Does anyone still use or like vinyl?

[Beef Oven!]

Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. The question is, did yours always sound like that, or were they once good?

Good question. For example, in 1978 I went to a gig at Wembley, the Progressive rock band 'Yes'.

A few days later BBC Radio broadcasted it. I taped it from a really rubbish radio/cassette player. I've long lost the cassette, but when I listened to it last about 20 years ago, it sounded pretty good. I recorded it on an expensive 'metal' tape, TDK (chrome?).

BUT, remembering the tapes that I recorded off my mates at school (1972 - 1977) they were poor. Had no choice, no way could we afford all the releases we wanted, so we swapped - even agreeing who would buy what on Saturday.

In short, they were bad then and probably are bad now!

Edit: Nearly all the tapes we had were TDK C90 Maybe better tapes (chrome?) fare better?

[umslopogaas]

#177 My local hifi shop has a second-hand Nakamichi cassette deck for sale. Cant remember the price (top range stuff, so it wont be cheap) but I can find out tomorrow when they re-open after the holiday.

I used to make cassette tapes from my LPs to play in the car; I remember they were a bit hissy, but otherwise, given the limitations of the car system, they sounded fine. When I changed cars to one with a CD player I no longer needed them, so put them all in a box on the tearoom table at work with a note saying Help Yourselves. By tea time they had all gone, so I remarked to the department secretary that I was impressed by the staff's musical taste - there was some fairly heavy stuff there, the whole Solti Ring Cycle for example - but she deflated me by pointing out they'd probably taken them to wipe clean and record Radio 1.

[ChrisBennell]

Yes, great cartoon.

I too have been suffering Great Inconvenience (could almost be a Dickens novel) recently. My turntable was connected to my 35 yo transistor amplifier - still going strong - but a couple of weeks ago I dug out the preamplifier and connected the turntable to my 10 yo valve amplifier, and have been listening to vinyl ever since, rediscovering old delights. Marvellous!

I notice someone mentioned cassettes. I have several hundred, many recorded off air from Radio 3, in the days when Radio 3 had good audio engineers, did not use compression, and I had excellent FM reception. They were all recorded with Dolby, initially B and latterly C. The problem is that my cassette machine is irreparably broken. I now have no means of playing my cassettes, and I'm not sure how they would sound anyway, as they are all at least 20 years old, some almost 40.

I'm reluctant to spend a lot on a new player, and I'm not even sure if cassette players with Dolby are still available. Can anyone here please advise?

Cassette players are still available, but you may have to search around. Here's one at Richer Sounds - albeit a bit pricey.

http://www.richersounds.com/product/audio-recorders/teac/w890r-mkii/teac-w890r

An alternative is Ebay but you have to be a bit careful there.

[Ferretfancy]

Most of the problems that people suffered from with LPs was caused by vain attempts to track them using high compliance cartridges and very low tracking weights. I have many pristine discs which still sound fine because I keep them clean and use a moving coil cartridge and a robust turntable. Many of them have not yet been issued on CD.

There's a huge advantage in using products that can be handled, as distinct from downloaded bits of information. At some time in the future it will still be possible to design and build the necessary playback equipment, but the internet may be completely different in only a few years time and all the encoding systems changed, as we have already discovered with earlier formats. Where are our collections then ?

[teamsaint]

Most of the problems that people suffered from with LPs was caused by vain attempts to track them using high compliance cartridges and very low tracking weights. I have many pristine discs which still sound fine because I keep them clean and use a moving coil cartridge and a robust turntable. Many of them have not yet been issued on CD.

There's a huge advantage in using products that can be handled, as distinct from downloaded bits of information. At some time in the future it will still be possible to design and build the necessary playback equipment, but the internet may be completely different in only a few years time and all the encoding systems changed, as we have already discovered with earlier formats. Where are our collections then ?

all excellent points, FF.
re the question at the end, see post #168 !

[pastoralguy]

All my cassettes sound shit.

Alas, I'm afraid mine do too. I only have three cassettes left now. The most important one is a tape I surreptitiously made in December 1976 of my father in conversation with his work colleagues. 10 weeks later he suffered a massive stroke that robbed him of his speech. Despite the tape being a very cheap one, it's kept its playback quality well. I've always intended to get it copied to a cd or mini-disc but have always desisted at the last minute through fear that something may happen to it in the hands of a third party.

The other tape belonged to my father and is a CfP cassette of the late Peter Katin playing the Grieg concerto with the LPO and Sir John Pritchard coupled with selections from 'Peer Gynt'. It's never come out on cd although I live in hope. It does still work but, inevitably, sounds terrible compared with what I'm accustomed to now.

The last tape is a recording from 1982 of an Itzhak Perlman recital with Bruno Canino recorded from Radio 3. It's unlistenable now.

However, I do have open reel tapes from 1980 when I purchased an ancient machine from a house sale. It was so heavy I could hardly carry it! It only lasted 6 weeks before grinding to a halt but that was long enough to record members of my family who have died long ago including my grandfather who was born in 1906 and could remember the sinking of the 'Titanic' being discussed as a small boy. These tapes were well stored in proper boxes and sounded terrific when I obtained a Sony open reel machine a couple of years ago.

