First LPs, now cassettes? What happened to quality???

[TitaniumTroy]

Flint, who cares about quality. When you can smell a fresh unopened cassette, and the sound of tape hiss in the air. These guys are one strange time warp, 8-track really sucked trying to find a song. I had a player in my second car a 1967 Cougar.

The is the baddest of the bad in tape decks back in the day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvSgfFNptuQ The Nakamichi Dragon :bow-blue:

 

[Randy]

First came the 4 track tape, didn't last long. 8 track was introduced right around 65 - 66, and believe me, be grateful you were never exposed to the finer qualities of 8 Track. What a PITA.

Rope

PITA? What are you crazy? 8 track rocks! Especially when the music would fade out (in the middle of a long song), you hear a loud "KACHUNK!", followed by the music fading back in.


Classic!

Agreed! My sister and I got matching 8-track portable machines for Christmas one year, and I can truly say, that is what gave me a love for music. To this day, I still know all of the words to the Monkee's greatest hits! :music-listening:

My brothers and I all got Panasonic dynamite 8 players for Chrsitmas one year. I think one was red, one was yellow, and one was blue.

 

[Yesfan70]

Ha! I remember those!

 

[Deleted member 133]

Flint, who cares about quality. When you can smell a fresh unopened cassette, and the sound of tape hiss in the air. These guys are one strange time warp, 8-track really sucked trying to find a song. I had a player in my second car a 1967 Cougar.

The is the baddest of the bad in tape decks back in the day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvSgfFNptuQ The Nakamichi Dragon :bow-blue:

I think my Nak RX-202 has all of its features (and more - at least the ones that matter) of the Dragon PLUS it has a way cool way of auto-reversing: the tape gets flipped - the heads stay fixed (and aligned) - and you can watch it happen through a clear plexi bay window.

 

[Deleted member 133]

And in defense of the 8-track system... for me it provided my first ever exposure to true multi-channel (ie. more than stereo) surround sound with its Quad format / tapes. Granted, for me it was all part of a 10 W/ch Sears system, but Quad wet my appetite for more, and that thirst wasn't slaked for many years after that.

Jeff

 

[Kazaam]

And in defense of the 8-track system... for me it provided my first ever exposure to true multi-channel (ie. more than stereo) surround sound with its Quad format / tapes. Granted, for me it was all part of a 10 W/ch Sears system, but Quad wet my appetite for more, and that thirst wasn't slaked for many years after that.

Jeff

Yeah... the fidelity of 8-Track is crap, but Q8's were an affordable and reliable way to provide discrete, separate surround channels---for the 70s, at least. So good call!!!! Granted this was all before my time, but still...

From what I understand, QS and SQ were matrixed quad formats for vinyl, and were probably just as prevalent as Q8; but the cheap Sears radios (and other inexpensive brands) didn't have any logic whatsover to properly move the sounds to the surrounds. You needed something expensive like a Tate processor for the surround sound to actually sound good. Or so I've read. So... score one for the 8-Track!

There was also yet another vinyl quad format called CD-4, which was discrete and probably sounded way better than 8-Track, but I suspect it was probably more expensive???? Or so I assume. Like I said, this was all before my time.

Anyway... I've collected a couple of Q8's over the years. Got me some Burt Bacharach and some Enoch Light that I found for cheap in the thrift store. I'll probably never get to hear them though. I'm too cheap to ever buy a player.

 

[Kazaam]

Dinosaur Jr re-issuing 3 albums on cassette:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/15/dinosaur-jr-reissuing-first-three-records-on-cassette-harnessi/

 

[Yesfan70]

I listened to the two YouTube clips.....horrible.



If the rest of their music is like that, then probably a good thing they're staying with cassette. That Cure cover made me want to puke.

 

[Kazaam]

I've never heard these particular albums, so they might very well suck. I do, however, have one of their other albums and find it to be OK. Not great, but just OK.

