The end of tape?

Oh, I have, but believe me that still doesn't bring sales anywhere near that of the CD, new or used. A lot of those recordings being sold in used record stores are also things that are not available on CD, a problem that is slowly but surely evaporating anyway.

 

I don't really think that's it. If it were, engineers would complain that master tapes were "edgy" as well. Yet some audiophiles claim LP is "closer to the master tape" than CD.

CDs can sound bad for any number of reasons, but it isn't because the tapes were played back "dry".

 

I still have several tapes I made from radio in the early 80's while growing up in El Paso. Irreplaceable to me. It's so cool to hear a bit of a Spanish accent from an English speaking DJ on a top 40 station. That sort of local flavor is a thing of the past.

Over the past few years, I'd been using my Nak to make tapes of CDs and LPs for my car. When I bought my new Nissan Sentra in 99, there wasn't a cassette deck on the lot! I actually investigated having one custom installed, but fortunately I was talked out of it. Now that I have a CD burner, the old Nak hasn't been used in months. Sometimes I get nostalgic and play a cassette, but that's extremely rare. In fact, 78's get far more play in my house than cassettes.

Dan C

 

Sckott,



Good observations!

Bob

 

I should have worded that better. I meant also that they compensated for the attributes of tape AND vinyl when they recorded and mixed an album. This IS why they used peaky mics, added top with an EQ. and recorded hotter.

Just because some people feel that vinyl sounds closer to the master tape doesn't mean that it's always true. There are still too many variables between the mixdown and the mastering house.

 

BTW, how many of us younger boomers and Gen-X'ers here used to record their favorite stuff from the radio? I still have many of these tapes and used to number them. I'm glad I kept them because I actually had to take a hard-to-find song from one and use it in a CD-R comp!

 

I'm not talking about people who "think" they know what a master tape sounds like. I'm talking about those people who have actually heard master tapes, and have compared LPs to CDs - and the masters.

Where is it said that vinyl rolls off all the top, which necessitates more top in recording/mixing?

Why is it (if what you say is true) that many recordings clearly made with vinyl in mind sound great mastered flat to CD?

 

Well.....
In England according to GfK last year:
"The real surprise, however, is that the ONLY other audio-only component to register increased sales is the vinyl turntable, up 9%...Furthermore, this is the second year running that turntable sales have registered growth, and that qualifies as a trend in anyone's perception"

And...

"Further evidence of vinyl's strength is seen on the software side. According to BPI (British Phonographic Industry) states, the annual number of new vinyl releases hovered between 1700 and 1800 from 1994 to 1998, but has risen steadily since, with 2787 issued in 2001...Vinyl has definitely outsold cassette, and the 12" vinyl disc is the strongest of all media in the singles sector, with nearly TWICE as many individual releases as on CD singles."

This is ONLY in England last year. And on the software front many releases are not coming to BPI's knowledge.

And many of the big Japanese hifi manufacturer is having turntables for sale again...

Sorry OT

 

I'm not talking about people who "think" they know what a master tape sounds like. I'm talking about those people who have actually heard master tapes, and have compared LPs to CDs - and the masters.


Interesting, can you comment more about it??

 

If you have a large cassette collection see if you can score a old traditional wooden library catalog card cabinet; they're perfect for tapes if you remove the metal rods that hold the catalog cards in place. A surplus of these should be around if you really look.

I'm certain a lot of kids would have a more difficult time identifying a library catalog card than a 45 single.

I have at least 30 drawers filled with tapes including more than a hundred recent Time-Life comps I bought sealed for 30 cents each at the Boys and Girls Club thrift store.

Anyone else ever cut up old Playboys to make J-cards?

 

Just read in Sound & Vision that quoted industry sales figures for the first six months of this year:

Share of market

CD 94%
Cassette 5%
Remaining 1% broken out as follows in units
DVD-Audio & SACD 92,000
Vinyl 661,000!!!

Sorry but Sound & Vision doesn't specify their source.

 

Was at a music collectables show this past Sunday. One dealer (an old friend) decided to bring only cassettes. Poor guy didn't sell more than a dozen or so all day!

Lots of vinyl and cd interest though!

 

Re: Re: The end of tape?

No, Gary, indeed it doesn't. Would you believe some Lp covers have been taken from CD-size sources? I saw a Miles Davis overseas reissue so grainy that's where it had to have come from. Worse: years ago I found a copy of Garth Brooks' NO FENCES on overseas vinyl. Record sounds okay, but the cover is very faded and pixilated. They just blew up the CD photo. On another note, the Cranberries' 1st Lp got a brief vinyl press, but all they did was put it in a black sleeve and tossed in the CD booklet...I kid you not.

