Best cassettes for recording?

Nostalgia plays big in the decision to use cassette.

I just spent $380C to get my Akai GXC325D back to like-new condition. I'm spending ~$200C to do the same with a Nakamichi RX-202. I'll use the former a couple of times and then probably shelve it forever. I'll use the latter to play some of the ~200 or so tapes I've recorded over the years. But not many since there's very few of those recordings that I've not been able to source digitally in the last few years.

And again, it's not about how they sound. Vinyl dubbed to cassette tape? C'mon! While it's fun to watch the little reels turn, and see the level indicator lights bounce up and down, or watch the RX-202 "flip" a cassette, I'll take a CD, or 320MPS ripped from a CD, over a cassette any day - both for sound quality and convenience of use.

Making demo tapes of your garage band? Sounds like fun. (The Akai could mix stereo line and mic inputs and I used it quite a bit in my college years to record budding musicians - and music students.)

Nostalgia is cool. I'm not knocking it. Heck I'm spending close to $600 on it!

As for tape types... the Akai, being a much older beast, is limited to "Low Noise Tape" (the old type I), CrO2 and Fe-Cr (which was new when the deck was released.) The Nak will accept anything, and of course gives its best result with metal tape. The Akai has only Dolby B; the Nak C as well. Interestingly enough, my 2004 Audi A4 has a factory-installed cassette deck (along with CD). If I were making a cassette to use in the car, I'd use only Dolby B - since that's all the car's deck has. In such a relatively noise environment it would be hard to tell the difference anyhow.

Use C90 tapes. It's the same tape as C60 or C30. It's only when going to C120 that manufacturers had to make it slightly thinner in order to put enough in the shell to get that length of time.

Jeff

 

No on both counts. I use NOS tapes from the '90s and out of several hundred, only a handful at most were fails. Ditto still sealed vinyl records. I estimate of the still sealed '60s and '70s and '80s records I've bought over the past 15~20 years, less than 5% have had warpage problems. It happens, but far less than people generally think. Or, I've been lucky. Take your pick.

 

The recording results from good quality cassettes can be impressive, especially the tape compression on drums. I’ve recently dusted off my still functioning Tascam 644 midi studio 4 track cassette recorder - purchased in 1990 for what now seems a vast sum - and have been digitising all my 4 track masters dating back to that time. Used mostly TDK SA-X60s, SA-90s or BASF Super or Maxima Chrome cassettes back in the day and most of them sound as fresh and clear as the day they were recorded up to 25+ years ago.

 

Funny thread, much misinformation posted, whatever...OT, many tape formulations yield different results, really depends on the source and the music. The high buck metal's will always give the best results. Do you have the money to record on those? For the most part, the type II chromes will give great results, Maxell UD-XL's, TDK SA's, vintage from the 1970's sound unreal istic bay be on my big Teac.

Then you have the type I's, I can coax some serious bass outta these bad boy Ferric's, especially the TDK ADX

I never use Dolby, my decks have Dolby S, much better off for my ears, unless the recording is uber noisy !!

 

AD was TDK's successor to SD, the very first serious quality cassette. Although it is a straight ferric, it can be considered a "low noise, high output" tape. It was first introduced in the late '70s as the replacement for SD. Worth noting, I have quite a few SDs from the early '70s that still play just fine.

From what I've found, the improvements in AD-X were limited to the shell itself, not the actual tape formulation.

Cheers,
Larry B.

