Toshiba Releases "High-Res" Cassette Player

I guess this was inevitable, given sagging vinyl sales. Toshiba has announced an Aurex-branded "high-res" cassette player:

Toshiba tape player promises high-res audio from cassettes

How a cassette boombox would benefit from "high-res" technology isn't exactly clear. However, I eagerly await the arrival of a "high-res" 8-track player sometime in 2025, or whenever the cassette revival has run out of gas.

 

For Toshiba:

 

BUT!!! . . . is it gluten-free?

 

Lloyds may have one coming too.

 

I'm saving my money on high-res eight track.

 

This is better than HD toothepaste...

 

does it have MQA?

 

Will it also decode Dubly B?

 

We have a winner!

 

Posted too early. April 1st is still a few days away.

 

Wrong sort of product to restore high quality cassette performance from a new deck.
I could spec a machine that would although I wouldn't use dolby -you can't license it anymore for starters- but the bigger thing is you'd need to get super ferric tapes back in production as most new tape is basic 'cooking' ferric rather than something the equal of XLS I or TDK's AR so people could record and hear such performance.

 

The amount of money for a new cassette deck from Toshiba could easily be spent on a used deck elsewhere. The new Toshiba deck looks like a stereotypical "portable" ghettoblaster than anything really.

And you're right about the new cassette types as there doesn't seem to be a market to manufacture brand new, higher-quality cassettes, as quite a few NOS are snatched up very quickly and increasing in price.

 

With the typical wow & flutter of a cassette player, the much vaunted time domain correction and anti smear of MQA will truly drag it screaming and kicking into Hi-Res territory. Or not.

 

I suppose it could be like DAT with the ones and zeros striped onto magnetic tape then read on a drum head.
Or however digital cassettes did it.
I think the DAT technology is ultimately unreliable and expensive to fix though.
Hard to beat old school high quality analog magnetic tape, but yeesh wouldn't it be just like opening really old wounds what with all the pitfalls surrounding the format?

 

The real question is which Audiophile Power Cord to use with your new Toshiba BoomBox

 

I'm still laughing over this.

 

Battery burn in is of far greater importance here.

 

Although it sounds funny, why not introduce a new analog audio tape format? However, rather than the compact cassette, why not something that was much better, like the Elcaset? Since the entire compact cassette infrastructure is basically gone for the most part, why not create a new one for a better format?

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Cause nostalgia sells baby!

 

About 15-20 years ago Pioneer had a cassette deck with a built-in DSP that claimed to improve the sound of cassettes. I bet that's what this thing has.

 

I wish I still had the Victrola from my parents' basement -- the player with a horn and steel needles.

 

I'm willing to bet that all this deck has is the ability to make a 24 bit 96kHz recording of really terrible cassette playback. Boom! Hi-Res!

 

Weirdly I actually like the warbly muddy sound of cassettes; the aesthetic itself is likable in some applications. Why hi-res? Leave good (enough) alone.

 

Pioneer ELITE CT-05D
Pioneer ELITE CT-07D

Essentially Digital Noise Reduction from what I understand. I've seen pics of the 07; seems it had a coaxial digital input as well as analog rca's. So, I presume there was some type of internal adc/dac and dsp for removing noise in the digital domain... I've never heard one; but, apparently, it worked pretty well; nevertheless, overshadowed by CDs just like LPs... were...

 

It did noise reduction, beyond anything Dolby was capable of, and could work on cassettes where Dolby wasn't used (or where only Dolby B had been used).

You could do something similar today, but I seriously doubt Toshiba has.

If I were gonna resurrect the cassette today and try to build an affordable deck that exploited modern digital signal processing to improve performance, here are the things I'd consider:

Digital noise reduction, like that old Pioneer deck had
Digital removal of wow and flutter, possibly using something like the Plangent Process
A virtual recreation of the Dolby B circuit for playback
Digital equalization, to accommodate for the limitations of the head in the deck
Using modern technologies to make radically different but still cheap and compatible heads (something like the thin film heads in DCC decks)
Digital auto-reverse - the deck plays both sides at once and stores them in memory

All of that mostly applies to playback, although some could be useful for recording as well. If you wanted to get really fancy and create a deck that can record too, you might add on:

A digital companding noise reduction scheme similar to dbx (or flat out dbx)
Dolby B, C and S noise reduction, implemented via software
Advanced auto-bias correction
Automated tape profiling, driving the equalization of the signal prior to recording to account for tape/head shortcomings
Advanced automated level setting, guided by the individual tape's saturation characteristics
Advanced bias level adjustment, similar to HX Pro (or just flat out a recreation of HX Pro)

I cannot imagine there would be enough of a market to support such a beast, but then again hipsters are running out to buy $300 turntables, so who knows.