ED

 

I was never a fan of cassettes, primarily because of wow and flutter. You can hear it even on the expensive Nakamichi decks. If you can ignore that, the decks made in the last five or six years have been amazing, for almost no money. I have a Sony that I bought for about $150 that, flutter aside, makes just amazingly good tapes; but I only use it to make tapes for other people, as a rule, or to transfer material that's otherwise unavailable.

So no big nostalgic wallow for me.

 

Great Wash. Post article--I liked it when I read it, and I'm glad you posted it, Steve.

I loved what cassettes allowed me to do. I don't love cassettes. Grant's objections are pretty much on the money. How MANY times have I heard a tape suddenly speed up with that cassette-death-sound, only to lunge for the stop button--too late--and prepare to eject a million miles of coiled, bent, sometimes stretched mylar. Ugh.

But I do have 25-year-old radio dramas, airchecks, etc. that still sound fine, dubbed onto good Maxell or TDK blanks from 1/2 track Studer or Ampeg rtr's. If I'd had CDR back then, though, I'd have gone there in a flash.

As for the alleged lack of romance in CDR's, well, my mileage varies. I make a birthday CD for each of my children every year, and they love it. Since I'm working in the otherwise pedestrian EZ-CD Creator, I can actually segue from song to song just the way I used to on the radio. Not a cross-fade, but a segue, in which I time the opening of the next tune to come in against, or under, the end of the preceding song. Great fun, and I'd need a mixing board and an extra turntable or deck to do that with cassette. (OK, I could do the whole thing in Sound Forge, but that'd take longer.)

 

Well I suppose it's something like where the recording engineer knows the tape and says that the LP most closely approximates that sound, or other instances where the CD or SACD come closest.

But no, tapes were not deliberately skewed to compensate for vinyls limitations. Vinyl does not smooth out edginess on a tape. You can get a master tape down on an LP easy, and with suitable level, assuming you keep it under 20 minutes a side. There may have been some compensation in the mastering stages, for levels or summation of lower bass information, but since vinyl actually has a broader bandwidth than Redbook, I can't see why they would "brighten" a tape to make sure the highs got onto the LP.

The cassette? Has a lot of problems but still sounds more accurate to the source that a MiniDisc or MP3. Like the LP, can be done right if you're willing to put the required effort into it. Nothing good comes easy anyway!

 

The great thing about cassettes (I never bought pre-recorded ones) was the different brands and types. Yes, I did all those things described in the article, the cueing of the record, releasing the pause, adjusting the VU meters for maximum volume. But the choice of tapes was fun. I mostly bought SA - TDK, but other good brands were Maxell and Denon. The great thing was buying those high end tapes, like the TEAC gold reel cassettes that look like reel to reel tapes. Then the MAXG and SAXG TDKs, those cassettes were so heavy. Then the high end Denon in the white shell was the most elegant looking cassette. I have a set of SA TDKs from various years, all different labels. I may frame them one day as a tribute to all the hours of taping special mixes from records and radio shows (like Solid Gold Saturday Night and Lost Lennon tapes).
The CD-R days seem more efficient, but the labor of love was not the same as cassettes.

 

How's about sitting by the radio all day wait, wait, waiting for your favorite song to come on, and slamming the record button as soon as you heard the first chord?

My first cassette decks were more dictation machines, and I had to point the entire unit with the built-in condensor mic to the radio to "record." After a weekend of patient but anxious listening, including the Top 40 countdown, I'd have a tape.

 

I have boxes of old tapes from the good 'ol 70s that were done this way. I stopped doing this in early 1978

 

I do my crossfades in Cool Edit Pro's multitrack OR CD Creator. If I buy CD Architect 5.0, it may become my new main burning program.

 

Oh wow what a memory! I must've had 200 pop songs cataloged on various tapes that were missing the first 10 seconds from dubbing off the radio. You could get some great "slices of time" from doing this on from the radio years ago. Just like having your own Top 40 from years ago.

 

Beagle, I agree with you.

 

And a 94% market share for the CD proves my point that, as far as the numbers are concerned, vinyl is dead. The format is holding on to less than 1% of the market share. It is surpassed by the cassette even, which is dying a slow death.

It would be interesting still to see how many of those vinyl sales are general release new, current releases, how many are standard release reissues, how many are audiophile quality new/current releases and how many are audiophile quality new releases. Those numbers would show even more how viable vinyl is as a format today.

 

As far as numbers go, of course. So I guess that, using that logic, 99% of music released today sucks, and if what I hear on the radio and see on TV is any indication, music is also dead. So CD accounts for 94% of the market for sales of rubbish. Good movies and TV programs are also dead, according to the 'numbers'. According to the 'numbers' McDonalds is better than filet mignon. Fine cuisine is dead too.