 

I'll have to agree with the statement that this thread has much incorrect information. I went from the very early years of listening to a tube radio to having purchased all the different formats listed in this thread. First thing I'll address is the question of which cassette tape to use. The best sound will come from using the tapes that the design of the deck was biased for. A middle of the road deck will not give you audiophile sound regardless of the tape being used. I would like to hear the cassette deck that produces the same playback as a good R2R.
My previous practice was to play a new LP to make sure it was without flaws, the second playing was when it was transferred to a new Maxell tape on my Pioneer FT 707. The Lp was then placed in it's storage place to remain until it was needed again.
The reason that vinyl has made a huge return to the market place is that all of the attempts to reproduce it's sound have failed, each having it's problems. I'm excluding R2R as I feel it's far better and above all the others in this task.
Now before someone feels that I'm coming off as some snobbish audiophile who has thousands of dollars in equipment from makers whom I can't even pronounce the names correctly, allow me to set things straight.
Back in the early sixties when I first purchased my first vinyl, I was the member of a hard working family with little extra funds. My dad was a bricklayer and my mom, a hard working stay at home wife & mother of two sons who helped keep her on the run every day.
My first TT was one of those portable models that had it's own set of speakers and a fixed tonearm with built in cartridge. I thought that the sound was great even though it most likley tracked at 20 grams and was doing great damage every time I lowered that needle onto my vinyl. Ha!! Ha!!

 

You obviously have not heard how well a decent cassette deck can perform. The recordings that I have made of favorite albums sound exact, and I would say are virtually indistinguishable from the vinyl. Think again.
Also, I do not use any Dolby, just high quality tape. No need for "noise reduction". I also have a cd recorder, and the tapes I make in some ways sound better. They are analog, and preserve the "air" around the music.

 

there is no "air" that a cassette can record that cannot be easily captured on even 16/44 digital. You may get a different response curve on tape, but that is a form of distortion. You can believe what you want, but that doesn;t make it true. If it sounds better to you that is fine but remember if you are a 40+ year old male you can't even hear the full frequency range of a tape very well most likely.

 

the tascam portastudio is fun for starting out and you can make some cool recordings with it. use the type II tape as people have mentioned. If you are recording a band or anything complicated, you will hit some limitations pretty quickly, especially if you want to record anything in stereo...

 

Many people forget about Nebraska.

Keep on trackin' my friend.

 

Or a BIG Ghettoblasters on their shoulder!

 

The best cassettes I've found was the TDK-SA. Maxell XLII is another good one. Is this a 4-channel tape deck or a regular 4-track? Depending on what kind of recording you are planning to do determines the tape length. If it is a 4-channel(4 tracks recorded in the same direction), a 60-minute cassette will only yield 30 minutes of recording time. If 4-track(2 tracks on each side), I prefer the 90 minute tapes.

 

I do plenty of needle-drops to cd-r as well as cassette. Tape adds a little compression to the sound, and I like that. Cds sound thin in comparison. Sound is more important than convenience to me.

 

You'd be credible to me if my experience wasn't what it was, including several years worth of experimentation with varying sampling rates with my digital dubs. Each decrease results in another audible shave off of the high end. And dubbing 16/44 has just been sad to me for a number of years now. Haven't done it for a very long time, but checked a few weeks ago just to see if what people with views like you were on to something and I'd been fooling myself. Sounded like audio cardboard. Easily captured? Not IMO. YMMV.

 

I bought these recently but haven't tried them:

 

Those Radio Shack tapes may be rebranded Maxell XLII tapes, depending on the year made.

Teac's own cassettes that had reels to reel style cassettes had Maxell XLII tape. Not sure if that is the tape used for bias setting.

Given most decks use a Maxell XLII or TDK SA tape for the bias default setting and they are similar, these are likely the ones that will work.

XLII-S and SA-X have different bias setting that their standard version and without bias adjust, you will get different results.

 

Money is tight and I have a tascam portastudio i bought in like 1999 which still works so why not? Don't really have 200 bucks for an interface and plugging my mic into the realtek soundcard on my laptop isn't going to sound better than the cassette. Chrome running at 3 3/4 ips isn't bad at all. The limitations are also helpful and bouncing is fun!

 

I still use cassettes to record with. My go-to for recording are the Maxell Type II. I've encountered many old cassettes from the 1990's and very rarely do I have any problems. I've used some Metal tapes but as mentioned, they don't really work well for multi-tracking. You will find with various Type II tapes, there are differences in sound. Sometimes that's a nice thing.

