Cassette Tapes

I used to like to listen to tapes that I had stored computer programs on. Now that's the shit.

-They are so cheap and easy to get. People don't value them for collecting so when hunting older, out of print, used stuff, the selection is much better than for CD's, if you go to the right place like flea markets. If you collect on a budget they let you hear way more music, and take more chances, then you can get CD's for certain ones later if you really care to. Also, for selection, there's certain stuff that will never be heard on CD.

-Tape players are cheaper, easier to find and fix and more durable than CD players. Lots of places you go (work, car) have tape players but not CD players so they can be more portable.

-Tapes are durable and won't die if you drop them. CD's are more delicate- I have lost more to scratching and bronzing than I have lost tapes to age and wear. (In the short run. I don't care about the long run, because only a small amount of any music is good enough to replace when it wears out, after having heard it that many times.) Tapes are easy to repair at home, CD's aren't. In fact I'm not even sure whether CD "resurfacing" really works- I heard there was one type of home repair device that did (the kind with a grinding wheel) but they took it off the market because stupid people were just melting their CD's with it.

-You can dupe tapes with a $5 tape deck- for CD's, you need hundreds of bucks of computer stuff which I don't have.

-Tapes can hold 2 albums, CD's usually just one unless you cut off songs.

-Some people think vinyl has that special analog sound quality. I don't care about that but I guess tapes would too. Regardless, tapes sound good. Maybe hiss matters if you have super duper expensive speaker equipment, but for personal use on small decks they are equal to CD's.

Making mix CDs is easier than making mix cassettes, IMHO. But making mix cassettes was so much more fun and involving. Too bad I so rarely get a chance to listen to cassettes anymore. My Orpheus, i.e. the vehicle I own and drive most regularly, only plays CDs.

*clicks on submit*

*sees nickalicious' post*

Making mix-tapes is such an intimate thing too cuz you yourself have to listen through each entire song/piece and it just feels more personal than lining the tracks up in the right order & burning 'em down at 16x speed.

*laugh* I basically said that before I saw this. So I'll agree.

totally forgot about that shit! that was great!

I make mix CD's in the same way I used to make mix tapes. Sitting there and individually recording all the songs with a CD-Recorder (one of my most expensive and eccentric purchases).

martin, I *love* recording scratchy records on CD. I think it sounds great!

Exactly why I adore CDs. Say what you want, but at least you don't to cuss your way through spending 10 mins trying to find the beginning of a song.

just thinking about it gives me an anxiety attack.

And I used to watch TV on the channels that didn't have actual programming on them just to see that cool black and white snow stuff. Did you all ever notice that the snow spins every once in a while? Sometimes the whole image spirals. I miss that--the blue screen modern TVs have isn't quite the same.

*walks away munching paint chips*

but what about the satisfaction of listening to the finished product?

xpost: I had a tape of the La's album and transferred my favourite song ("I Can't Sleep") to CD. It sounded pretty obviously from tape though, so when I finally bought the actual CD of the album I listened to that track first to see how much better it would sound. IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME. which, in a way, was cool.

I don't miss pissing around with rewind and fast-forward. I don't miss the bastards getting chewed up and sustaining sound drops simply from being played. I have some audo tapes, but I ditched a large amount of them. My VHS stuff will dwindle over time similarly, I expect.

The funny thing is, I see the tape boosters today as being a modern equivalent of the vinyl boosters of 15 years ago. In 50 years time, there will be people vehemently defending CDs against whatever the hell is new and vogue then. The more things change, etc...

...so you decide to end on an appropriately short track (may fave was "I'm sticking with you" by the Velvets before Mazda ruined it!)....and just as the song ends as you are recording, you hear that satisfying sound of the leader running over the tape heads...

...the CHUNK! the tape ends and stops.

Genius! And you realsie that you filled the whole D90, with all complete songs...and only a second to spare.

Life, my friends, does not get much better than that.

(My typing has gone to shit, as I'm having a cigarette and so my bedroom window is open and my hands are freezing.)

(Cue Horace telling me to just give up)

I did have a CD that went iffy all on its own, once. And a friend had the same album bought at the same time and it happened to theirs, too. I think it took 2-3 years. It was obviously a manufacturing fault.

