The Cassette Revival - will it last?

Cutoff at 8k? Wha?

I have no particular attachment to cassettes, but I'd be surprised if many come *close* to that poor of response, at least those from the '80s on. I just glanced at a transfer I did of Days of Future Passed from the commercial cassette from the '80s, and it has steady content up to about 17k or so, with zero evidence of any cutoff anywhere near 8k. I'm pretty sure that's not an anomaly either.

 

There's a cassette revival? Is now the time to unload my stash of unopened blank Maxell XL II's?

 

You. Will. Make. A. Mint. The nostalgic geniuses who are largely responsible for this incredibly little fad will eat them up.

Ed

 

When those slip sheets dry out on mass produced ones they squeal so bad it gets picked up by the tape head and sent to your speakers. The tapes pre XDR sounded like crap even to me as a teenager I thought they stunk. When the XDR tapes came out they at least sounded much better on a good deck. My pioneer had a shaft sticking out of it so you could adjust the tape head to match tapes made on different machines by turning it in or out.

 

The kid's name on the show THE WALKING DEAD is Carl. In this series of memes, they use Coral because that's kinda how his dad says it. Kinda.

 

The cassette revival will be erased shortly.

 

...or it'll get chewed up by the machine.

Ed

 

Just out of curiosity I dubbed one side of an LP to metal tape with Dolby C. Last time I experimented with Dolby had to be sometime in the 80s and I didn't like it. Wanted to check to see if my ears were right then. They were. Like you said, shrill, bad. The few extra db of range aren't worth the loss of fidelity.

 

Any revival, whether it be vinyl LPs or cassettes, will ultimately last if the format turns a profit. A revival can't simply survive on "I'm seeing a lot of these around now" -- the "revival" can start that way, but it can't survive that way. Ultimately, if no one sees any real cash, that revival was just a temporary diversion until the novelty wore off...

Are there any real figures on cassette sales these days?

 

So, how much was that 17khz tone tilted down referenced to 1khz? Was it 17khz appearing as distortion? In any case, check the CD of Days of Future Past against the cassette, come back to me.

 

None.

No.

Different mixes, apples to oranges.

 

I think the thing that most of these replies have missed is a crucial one - price point and accessibility.

Bands can make a couple hundred cassettes, with artwork for $250-300, and sell them at shows for $6 each.

Good quality used cassette players are plentiful and quite inexpensive on the secondary market.

That minimal investment just isn't possible with factory-pressed CDs (usual minimum is 500) and vinyl pressing right now is a nightmare. Plants require 60-70% up front as a deposit on vinyl, with no guaranteed pressing date and delivery times 7-9 months away if not delayed further.

So if you are in a band with a limited budget and want to get music into people's hands, the cassette represents a good option.

 

A band can burn CDs at home on their computer, small batches, no need to go to a pressing plant.

 

The cassette may be an all-analog format, but most of my audiophile pals aren't ready to go down memory lane, my friend Adam said, "May it rest in peace. Really. Please. No need to bring it back."

http://www.cnet.com/news/cassette-tape-the-other-analog-format/

Some frequency response charts of cassette decks here:

http://www.iavscanada.com/innovative-audio-cassette-deck-shootout-take-2/

 

I'll believe the revival is healthy when I see new cassette decks being manufactured.

Are all these tapes being played on old used machines bought from pawn shops and off Craigslist? Because I have a hard time believing any of them are properly calibrated, head-cleaned or demagnetized.

 

Kids attending shows don't want/buy burned CDs. Or even professionally produced CDs.

I was just discussing it with a band I'm working with last week.

Kids buying cassettes aren't concerned with pink noise measurements and frequency responses.

They want something inexpensive to listen to music, also inexpensive, on...

Sometimes, it's not about "audiophile", it's about price, convenience and yes, coolness factor.

 

Fashions Statements. But of course, that is the way it is. As someone who gets paid to transfer cassettes to CDs, such a technologically antiquated audio format strikes me as absurd. How preterite tech manages to become 'hip' is beyond me. But as Tana said of the pianola in "Touch of Evil"—"It's so old it's new."