 

[Batman]

^^ I can"t stop :laughing-lettersrofl: :laughing-rolling: Especially that Cure cover :text-lol:

 

[TKoP]

Flint, who cares about quality. When you can smell a fresh unopened cassette, and the sound of tape hiss in the air. These guys are one strange time warp, 8-track really sucked trying to find a song. I had a player in my second car a 1967 Cougar.

The is the baddest of the bad in tape decks back in the day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvSgfFNptuQ The Nakamichi Dragon :bow-blue:

I think my Nak RX-202 has all of its features (and more - at least the ones that matter) of the Dragon PLUS it has a way cool way of auto-reversing: the tape gets flipped - the heads stay fixed (and aligned) - and you can watch it happen through a clear plexi bay window.

I still have my aiwa cassette deck with Dolby S recording. Cant rememeber the last time I fired that sucker up but if there are some audiophools thinking this is the bees knees, well I think I may have to get a little more uppity around here.

 

[MatthewB]

I can recall the last 8-Track I bought "Herb Albert's Rise" album in 1980 it was memorable to me because I last heard it the night before I went into a coma for a week. Then I had a roommate in college who still had a working 8-track player and he was ecstatic when I went home and found a box of 8-Tracks including the Beatles Red and Blue greatest hits and gave the whole collection to him.

Two years ago I finally took out my Sony dual cassette player. Anyone want a mix tape?

 

[Flint]

Reviving an old thread because there is news on this front...

The WSJ had piece on their front page about a US company, National Audio, who got a name for themselves over the years for being the one company to continually invest in Cassette production - cashing in on being the only provider out there, so the small market was nearly entirely there's alone. They said other companies laughed at them as they bought up all the Cassette assembly, production, and duplicating machinery on the cheap from all their former competitors who abandoned the format for CD. Well, the last huge tape maker, from Korea, shut its tape manufacturing years ago, so National Audio bought the remaining stock of tape which is set to run out in a few years - and with demand increasing, they needed a solution.

Now National Audio is building a brand new ferric-oxide tape production machine, the first new tape machine put into production in nearly 50 years. Demand is high enough to start making tape again - and the company says it will be the best tape ever produced because all the modern production knowledge and highest possible precision will be employed.

They claim young bands are coming to them to create new releases on Cassette for all sorts of music, mostly punk and alternative rock. But they also made the cassettes for the Guardians of the Galaxy II soundtrack, the Hamilton soundtrack, the Metallica demo tape release, and others.

So... I guess we can expect to see new versions of the Walkman (or throwback copies of the design) hitting major stores soon.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

That is just amazing. There is absolutely no sonic argument favorable for cassettes. The only available cassette players/recorders available today are essentially junk (although Sony still makes some apparently), so I guess they will match the quality potential of the tape. Making a cassette deck of any quality is not a trivial matter, and unlike vintage professional reel to reel decks, vintage ones are extremely unlikely to work anywhere near like they did when new, no matter how much restoration work is done. There's just so much mechanical stuff inside all cassette decks which is made to a consumer level of quality, i.e. it was not made to last decades. And replacement parts? forget it.

Oh well.

 

[Akula]

That's just messed up.

The only two benefits cassettes had over anything were the ease of recording and the portability due to shock protection. Digital methods have it beat in both regards and in every other possible way now.

Nostalgia gets frigging stupid. Nobody who actually used cassettes wants them back.

 

[Deleted member 133]

You know, based on the listening I've been doing today, I've gotta mount a bit of a defense of the cassette - despite anything I might have said in this thread or others.

As mentioned (I think) previously, I've just finished paying nearly $600 to have two cassette decks (Akai GXC-325D and Nakamichi RX-202) refurbished to "like new" condition. This was a pure nostalgia move on my part. I'll never record anything with them again (I looked, and I have no old new blank tape kicking around) and just about everything I've got on the 200 or so tapes that I made over the years I've now been able to source either online or as a CD. Regardless I decided to pull one out at random and play it in the main HT (Zone 2 stereo system) today.