The pricing thing doesn't stick too well. Just about anything you want will be in a sale sooner or later for a price that's less than a brand-new tape. HMV, Virgin, etc., have these sales in a continuous cycle, more or less. Or buy second-hand! A second-hand CD or DVD will play like new if it's not damaged, whereas it's absolutely inevitable that a second-hand tape will at least be moderately shitty.

I can only look at potential problems vs. obvious ones. Will a CD turn to shit after ten years? If it worries me so much, I can take five minutes out to copy it when it's nine years old. Bit more efficient than needing to copy loads of tapes that WILL need replacing if you value quality, where the process takes 90 minutes a pop. Life's too short, man...

Alright they last less long.

They're like a plastic tragedy waiting to happen.

I disagree! If it was good quality to begin (you can tell just by looking) either it plays or it doesn't. (Manufacturer defect- poor binder causing squeal- accounts for 95% of the very few problems with thousands of tapes I have. And always avoid Type I, that might be giving you the idea all tapes wear out like those do.) And there's no comparison to the price of used tapes. Provided you look in the right place you can get dozens of good tapes for the price of one used CD. I do it off ebay, flea markets and thrift stores all the time. In fact that's the ONLY music I buy. I guess it depends on what you listen to, but I know what to look for and most people don't among old stuff so it's easy.
Most people don't realize I also sleep in a nest of unspooled tapes.

tapes gettin expensive

yup, competitive starting price here, given the quality of the goods on offer...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Various-Cassettes-/320640741255?pt=UK_Music_Other_Music_Formats_ET&hash=item4aa7ad6f87

Sony stopped making Walkmen just recently. I was able to score one about two years ago, so at least I have a decent player I can plug into my stereo (although not as cool as the yamaha kx-690, I must say).

Only tapes I have are Steely Dan, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin though.

old walkmans are a good thing to get on ebay. new walkmans always last like eight months and then die. the old ones are built to last.

really want a walkman with a speed control, just to sample shit.

Only tapes I have are Steely Dan, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin though.

― calstars, Wednesday, January 12, 2011 3:42 PM Bookmark

Sounds like you're pretty much set up!

We still have my husband's old yellow waterproof Walkman, must be like 20 years old now...but it still rocks the old tapes when we feel a hankerin' for reliving some mixtape nostalgia.

If you spent a lot of time making mixtapes in the '70s and '80s, you might get lost here. (I used to think BASF tapes looked so...serious. And they tended to be a little cheaper.)

http://vintagecassettes.com/

Memorex - I still remember those early 70's tapes with the 'movie clapperboard' box, and the plastic smell of those early 80's dB series tapes.

http://imagecache5.art.com/p/LRG/8/859/JPDJ000Z/steve-steigman-blown-away.jpg

Oops--that was Maxell. It was Ella Fitzgerald for Memorex.

Also I had a lot of early 90's TDK, with the slimline box.

so like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie1d1SL91zg

If you spent a lot of time making mixtapes in the '70s and '80s, you might get lost here. (I used to think BASF tapes looked so.../serious/. And they tended to be a little cheaper.)

http://vintagecassettes.com🕸/

tdk or gtfo

Maxell man myself. I can still remember the smell of the plastic with a twist of tape

Picked up a half-working Panasonic boombox to get cleaned up by a local cash only hole-in-the-wall hi-fi repair place. Currently in $2 second hand(Roxy Music, Tom Petty, Van Morison etc. very easy to find) and cheap new ambient/experimental/noise tape heaven. Might have to start getting into death metal to maximise on the investment.

Anyways, the kids are not yet into cassettes in a big way which is fine with me (selflishly): the last overlap of economical/ethical in music consumption. I am having my cake and eating it with Loren Conors/Chris Forsyth split release tape on a Sunday night.

I used to think cassettes were rubbish. The hiss always offended me, and also the uncertainty of playback, with the potential for the treble to dip in and out, and the speed to vary from one machine to another, let alone the tape mechanism getting snarled up from time to time, making the tape unplayable. Nevertheless, I accumulated hundreds of them over decades, where I taped things off the radio, including lots of pirate radio in the 1980s and 1990s, and also used them to record all the music I made myself in that period.

