Thinking about adding a cassette deck to my set-up

In the 90s our cars had cassette decks but no CD, so I recorded a lot of CDs to tape with Dolby B. I listened to my old tape of Ray Charles The Birth of Soul a few days ago and it still sounds really good. I used Maxell UDXL-I tape to match what the car decks could handle.

 

Old, degraded and aged analog tapes, do not sound better than high-resolution digital master files. Only a hipster would believe that.

 

The wearing down of heads is a hipster myth. There was this one guy claiming that late 1990s Sony CD-IT type II tapes wore down his heads. That makes no sense.

 

We think alike. But I have heard the Metal tape legend wearing down heads back in 1983. It wasn't from a hipster.

Maybe his tape wore down. It is regarded as a urbane legend. But a member says here that the metal tapes wore down his heads. I think his experience with his own machine must count for something. Is there any data/tests to back up the claim about Metal tapes or even Type 2 tapes?

 

Ahhh, mmmm, good point. What is a hipster?
I have a good idea but......

Yes. But an analog masters are kept in a cool valut and play back pretty good. As for the Scotch 306/307 tapes suffering from SSS that need to be baked.....well......Sad.

 

You would think so right? Apparently not. They would take the 2 inch video (jesus) and film the 15 inch monitor with a 16 mm film camera. And that would get shipped to whomever. No problem there. That is what they did do TV shows shot on video.

Yea, the 1967 All You Need Is Love broadcast comes to mind.

Wikipedia article on the Telstar satellites from the early 1960s says that in order to facilitate transatlantic television signals (where the US had the 525-line (480 visible) NTSC system, and the UK's BBC had a 405-line system) the BBC had room-filling video signal conversion apparatus.

The standards 525/405 conversion equipment (filling a large room) was researched and developed by the BBC and located in the BBC Television Centre, London

Today, to convert video of one-frame-rate and resolution to another necessarily involves modern interpolation algorithms operating on multiple digital frame-buffers - but [Wikipedia implies that the capability for video framebuffers in the 1960s simply didn't exist.

1960's standards convertors did involve CRTs and cameras, with quite a lot of tweaking to minimise artefacts. This description of the state of the art at the time, from BBC Engineering, goes into a lot of detail about the process.

Quartz crystals used as delay lines were just around the corner. By 1970 the BBC had built an entire field store based convertor that way. THe references in the linked report show that the design process was already under way in 1964.

 

Hipster has a few varying definitions, but "analog" is common in all definitions. Someone who thinks that analog is better, obsessed with vinyl records, bashes digital music, describes analog music as having "warmth," or someone that recently got into analog music in this millennium.

 

Only a hipster would be buying VHS machines at that price. That is insane.

 

How dare you insult people with lots of money to waste on crap. Release the Kraken!

Well.....ahhhh..(thinking of excuse) maybe they have old VHS tapes to play back. You know, like school plays. Or old TV shows that are so crappy they never made it to disk. I have 3 schools plays on VHS / 8mm. 1986, 1987 and 1988. I am in them all so they are priceless. Apparently if you want a good new VHS HI-FI VCR it may run you a bit much. They don't make them anymore so ahhh.....supply and demand. A new Play Station 2 is going for $900 CAN on Amazon. Used $150. I would pay $900 for a Play Station 2. If I had the money..

What is a hipster???

And ahhh.....wait.....ahhh. I wanted my Mother to see Fued: Betty and Joan. But my Mother didn't have the FX Channel and it isn't available on DVD/BLU-RAY (Not legal copies anyway).
So I got out my trusty 20 year old VCR, popped in a VHS tape in, reduced the resolution of my Roger's box to 250 lines and the ratio to 1.33 : 1 and hit RECORD. I even edited out all the commercials. I had to do that as it was recording. I gave the 4 tapes to my Mother who watched Fued: Betty and Joan on her VCR. see! The VHS VCR isn't dead. It is ahhh....still useful. Not insane at all. Well the $1300 price is a little insane.....o.k. more than a little insane. But if you really need a good HI-FI VCR.... I have seen late 1990's Super VHS editing models for $3000 + on Amazon. Surely it is Supply and demand. They don't make them anymore so the prices reflect the vintage aspect of the crap (sorry!) VHS machine.

For example, two years ago the OOP Region 1 NTSC DVD of Doctor Who - Web Planet had reached $750 CAN. At one point OOP Region 1 DVD for Doctor Who - The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Time and The Rani were over $5 000 CAN each. Just this year the OOP Region 1 NTSC DVD of Doctor Who - The War Games was $500 CAN or $400 used.

