleeker / more slimline cassette cases "out foreign" - I had blank tapes from the US and one of the older siblings brought some home from Japan, might've been something like this

rpirl

On a kind of related note I think the cassette market held steady for a good while in Eastern Europe, all the way into the new millennium, probably something to do with the black market that used to be there for cassettes

I bought an Asian Dub Foundation tape in Poland in 2001 (housemate pinched it off me a year or two later) and was kinda surprised to find the release listed on discogs when I looked a few months back

https://www.discogs.com/release/24266624-Asian-Dub-Foundation-Rafis-Revenge

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121122583#Comment_121122583

They were readily available here. I had a load of those myself. Can't remember which shop sold them.