Looking back at it Cassettes were a great way of listening to music

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Houseplants, Mar 5, 2021.

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  1. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    But it's all on YouTube, so why bother?
     
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  2. carlwm

    carlwm Forum Resident

    Location:
    wales
    There's so much available cheaply, there's no need to spend much. Having said that, I know a collector who semi-regularly pays into three figures for rare ones. :yikes:
     
  3. Rfreeman

    Rfreeman Senior Member

    Location:
    Lawrenceville, NJ
    The biggest flaw was really the high speed duplication (like 80x) - but without that they would not have been able to price competitively with LPs.
     
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  4. carlwm

    carlwm Forum Resident

    Location:
    wales
    Things seem to come and go on YouTube. If I have the physical product, I'm not at somebody else's whim.
     
  5. mbrownp1

    mbrownp1 Forum Resident

    Fantastic avatar.
     
    Purple Jim likes this.
  6. Doghouse Riley

    Doghouse Riley Forum Resident

    Location:
    North West England
    I've still the demagnetiser, (somewhere) and a couple of Alexander tape head cleaners with the spare felts and the cleaning fluid.
     
    gitters likes this.
  7. andy obrien

    andy obrien Forum Resident

    Location:
    watford
    Back in the early 80s tapes were a great way for youngsters like myself - 11 in 1980 - to get hold of music. The family turntable was a knackered old beast and one of the speakers was bust - but the portable cassette deck in my bedroom was the bees knees, indestructible and with a graphic equalizer and - most important, this - a SLOW EJECT. It could travel with me into the garden or round to a mates house, it had a headphone socket, and it was LOUD.
     
  8. MarcS

    MarcS Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey
    They were fine in their time and I had tons for years, but what I don't miss:
    -prerecorded cassettes were cheaply made, broke easily and often were very hissy
    -the multi generational tape dubbing led to some very bad dubs with varying tape speeds and even more hiss
    -dubbing was in real time
    -using them on more than one deck eg home and the car made them way more prone to breaking
     
  9. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    Also, adverts. :realmad:
     
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  10. aphexj

    aphexj Sound mind & body

    I was riding public transit, fam
     
  11. andy obrien

    andy obrien Forum Resident

    Location:
    watford
    The two most formative musical experiences of my early teenage years - which have informed my listening taste ever since - were both delivered to me on cassette.
    The first was a soggy shoebox full of discarded tapes left next to a skip at the local dump (now referred to as recycling centre) which i took home. It contained Who's Next, Quadrophenia, Parallel Lines, Billion Dollar Babies and - most crucially for my future musical development - Relics. I distinctly remember listening to the latter for the first time aged 13 or so. 'Bike' came on. Mind subsequently blown.
    The second was a mixtape made for me by my art teacher, which had Cocteau Twins, Joy Division, solo Eno, Cluster, Eno & Fripp, solo Sylvian and lots of other amazing stuff. All of which Ive subsequently collected and play to this day. Neither of these experiences could have happened with vinyl, and being sent a playlist isnt the same as receiving a lovingly recorded tape from someone as a gift.
     
  12. violarules

    violarules Senior Member

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
    I don't think there is any technological nor financial incentive to make open reel tape "more high fidelity". Seeing as how 1/2", 2-track and 3-track tape from the 1950's often sound awesome in their own right, I'm not sure what "improvements" you would have in mind...
     
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  13. Doghouse Riley

    Doghouse Riley Forum Resident

    Location:
    North West England
    Tell me about it.
    It's the same with 45s.
    On a whim, I just wanted a run of the mill 45 from 1979. Independent Woman, by Jan Jones.
    Discogs offered me one for £145.

    I wouldn't pay more than a fiver for any 45.

    As adverts have been mentioned, you completly avoid adverts on YouTube if you use Firefox with adblock plus, It's free.
     
    carlwm likes this.
  14. carlwm

    carlwm Forum Resident

    Location:
    wales
    Indeed. :)
     
  15. JosepZ

    JosepZ Digital knight of the analog masters

    Location:
    Barcelona, Spain
    Easily avoided if you install an adblocking extension to your browser. If you are an Android user on your phone/tablet, you can get a wonderful free and open source app called NewPipe. Of course it's not on the Play Store but you can get it on its website.
     
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  16. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member

    Location:
    Bretagne
    I cassetted my brains out back in the day, making mix-tapes from my LPs, copying LPs from record libraries, from friends records,... fun times.
    The format was a pain trying to find where a certain track began. Tape chewing was a pain, as was pencil winding. I would transfer the tapes into another cassette if one got damaged or rusty inside. Glad to see the back of them. CDs/CDRs are great.
     
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  17. carlwm

    carlwm Forum Resident

    Location:
    wales
    Crazy prices. I'm astonished that people seem to pay them!
     
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  18. JosepZ

    JosepZ Digital knight of the analog masters

    Location:
    Barcelona, Spain
    Good point. I was just thinking that if they could improve a weak format that much, maybe some of that could be backported to other formats.
     
  19. Mr-Beagle

    Mr-Beagle Ah, but the song carries on, so holy

    Location:
    Kent
    The first cassette of Pet Sounds that I bought in 1990 sounded unbelievably bad. I took it back to the shop and insisted on exchanging it for the LP.
     
  20. JosepZ

    JosepZ Digital knight of the analog masters

    Location:
    Barcelona, Spain
    This particular album never sounded that great anyway, but yes, LP and CD improved things quite a lot. The 90s stereo mix sounds really good though.
     
  21. MaybeI'mMrsVandebilt

    MaybeI'mMrsVandebilt Just spinning on my axis

    Location:
    London
    I'm surprised no one has brought up having to wind the tape back into the cassette using a pencil. Or was it a biro? That used to happen a fair bit. And I had one or two tapes ruined that way. Or when someone would tape over your carefully curated compilation with something else. lol
     
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  22. Chemguy

    Chemguy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Western Canada
    Almost no purpose. But my Technics deck has a dbx button so I can decode those records.

    Two antiquated components in one!
     
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  23. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    They certainly are, though my main CD player is very temperamental with them at the moment. It plays the vast majority perfectly but won't read others at all. It's a very old late 80s Technics CD player so that's better than it should be. I still use CD-R's a lot.
     
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  24. Jamsterdammer

    Jamsterdammer The Great CD in the Sky

    Location:
    Málaga, Spain
    Back in the 70s and 80s I had most of my music on cassette. I would borrow albums from a library and tape them. Even in the early 90s I would still make mix tapes. But to say that one of the advantages was their portability on the bus, etc., that was only valid after the introduction of the Walkman in the 1980s. Later, when CDs became ubiquitous and I could afford them, I bought a Discman as well, but these were never as portable and convenient as the Walkman. We had to wait until the release of the iPod in late 2001 before anything that compact and portable came along. So yeah, happy cassette and Walkman memories. But I definitely don't miss them. Dumped all my cassettes a few years ago as they had been sitting in a box in the attic for many years. I now use a DAP that can hold many thousands of FLAC files for my mobile needs.
     
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  25. JosepZ

    JosepZ Digital knight of the analog masters

    Location:
    Barcelona, Spain
    It has been mentioned already. As the pain it was.
    My dad's Marantz CD player from the early 2000s didn't play CD-Rs at all. And that was by design for sure, as our older players, all from before the CD-R era, played them flawlessly.
     
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