 

You had me laughing on the floor with tears in my eyes. What made it funnier was me thinking, No. Good equipment costs money. If someone has VHS HI-FI tapes to play back and wants good quality then $1300 is reasonable... Which is even more stupid! Too funny. Very true.

 

Cool. I am just guessing. Good posts.


Oh those 2 inch quad machines are around. But they don't work. They have to be restored. And then if you have 40 year old 2 inch tapes the tape will be a drop out at least every 3 seconds. The 2 inch NTSC copy video tape for Doctor Who - Inferno had a drop out every 3 frames. It required a lot of work before the tape could even be played...Of course it depends on how the tape was stored and other factors.

You can buy old 2 inch quad machines and fix them up. Assuming they don't need to much work. If it is just new belts or an electrical fix then it is easy. If the person in Eastern Europe needed a new playback head then the lassy would be out of luck.. new belts, motors and stuff like that is easy to come by and fix but no one is making new 2 inch quad video playback heads. You can't relap video heads. Or can you? Anyone know??

They are around. There is big market in transferring 2 and 1 inch Type B video to digital. Plenty of old DASH machines around to. 10 years ago a studio in Paris, France threw out all of it's Sony DASH 3324's and 3348's in the trash.

 

Techmoan did a video about it:



Did hipsters exist in 1991 when Digalog was created?

 

MP3 has only one scale factor (frequency band) for audio frequencies above 16 kHz. Because of this, it is very hard to control the quantization noise, and even at 320 kbps, most of what gets encoded above 16 kHz is just sporadic noise, especially when encoding from analog sources -- tape hiss and the usual slight phase difference between the left and right channels kills the efficiency of the MP3 codec.

So if you encode audio above 15~16 kHz, you end up sacrificing bitrate away from the frequencies you can hear to try to encode noise at frequencies you probably can't hear. But employing a lowpass filter to prevent these high frequencies from being encoded makes the entire codec more efficient.

 

Maxell UR is still made and it sounds great recording to it with a tape deck which can be adjusted to type 1 bias.

 

There were no hipsters in 1991, because many still used cassettes. Anyone that started using cassettes after the year 2000, is a hipster. Cassettes were considered dead by that time. So anyone still into them = hipster.

 

No, but there was an audiophile community with some irrational beliefs just as today. But I don't think worshipping cassettes over CDs was a thing.

 

OK, but 405-line was UK specific (+ Ireland). In continental Europe we had 625 lines, wonder how that was done?

 

I got a good deal on a used Nakamichi DR-2, but now I kinda wish I didn’t pick it up.

My cassettes from the 1980’s didn’t age well - humidity, weather changes, travel and neglect. Chrome and metal tapes are not in production anymore, so no more making needle drops the old fashioned way - unless I want to use Type I tapes.

I will probably end up buying Type I tapes to do some recordings - just so I don’t feel as though I wasted my money. Plus, the thing looks cool and will look good on my new audio furniture.

Im trying to be a “cup half full” guy.

 

how do you know it’s the cassettes that didn’t age well? If you got a “good deal” on a DR-2, I’m guessing it hadn’t been recently serviced? If the azimuth is off and the machine is incorrectly aligned, has old belts, etc The best cassette in the world is going to sound like crap on it.

 

The tapes were physically damaged. It was obvious. A handful were still ok. The DR-2 was serviced and worn parts replaced. Nothing wrong with the DR-2.

 

Given that supply of "new" and well maintained used machines is drying up, it's just market forces at work. There are good non-hipster reasons why someone needs a VHS.

 

Anyone spending a lot of money on any analog equipment for any reason is a hipster.

 

I'm no hipster but we never removed the VHS machines in our two homes and I still have a couple old cassette decks, on of which has been in my main system for years. With some of the prices people are willing to pay, I wonder what my two professional Panasonic SVHS decks are worth? Heck, I still have my Sony Beta machine and Sony 8mm tape machine (was it 8mm?)

 

So I can become a hipster by buying something you don't approve of?

The main reason for buying a VHS deck today is: Wanting to play or digitise old VHS tapes that you can't get any other way (or not cheaply), for example your own home movies. Does watching your home videos make you a hipster? Easier than I thought

There are similar reasons for wanting to play old cassettes.

 

If they're in good condition, probably a lot.