[Dave2002]

Alas, I'm afraid mine do too. I only have three cassettes left now. The most important one is a tape I surreptitiously made in December 1976 of my father in conversation with his work colleagues. 10 weeks later he suffered a massive stroke that robbed him of his speech. Despite the tape being a very cheap one, it's kept its playback quality well. I've always intended to get it copied to a cd or mini-disc but have always desisted at the last minute through fear that something may happen to it in the hands of a third party.

If you get good playback of the tape of your father you can probably make a digital copy from that yourself, though it might depend what outputs you have. I made a perfectly acceptable recording of speech not very long ago using the headphone output of a tape/cd/radio box fed into a computer, and if I recall correctly I used Audacity to do the recording. I think I also did a few short test runs to get the volume level set up. Then I let it run. Once done, for speech there is relatively little loss in compressing down to a high bit rate mp3, or even a modest bit rate.

This probably wouldn't work well for music, because speed variations and other problems might be very apparent, though a good tape deck might rescue an impossible otherwise to get tape recording. Worth a try, perhaps.

Most commercial cassettes always did sound awful, no matter how good the casette recorder/player or deck. However tapes made on my Sony S machine were very hard to tell from CDs, and some tapes made on lesser/cheaper machines would still sound good if played back on the same machine.

[richardfinegold]

I was doing some housecleaning a year ago and came across my cassette collection, a mix of my own tapings and pre recorded muic.
An A_V shop that I frequent had a used Sony Cassette player for sale for about $40. It looked a lot higher end than anything I had owned back in the day and dated from the early 90s, a time by which I had long abandoned cassettes in favor of Cd and CD-Rs.(I bought it out of curiosity and hooked it up to the main rig. It was money wasted. All the cassettes sounded horrible, the prerecorded worst of all. I resold the tape deck and tossed the cassettes . This is one forum whose demise should not be lamented.

[Beef Oven!]

Alas, I'm afraid mine do too. I only have three cassettes left now. The most important one is a tape I surreptitiously made in December 1976 of my father in conversation with his work colleagues. 10 weeks later he suffered a massive stroke that robbed him of his speech. Despite the tape being a very cheap one, it's kept its playback quality well. I've always intended to get it copied to a cd or mini-disc but have always desisted at the last minute through fear that something may happen to it in the hands of a third party.

The other tape belonged to my father and is a CfP cassette of the late Peter Katin playing the Grieg concerto with the LPO and Sir John Pritchard coupled with selections from 'Peer Gynt'. It's never come out on cd although I live in hope. It does still work but, inevitably, sounds terrible compared with what I'm accustomed to now.

The last tape is a recording from 1982 of an Itzhak Perlman recital with Bruno Canino recorded from Radio 3. It's unlistenable now.

However, I do have open reel tapes from 1980 when I purchased an ancient machine from a house sale. It was so heavy I could hardly carry it! It only lasted 6 weeks before grinding to a halt but that was long enough to record members of my family who have died long ago including my grandfather who was born in 1906 and could remember the sinking of the 'Titanic' being discussed as a small boy. These tapes were well stored in proper boxes and sounded terrific when I obtained a Sony open reel machine a couple of years ago.

Wow! You should try to get some copies made. It's quite easy these days.

[mangerton]

Thanks to all for your helpful comments and suggestions.

[umslopogaas]

#177 mangerton, Audio Destination in Tiverton, east Devon, have a second-hand Nakamichi 681ZX cassette deck for sale for about £650 - 700. Probably more than you want to pay, but I thought I'd let you know. It was very high quality stuff in its day. The business is run by Mike and Caroline Rogers, tel. 01884 243584.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I recorded all my school concerts in the 1970s and '80s, using a Tandberg open reel tape recorder. A few years ago, I set about making CDs of these, using a Sony CD recorder. The results were beyond my wildest expectations, though I had some difficulty transferring one particular tape that was shedding oxide rapidly. This requited me having to clean the heads after each piece/movement/song, but it was worth it in the end. Having also concerted the CDs to mp3, the entire series of concerts from 1975 - 85 can now be stored on a 4Gb memory card.

[gradus]

Re the Nakamichi, I'd certainly concur having bought a CR2E from a friend in 'well used' condition and hence at a somewhat lower price but the build quality is first rate and everything works.

[umslopogaas]

Many thanks Gradus, I think mangerton should take the plunge (of course, I am supposing he has seven hundred quid to spare) because I think this would be not only a great buy for now, but an investment for the future.

OK, I know, spending other people's money is very easy ...

[Roehre]

Re the Nakamichi, I'd certainly concur having bought a CR2E from a friend in 'well used' condition and hence at a somewhat lower price but the build quality is first rate and everything works.

Two of my decks are Nakamichis (BX-1 [1984] and CR2E [1997] ), and both with only one service in the past 30 and 18 years respectively they are really super machines. Strongly recommended