It's a recording of the Canadian Brass' Basin Street, from a CD, that I made with a previous deck, a Pioneer CT-8R, using Sony Metal-SR tape and Dolby C NR. Today I played it on the refurbished Nakamichi RX-202 (circa 1984). And I gotta say, there's really no way that if I walked into the room while it was playing that I could tell that it was not a CD. Ignoring all the other issues with tape (hard to directly access tracks, rewinding and forwarding, etc.) from a purely sonic point of view, this is a near-perfect recording, free from any noticeable distortion, hiss, wow & flutter etc. With metal tape, frequency response is essentially flat from 20-20,000Hz. This is a recording that was made probably 20-30 years ago. And not on the deck I'm playing it on today. (The CT-8R spec'd out as good as the Nak back in the day. I only replaced it with the Nak when it kicked the bucket a number of years ago and parts were not available to fix it.)

I'm not advocating for a return to cassette (especially not for making copies of vinyl!) but by the time it (initially) disappeared as a format, it was capable of sounding pretty darn good - as I'm proving to myself today.

And for nostalgia? It's way way cool watching the Nak auto-reverse!

Jeff

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

With metal tape, frequency response is essentially flat from 20-20,000Hz.
Jeff

Wow that must be some mighty awesome tape machine! 20-20,000Hz flat? REALLY???? If you can provide some objective measurement of that (at operating level of course), I'd like to show that to my studio Ampex 1/2 track 15ips machine - even it has a hard time pulling that off, even using studio mastering tape. And even then, I can hear tape hiss, and traces of flutter.

The thing is, with anything but machines operating at at least 15 ips or 30 ips, the recording level where response measurements are made are much less than at "0 VU". With cassettes it is normally minus 20dB, a level so low that nobody would actually use that level to make a real recording. Since cassettes on a good day have a native signal to noise ratio of around 45dB (and that is referenced above "0VU", at the approach of tape saturation), a recording at minus 20dB would have a signal to noise ratio of around 20dB. That of course is totally unlistenable. If you tried to record a response measurement at the real operating level on a cassette machine, you would be lucky to get to 5kHz before massive saturation effects would bring the party to an abrupt halt. That's the reality, even with metal tape.

Its a miracle that cassettes sound as good as they do, to be generous. While I absolutely love the magnetic tape medium, I'm realistic enough to acknowledge that it is deeply flawed. At 15 ips and especially at 30 ips using extremely wide tracks, really fine performance can be had, but even then it does not approach digital in any respect. And of course digital has its own problems.

In some ways, disc recording and reproduction is capable of better performance, at least in some ways, but that's too big a subject to get into.

 

[Deleted member 133]

Sure...

From a review of the RX-202 ($650) in the February 1984 issue of High Fidelity:

"Record/Playback Response, Type 4 Tape (-20 dB), with Dolby C noise reduction, +1 1/4, -0 dB, 21 Hz to 20 kHz" (read from a table)

"The results are superb, particularly when you consider how few other two-head decks can achieve virtually flat response to 20 kHz."

From a review of the RX-505 ($1090) in the July 1984 issue of Audio:

"Record /playback responses (-3 dB limits), with Dolby C NR, using Nakamichi EXII tape: Dolby Lvl: 10.4 Hz and 20.5 kHz, -20 dB 10.4 Hz and 23.7 kHz" (read from a table)

"The record / playback responses for the three tapes with and without Dolby C NR were excellent... Take particular note of the outstanding flatness from 20 Hz to 20 kHz at Dolby level with Dolby C NR."

When I got rid of the Pioneer CT-8R I unfortunately threw out the reviews for it that I had collected. I recall clearly a review in a trade pub, perhaps by Julian Hirsch, that sung its praises and particularly for its flat frequency response. I recall this because when I looked for a replacement I wanted something as good - and the Nak was it.

That's about the best I can do as far as objective info goes - since I don't have my own test lab to generate results and must rely on published results of others. I don't know that it satisfies your "at operating levels of course" requirement. I can only go by what was in these reviews. It was on the basis of those reviews, and my own listening (albeit with aging ears - certainly older than when I bought the Nak), that I said "With metal tape, frequency response is essentially flat from 20-20,000Hz." Note that I used "essentially flat" - where the two reviews used "virtually flat" and "outstanding flatness." Can we at least agree that my comment was pretty much in line with the pros who did the testing / reviews?

