Battle of the Bad Ideas: Cassingles, Quadraphonic, Dynaflex? Which was the worst?

Long boxes were to prevent theft, and they were a horrible waste, but when you were little, it sure was cool pasting them up in yr room.

*shakes head, tut-tut-tuts, skahes one's hand, smugly*

I may post more on this if I get motivated.

From a Dynaflex inner sleeve:
It is thinner than any record you have ever owned. It also is superior in many ways to any other record you have ever owned. It is freer of imperfections--ticks, pops and blisters. It is much less susceptible to warpage. And, its life will be far longer than conventional records. It is the record of tomorrow, yours today.

You may as well stop at the first sentence; that's all you need to know.

The long boxes were just so shops could keep using their vinyl bins, I thought?

Elcaset was a short-lived audio format created by Sony in 1976. At that time, it was widely felt that the compact cassette was never likely to be capable of the same levels of performance that was available from reel-to-reel systems, yet clearly the cassette had great advantages in terms of convenience. The Elcaset system was intended to marry the performance of reel to reel with cassette convenience. The name "Elcaset" may simply mean L-cassette, or large cassette.

The cassette itself looked very similar to a standard cassette, only very much larger - about three times the size. It contained quarter-inch tape running at 9,5 cm/s (3.75 inches per second), giving much greater frequency response and dynamic range. One unusual difference from compact cassettes was that the tape was withdrawn from the cassette when run through the transport mechanism so that the manufacturing tolerances of the cassette shell did not affect sound quality.

The system was technically excellent, but a total failure in the marketplace, with a very low take up by a few audiophiles only. Apart from the bulky cassettes, the performance of standard cassettes improved dramatically with the use of new materials such as chromium dioxide, and better manufacturing quality. For most people, the quality of cassettes was adequate, and the benefits of the expensive Elcaset system limited.

The system was abandoned in 1980, when, curiously, all the remaining systems were sold off in Finland.

Few people will repurchase their entire record collection for an audio improvement that most of us who have damanged our hearing by listening to a lot of music are no more able to hear. :-)

and let me just say that digipak haytaz got it all wrong - load up a box with digipaks & another one with jewel-cases and then ask yerself: which one would you rather have to haul around on tour/load into a moving van/carry out to the car to take to the Goodwill? digipak 0\/\/|\|z0r u r all insane

I've become a vocal advocate of RCA's Dynaflex experiment (mostly through a bunch of early 70s country albums purchased in the last several years, but some Bowies and other things too). I LOOOOOOOOVE a lightweight record, and these are the lightest.

The claims about them being tick and pop free, low noise straight from the press, I can't vouch for any of that because I've never bought one sealed and they haven't been in production since 1975, but the key thing to know in 2023 is that they're NO WORSE than anything touted as heavyweight vinyl and, in many instances, are BETTER than contemporary heavyweight pressings.

Most importantly, though, all those extra grams add up and make my shelves bendy. I would love my collection, as is, to be pressed on Dynaflex instead. Bring it back!

From what I've read, the average Dynaflex record is 90g, which is HALF the weight of all those 180g monsters. Now spread that out to a collection of 2,800. That is A LOT less stress on my old record shelves.

BETTER than contemporary heavyweight pressings.

this is—

—accurate
—not a compliment
—more of an indictment on new vinyl
—hilarious. thank you for posting.

(ftr, i've heard/own a few dynaflexes. they sound no better or worse than any other lps from the early 70s in decent playable shape)

When the Who were making Quadrophenia the initial plan, on paper, was to mix it in quadrophonic. But there were two competing systems: one developed by CBS, and one by RCA. The RCA system was thought to be much better than CBS’s, but for some reason most labels (including MCA) went with the CBS system.

A quadrophonic unit was sent to Ron Nevison, the engineer on Quadrophenia, but it was immediately obvious that, instead of four discrete channels, quadrophonic was (in Nevison’s words) “a big mono.” He and Pete Townshend decided not to waste time on a mix that would sound like ass, so Quadrophenia was never mixed in quadrophonic (which pissed off MCA — they planned on launching a line of quadrophonic albums in the wake of the presumed success of the Who album).

Nobody has mentioned SACD yet.

I have an SACD-capable player but my regular CD player is already way better than my hearing, so I just play the CD layers.

#based

also to answer the initial question this thread asks— i heard an 8-track in genuine quadraphonic sound once and it just seemed like two channels for left and two for right, so that one. yes, i get that there was special mixing and equipment involved but i've arrived at the theory that, like any sound mixing, it's very easy to mess up if you don't know what you're doing. addendum to that: i used to have a copy of the spinners's second album "mixed for quadraphonic" and it was weird to play it on my stereo setup. it still worked and you could hear it, but it seemed to me like that sound was coming from "behind" the actual speakers (if that makes any sense?).

iirc the actual Spinners were hiding there

damn, that was a collectable then!

also i'm planting my flag: cassingles were rad.

wish I hadn't tossed my Kriss Kross "I Missed the Bus" cassingle

yeah I have rock n roll animal on dynaflex and it sound a great

sounds

"it sound a great"

https://media.tenor.com/wIPoJGRt8OUAAAAC/ok-mario.gif

I remember radio stations pushing the quad gimmick back in the day:

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0818/08/detroit-radio-wwww-w4-howard-stern_1_971260bc9b8b10a8f39f19b886aa03f6.jpg

I also remember being able to successfully post images, back in the day.

all the dynaflex records I have sound great. I think they may be pretty resistant to scratches, all of mine were used, a few I found in a box on the street.

SACDs do sound excellent but not enough to warrant hunting them down and buying a special player. I was into them for a while then got over it.

Quite a few Sony and Pioneer DVD players from the 2000s are SACD capable and sound good, for anyone curious about the format.

Yeah, I can’t say anything bad about Dynaflex. I think the timing was bad, as it was easy for everyone to just assume it was a cynical ploy for RCA to use less material. But they’re certainly at LEAST on a par with other records pressed at the time, and I wouldn’t swear that they aren’t quieter. I really wish whatever the Japanese do to get their record pressings so damn quiet (in terms of background noise, crackle & pops) had somehow filtered out into the general record manufacturing world.

8-tracks obviously the clear loser of all formats.

True enough about 8-tracks, but before cassettes became ubiquitous, they were they only alternative to the radio for listening to music in the car. (I don't count the handful of in-dash turntable systems, as these were never in widespread use).

I have a Luiz Bonfa album, Introspection, on Dynaflex, and I've always thought the pressing was beautiful, remarkably warm sounding and free of imperfections. I honestly can't recall if I have any others.

https://i.discogs.com/g9L1qNMs2ZfOOKr2HDo4GqBxPkjQZtJvYZkbAyOHrJY/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:592/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTE4ODk0/NjUtMTM2NzQ2MDI1/NC03NzkwLmpwZWc.jpeg

i'm with crowd, have a few dynaflexes and they sound good, never seemed markedly worse or better than anything else pressed around that time, though i will have to find one and check out the surface noise thing

I bought a record with a Unipak sleeve (mentioned upthread) last month, and my experience so far is that it has taken a bit more juggling to get it out.

ha yes, I dislike those

Someone at the record show this weekend claimed to like them because the record can’t fall out accidentally and I was like “right, and you can’t get it out deliberately either.”

even worse on cd imo

The only unipak sleeves I can think of owning off the top of my head are Box Tops records on Bell, and it might just be one album, but it's actually a deterrent against ever listening to it.

A lot of late-'60s(ish) Mercury label gatefolds were unipak--I think they may have patented them?