But I've changed my opinion. I think the sound quality is OK to good, and I'm finding that my old tapes are a wonderful source of samples. Long ago I used to record myself playing the drums in my room, using a mono cassette-radio unit that was poor even by the standards of the day, yet I've been able to make usable drum loops from these recordings, albeit getting creative with noise reduction and noise gates.

I saw a red Saisho single cassette deck boombox - the kind of thing that would have been sold in Dixons in the late 80s - in one of the waste electrical bins at work a couple of weeks ago. The back was completely caked in a thick layer of mud and/or shit though, so I left it.

Cassettes are a necessary rebellion against pharisaical audiophilia. Spirit vs. letter. Form vs. substance. Rectangles vs. circles.

I am deep in a cassette tape trip at the moment -

provisional findings:

yeah they sound a lot better than they ever did in the 1980s - or my 1980s anyway - really great on a decent machine, and with a smudgy charm even on a mid-tier walkman - also for peanuts you can buy a pair of IEMS that totally smoke any walkman headphones from the 1980s/90s

BUT bad tape playback is still really bad!

(is this pharisaical audiophilia? yeah well maybe but i still enjoy my music sounding as good as I can make it on a beer budget, sue me I guess)

as with vinyl, all the annoying things about them are also kind of fun - unpredictability, dropouts etc - kind of appreciate the upfront disposability / imperfection vibes vs digital (still like digital fine tho)

Anyways, the kids are not yet into cassettes in a big way

really solid noise/punk cassette scene here in Aus - and it is still possible to find fun vintage tapes in the wild but they are definitely more picked over than they might've been a few years ago - some of the prices for certain desirable tapes are full on! like Cure/New Order/Nick Cave/Mazzy Star & other indie staples = $$$

bought a case of laid back jazz funk yesterday for $1 ea and currently enjoying Herbie Hancock's Sunlight, sounding smooth and beautiful on my top of the line (in 1982) technics deck

To add, I bought a Technics cassette deck in the early 1980s. It was nowhere near top of the range but was the most highly recommended budget model in some hi-fi magazine. It had fairly heavy use through the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s, at which point I started mainly using DAT tapes instead to record music I was working on. The Technics went into storage from that point, but I dug it out a couple of years ago when I started going through my old tapes and it still works, seemingly as good as new. Amazing. I hope I won't jinx it by posting this.

It's an RS-B305 and cost about £120 new around 1983 or something like that. Great machine.

xxp fk I've got competition! Repressed on Kings street has been keeping me well stocked up, very much enjoying dipping my toes into the noise/experimental tape cassette scene here. Anywhere to go besides Repressed to find these things? New to the city, not exactly tuned into the scene (busy busy). Various oxtail and room40 cassettes currently rolling. Off to pick up a Lisa Lerkenfeldt tape tomorrow.

My dad currently drives my Grandmas old 80s corolla with only a tape player for music. Sent back to QLD Roxy Music's Avalon and Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green on tape for fathers day yesterday. Nice way to stay connected across state lines.

the kids are certainly into cassettes

I have a Nakamichi tape deck I bought in the 80's that still works fine. I've cycled through about 5 CD players in that time.

Anywhere to go besides Repressed to find these things?

Off the top of my head maybe Ten Seconds Down in Glebe or Prop in Ashfield would stock some interesting things? But Repressed definitely the best prospect yeah

& that is a superb father’s day present! Green on tape such a nice idea. i picked up a bunch of ambient/new age tapes a while ago and enjoyed going through them and separating the synth pad masterpieces from the gross pan pipe stuff

I did a project on Tascam multitrack during covid and we noticed some wow & flutter in the final mix on a couple songs, so I put the machine into mothballs (though it very well might have been the cassette itself) and replaced it with some equally obsolete digital thing

Now I'm hearing so much bumper music on the radio & elsewhere where they add wow & flutter to digital recordings.. probably a plug-in or something

(I have the first Stooges album on an actual Elektra factory cassette, the kind with no printing in the J-card.. but I never play it anymore)

I put out a cassette of ancient ambient doodles earlier this year, seemed the appropriately humble format for that kind of thing. I’m really proud of myself for following through and doing all the artwork/dubbing myself lol.

https://dreamscan.bandcamp.com/album/reduced-pathways

this book is great fyi

https://uncpress.org/9781469675985/high-bias/

Yeah I read that last year, agreed!