I'll leave it up to you as to whether you think your Ampex can deal with this information or not.

Jeff

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

I don't know that it satisfies your "at operating levels of course" requirement. I can only go by what was in these reviews.
Jeff

No, it does not. The review is basically useless.

I said what "operating level" was; it is 0VU on the meter. The dirty secret of reviews like you quoted is that these measurements are made at -20db below that level, and of course they didn't tell people that or if they did, it was in passing. That makes the measurement useless in the real world because nobody will record something at that low of a level since the noise would be intolerable. The response in the real world would be much, much less than that, and in my experience it would top out at around 5kHz at a useful level. And add that to the extent to which magazines were in the pocket of manufacturers and their ad dollars during that time. Actually they still are to a certain extent, but it was far worse then.

Still most music sounded passable on cassette despite this since the spectral distribution of most music as it was recorded didn't challenge that limited dynamic range. Digital recordings of today, recorded at full level on a cassette would sound far worse than the limited dynamics of material in the 70s. Even at 15 ips 1/2 track on mastering tape, making a copy of a CD is pushing the limits of the tape medium - its 60dB of tape verses 90dB of digital, and guess who's going to lose. A cassette would not have a chance.

Vinyl is similarly limited, but the only thing which makes the medium work with today's material is the complex signal processing done as the lacquer master is being cut. Things like frequency and level dependent compression, filtering, blending and other tricks.

Consumer electronics is full of misleading advertising. Receiver power ratings today have slipped back into the meaningless numbers we had to deal with during the "music power" days of the 70s. Digital devices have their own misleading claims. Its consumer electronics for heaven's sake, and anything a manufacturer says should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.

 

[Deleted member 133]

No, it does not. The review is basically useless.

I said what "operating level" was; it is 0VU on the meter. The dirty secret of reviews like you quoted is that these measurements are made at -20db below that level, and of course they didn't tell people that or if they did, it was in passing. That makes the measurement useless in the real world because nobody will record something at that low of a level since the noise would be intolerable.

I understand.

However here's what I quoted from the Audio review.

"Record /playback responses (-3 dB limits), with Dolby C NR, using Nakamichi EXII tape: Dolby Lvl: 10.4 Hz and 20.5 kHz, -20 dB 10.4 Hz and 23.7 kHz" (read from a table)

"The record / playback responses for the three tapes with and without Dolby C NR were excellent... Take particular note of the outstanding flatness from 20 Hz to 20 kHz at Dolby level with Dolby C NR."​

Now when I did that I confess that I had no idea exactly what the difference between Dolby level and -20 dB is. There must be some, since they report on both.

So looking at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system I extract the following:

The Dolby preemphasis boosts the recorded level of the quieter audio signal at these higher frequencies during recording, effectively compressing the dynamic range of that portion of the signal, so that quieter sounds above 1 kHz receive a proportionally greater boost. As the tape is recorded, the relative amplitude of the signal above 1 kHz is used to determine how much pre-emphasis to apply - a low-level signal is boosted by 10 dB (Dolby B) or 20 dB (Dolby C). As the signal rises in amplitude, less and less pre-emphasis is applied until at the "Dolby level" (0 VU), no signal modification is performed.​

So Dolby level is 0VU according to Wiki. And you say that 0 VU on the meter is operating level. And one of the reviews gives results for Dolby level that show the response being down -3 dB at 10.4 Hz and 20.5 kHz. Which, in my books is "essentially flat" - at operating levels.

Again, I'm not advocating a return to cassette. I'm not saying it was technically superior, or even equal, to other formats. My post was simply a reaction to the fact (not a review) that yesterday when I walked into my HT to listen to a 20+ year old cassette copy of a CD it sounded really really good, to the point that I would not have known it was not a CD playing when I walked into the room. I did not do any A/B testing (I do have the CD of that recording as well). I was not trying to convert anyone to cassette, nor harm any living creature during the writing of my post.

I appreciate all of your comments - which are based on knowledge and experience that I don't possess.

Jeff