Cassette Tapes. Does anyone still buy them?

[jayne lee wilson]

I read somewhere that the ine in the movie was standard BBC kit at the time, but what do I know, I still want one, or the one you suggest.

What are you going to play on them, or record on them...?
Or do you just want to watch the Big Wheels turning, and meditate...?

[teamsaint]

What are you going to play on them, or record on them...?
Or do you just want to watch the Big Wheels turning, and meditate...?

Oh, I have an offer of some quality reel to reel material, ( or so I like to think) so no need to worry about that.........

Anyway, silent reel to reel mindfulness might be just the thing.

And it would be a whole new recording adventure.

Edit: And I bet you would love to have one........

[MrGongGong]

I was taking it as understood that I meant "unless it was issued in powder-blue plastic", of course!

Hopefully LJ will play a bit....... (then i'll get enough PRS £ to buy you a pint at HCMF )

[richardfinegold]

I remember many prerecorded cassettes that became stuck and tangled up in tape players. Extracting them without damaging the player was a challenge and needless to say the cassettes themselves didn't survive the procedure.
I had saved my cassettes in a shoebox after the last car with a cassette player was sold off. A couple of years ago an audio store had what was supposed to have been a really good Sony Player back in the day, being sold for about the price of a dinner for two at a moderately priced restaurant, so I purchased it. I couldn't believe how poor these cassettes, both prerecorded and the ones that I had made from CDs in the early days of that medium, sounded. They made mp3 sound like high rez downloads in comparison. I returned the machine and got about 50% of my purchase price and the cassettes went in the recycle bin.

[jayne lee wilson]

No-one here ever play with a Nakamichi? (The legendary Dragon!)...
That brand was always the one...
I longed for one, but by the time I might have afforded it.... I'd moved on....everything had moved on....

Formidable beasts....

[Bryn]

I remember many prerecorded cassettes that became stuck and tangled up in tape players. Extracting them without damaging the player was a challenge and needless to say the cassettes themselves didn't survive the procedure.
I had saved my cassettes in a shoebox after the last car with a cassette player was sold off. A couple of years ago an audio store had what was supposed to have been a really good Sony Player back in the day, being sold for about the price of a dinner for two at a moderately priced restaurant, so I purchased it. I couldn't believe how poor these cassettes, both prerecorded and the ones that I had made from CDs in the early days of that medium, sounded. They made mp3 sound like high rez downloads in comparison. I returned the machine and got about 50% of my purchase price and the cassettes went in the recycle bin.

I have been struggling with transferring to the digital domain some cassettes sent to me by a fellow contributor. Unfortunately, I upgraded to Sound Forge 13 Pro recently and was pretty miffed to find some of its supposed functions, such as tape his reduction were, in fact, non-functional. A more recent major update to SF 13 Pro claims to have resolved some problems, including one relating to hiss reduction. However, I am bogged down in preparations for the forthcoming Scratch Orchestra 50 event, so the cassette transfers have had to go on the back-burner for the next couple of weeks.

I have had considerable success in transferring many of my old cassette recordings in recent years, especially those originally recorded using Dolby S. Even the high-speed cassette duplicates of recordings of the 1984 first complete performance of Cardew's The Great Learning (Union Chapel, Islington) were pretty decent. Those high-speed cassette duplicates were all that survived to digitise, the reel-to-reel masters and real-time cassette mothers all having gone in a house fire in the late '80s. There again, the high=-peed duplication process, carried out at Goldsmiths, back in 1984 involved careful calibration, prior to copying, to preserve the right level for their Dolby B encoding to retain its efficacy. To get the best out of cassettes and their player, close attention to the free-running of the tape and regular cleaning and demagnetising of the tape heads is vital. Many mass-produced commercial cassettes used poor quality mechanics and, indeed, tape.

[LHC]

No-one here ever play with a Nakamichi? (The legendary Dragon!)...
That brand was always the one...
I longed for one, but by the time I might have afforded it.... I'd moved on....everything had moved on....

Formidable beasts....

I still have my Nakamichi tape deck, although sadly not the legendary Dragon.

[pastoralguy]

What are you going to play on them, or record on them...?
Or do you just want to watch the Big Wheels turning, and meditate...?

I LOVE watching the reels go round! In fact, I suspect that's what attracts the younger generation to vinyl. You can see the music being reproduced as opposed to popping a cd into an anonymous black box.

[jayne lee wilson]

The Nak 505 had an amazing bay-window drawer mechanism...keep watching..... just wait for it to change sides.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZNniwPM_hY

...

[pastoralguy]

The Nak 505 had an amazing bay-window drawer mechanism...keep watching..... just wait for it to change sides.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZNniwPM_hY

Superb!

I remember having a cassette machine that reversed automatically. If I was out on a Saturday morning I had to use the wall timer and decide which 90 minutes of Record Review I wanted to capture!

[pastoralguy]

I seem to remember a cassette tape of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' being roundly condemned by the Guide to Penguins as there was a side turn before the recapitulation of the 'Big Tune' in order 'to miserly save a few feet of tape!' An American company, iirc.

[Bryn]

Superb!

I remember having a cassette machine that reversed automatically. If I was out on a Saturday morning I had to use the wall timer and decide which 90 minutes of Record Review I wanted to capture!

I, too, had a cassette deck with a similar facility. I used to cut and splice the far end of the leader tape to ensure minimal loss of recorded signal.

[MrGongGong]

The Nakamitchi takes the tape out and threads it round rollers like a 1/4" machine or DAT ... I think ?
Which, as far as I remember, was one of the main reasons why it was supposedly much better quality as this eleminates many of the issues with friction mechanisms

[pastoralguy]

I, too, had a cassette deck with a similar facility. I used to cut and splice the far end of the leader tape to ensure minimal loss of recorded signal.

I didn't have the patience to do that so there'd be a 12 second gap while some vital piece of information was lost!

[gradus]

I still have my Nakamichi tape deck, although sadly not the legendary Dragon.

Me too, a CR 2E, but I rarely use it despite loads of cassettes in rarely opened cupboard drawers, just too much hassle.