"Now I'm hearing so much bumper music on the radio & elsewhere where they add wow & flutter to digital recordings.. probably a plug-in or something"

I have in my possession a Strymon El Capistan, which is a guitar pedal that emulates tape delay, and it has "tape age" and "wow and flutter" knobs that muffle the sound and add wobbly modulations. Which is nice in moderation but it's easy to overdo it. The same company also makes a pedal called the Deco that emulates the sound of overdriven tape. There's also a popular free plugin that tries to emulate the sound of a reel-to-reel tape deck:
https://chowdsp.com/products.html

This is the reason why old Tascam Portastudios are more expensive on eBay than digital recorders from twenty years ago, because the digital recorders are mostly redundant nowadays and there's a fetish for the muffly, hissy sound of tape. It's odd, because actual studio-quality tape sounded nothing like cassette tape, and the kids of today grew up with MP3s, so it's as if they're trying to capture a genetic memory of their parents' exposure to the Sony Walkman.

also trying to capture the vibe of Boards of Canada perhaps?

Trying to capture something REAL. I do think audiophilia has suffocated musical enjoyment. Everything sold is pristine, absent of artefact. The advance in technical forms and know-how have made musical objects homogeneous. It's the blandness of perfection. A retreat into the damaged past is understandable: we want singular damaged works not perfect shiny commodities.

Thanks for the recs emsworth!

I disagree
It’s the feeling not the format

Xp lol sorry Ten Seconds Down was in Chatswood like 20 years ago - 19th Nervous Breakdown is in Glebe and has a pretty good cassette wall

haha all good. Nice and central to Usyd and Flodge Hotel, what more could I want? Thanks!

I do think audiophilia has suffocated musical enjoyment. Everything sold is pristine, absent of artefact. The advance in technical forms and know-how have made musical objects homogeneous. It's the blandness of perfection. A retreat into the damaged past is understandable: we want singular damaged works not perfect shiny commodities.

what's pristine is the fiction of all of this

thanks

hey no offense, i like your enthusiasm for tapes. it's just pretty clear that formats aren't all the same now. in some ways they're more complicated than ever. analog and digital are hopelessly tangled in production chains leading to a lot of contingencies. and today's main form of listening - streaming - is very much not audiophilia, though i would agree that it's suffocating musical enjoyment (by stripping out audio information). maybe what you're saying is true in your experience but you're generalizing like it's true of the world at large, but it isn't.

Well also your cassette copy of Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits on Columbia Records is not some N’th generation bootleg of a concert recorded on a dictaphone. Tapes sound fine? Certainly compared to compressed digital files. They just made it hard to skip around and cue up a song. You had to be really motivated, it was much easier to just let an album play through.

IMO the better scenario is not having to go to the mall and buy a tape every time you want to hear a particular song but now everyone’s like “fuck it! You choose for me, algorithm!!” anyway so maybe it’s me.

I mean, I think the "fun" of this would be having a small, finite collection of music that you can only add to slowly.

tape also adds a level of pleasing compression, especially if you hit it hard.. a buddy actually has a tape-simulator effects unit just for this reason

("fun" because you're not *really* limited to it anymore, tbc. you can still access the digital free for all while you focus listening there)

https://i.imgur.com/d96IhKY.gif

https://i.imgur.com/Yk8KBYA.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo13FP4UpI

https://i.imgur.com/GFiy9WK.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rObG3GddYGk

https://i.imgur.com/vnHn2wd.gif

omg, lee

here's thinking that Nakamichi deck that does the skinny thing was peak TAPE NIFTINESS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIjcyeY5-Hw

I actually own one of these - BIC T-4M - made a few years before CDs became available and the market for high-end cassette decks was at its height. Nothing unusual about the loading or transport, but so crazy complex for a cassette deck, loaded with buttons, switches, knobs, and lights, looking more like a laboratory device for monitoring vital signs than something to play your mixtapes...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5KNK3qtsLs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTEF1c4Cxg