Because my peak years of music consumption were in the CD era it's strange to think of the CD as similarly antiquated. But it is, naturally. Maybe not to the same degree as the cassette, but close enough.

 

"Even though any audio product ultimately has to be judged on its sound, the human ear is a fickle, inconsistent and easily influenced judge.'

Almost as fickle as comparing a grab bag of decks that may or may have not been maintained in years, decades even.

Turntables, cartridges, rtr decks and cassette decks are fickle pieces of equipment, relatively speaking, highly dependent on hobbyists that have at least some understanding of the need for regularly maintaining the gear if they want it to consistently perform the way its supposed to.

I know -- even with my limited understanding and experience. I spent quite a lot of time (1+ hour) yesterday getting a cartridge Baerwald aligned to the best of my ability, getting the VTF exactly on my target (1.72 gms), fiddling with bubble levels to get the table flat both for the alignment stage (done on the kitchen table) then again back on the rack, and experimenting with VTA adjustments by ear till I found the sweet spot (don't have a microscope or fozgometer to do it in a more proper and exacting way). My table doesn't have one of those very cool 'change the VTA on-the-fly' tonearms, so by ear is the best I an do.

Still, I would expect that if I took my turntable in for a similar sort of shoot-out it would perform pretty close to its advertised specs, while the only other guy I know in my area with a turntable probably hasn't turned it on in years, has the original '80s cart -- maybe even with its original stylus -- dust laden and forlorn in its corner compo rack.

Do I really think he could bring that thing in to a shoot out and have it perform the way it came out of the factory? Of course not.

Knowing that, I'm not sure how much one can actually read into such a review like the one above, other than a bunch of nice-in-their-day cassette decks did not perform very well. A balanced review would return to the test once those decks were properly serviced by technicians who still know how to do that kind of work (there are a handful left) and then see.

Of course, I doubt any of this closely relates to the 'cassette revival', such as it is, because it seems like more a young and hip thing done on the cheap. Getting a deck cleaned, lubed, new heads and/or other parts as needed, heads aligned is probably going to cost more, perhaps a lot more, than the decks themselves. Wouldn't be worth it for most.

 

But of course, machines like these are fueling the 'revival'. Not the ideal or properly maintained machines.

 

You're right about RTR's for sure. I have to clean the heads on mine once a week. I use it regularly for transfers and, in order to maintain optimal quality. The sound is my reward but if there was another way...

Ed

 

I don't bother with VTF on the fly, my SME III don't play that. Do understand the importance of maintenance with gear like turntables and tape decks. Have done a number of low cost tweaks to make a base for the turntable where it's easy to re-level the turntable, should the need arise. When I had six or seven cassette decks wired up to my Mackie, I cleansed heads and capstans before making cassette copies. Also managed to adjust/correct speed on a couple. I would suspect my taste in audio is different from those who favor the sound of cassettes. I'll take plainwrap over lush and romantic. I've always heard a softening of dynamic events in the treble with cassettes.

 

There's no way that's accurate across the board, though tapes would have had a lot less hiss if it was.

 

But did you ever try and look forward?

 

This absolutely this. It's definitely a generational thing. My old roommate (36) had a cassette release for his band though he lacks a deck to play it on, as do all but one or two of my over 30 musician friends. I am pretty nostalgic about cassettes, I'd consider doing a release on one were it not for the fact that I know so few people with players.

 

No, there were some cassettes with extended treble content in comparison to what was typically issued, exceptions like the Connoisseur Society cassettes of Ivan Moravec playing Beethoven and Chopin. The Connoisseur Society tapes were transferred from a reel-to reel master to Nakamichi cassette decks. By and large, commercial cassettes were dubbed to type-1 tape, from 3 1/4 bin loop masters, with dolby B encoding at 8x playback speed or greater. More hiss that from homebrew tapes. This guarantees self-erasure at high frequencies. Probably a nightmare to align, probably made for a lot of marginal or defective tapes. Mind you, this is about your typical commercially duplicated cassette. This is not about mix tapes [I've made hundreds] or dubs from your SME 30 via $40,000 of phono preamp to your highly modified Nakamichi Dragon.