Nevermind the naysayers about how even modern computer interfaces sound better or whatnot. Obviously if you're using cassettes, you don't want some digitally clear sounding recording. I've also found that since recording onto cassette, I don't sit around at a computer fidgeting with mixes, sounds, etc. You record, you mix live, and that's it. Done. It's my opinion, but recording needs to have good energy, be a little random, and not always perfect... not something that has to be pristine and computerized. Blah. Plus drums sound better recorded onto tape. Period.

 

Maxell XLIIs

 

You know exactly how well a decent cassette deck can perform? What "pro 3-head" decks did they have in the studio? Can we see the specs? What kind of daily use do you estimate the decks saw?

Even the nicest, well-built pro discrete head cassette deck, or the dull-sounding-but-serviceable heavy duty tractor/trailer studio workhorse models would degrade and heads wear down with tens of thousands of hours of continuous broadcast use through the years.

I remember the studios at my university, too. Maintenance? Forget about it. Not a priority.

If you made "extensive use" of the decks, so did every other broadcast student in all the other classes and during the other shifts at the uni's radio studio, and before you going back to the first year of installation.

How many years was that?

Oh, by the way, good job on trotting out the dictation medium factoid. Never mind one could argue that that all magnetic tape recording started with the spoken word as initial focus, then went to music. The question is as this regards cassette -- has that been at all relevant since, what, 50+ years ago? Improvements in fidelity/tape formulations meant that cassettes started being used for music in 1965 in Europe and 1966 in the US.

In fact, we might not have gotten Eight Miles High by The Byrds had (Jim) McGuinn not had his little cassette player in their Clark Cortez playing a tape of Coltrane betweens shows.

But, yes, it started as a dictation medium and stayed that way for all of three years 1962 ~1965. Abacus point for you. Guess that college paid off after all. Well, except for thinking that your broadcasting classwork in the studio gives you the knowledge to spread a generality like "I know exactly how well a decent cassette deck can perform: not all that well" when there is very, very scant chance any of those studio decks at your uni performed anything like my deck, or any top-of-the-line deck, even new, and certainly not after hundreds, thousands or tens or thousands of hours of use, which is why I seriously call into question your assertion that "you know exactly" how well a decent cassette deck can perform. You clearly have no conception of how mine performs, though I think I have a fair idea on how the studio decks at your college did.

 

The ones in the student labs saw virtually no use. I know - I used to sit there and dub CDs on them. They were perfectly maintained, because there was a cadre of engineers running around the place keeping everything in perfect condition (and I know they used those decks for the same purpose!).

The cassette was a crap medium made marginally acceptable by a lot of clever engineering. A really expensive deck with expensive metal tape and Dolby HX Pro could sound about as good as an average reel to reel deck with none of that technology. Still didn't hold a candle to CD, and in many regards wasn't as good as vinyl, either. Dolby S finally brought it to near parity on more reasonably priced (tho still expensive) decks, but by that time the market had completely moved on.

(dbx sounded pretty good too years earlier . . . when it worked . . .)

The best cassettes for recording are your PC or tablet. Cheaper and better. If you want to tinker around with ridiculously obsolete tech just for fun that's a completely different story. But let's not kid ourselves that the cassette was anything other than tediously mid-fi in actual practice. And even that came at a high cost.

 

Some people simply lack the ability and skills to appreciate and make the most of certain technologies.

But rather than accepting this, they find themselves going out of their way to put down certain formats...

So, for them, digital clearly is an easier and cleaner solution.

I'm happy that they've found something that works for them.

And hopefully I don't feel the need to go onto digital threads with a subject asking what digital format is the best to use for digital recording...to write an essay about the weaknesses and downfalls of digital.

 

As usual someone has to come into a cassette thread and thread crap it. Figures.

 

Whatever. This seems to be a pro-cassette thread. Are you just pissing into the wind?

 

Cassettes are a pain in the a**, and if things are not clean, aligned and of good quality (deck and blank tape), is probably a waste of time.
No way I would go looking for a cassette deck, and blank tape today. But I already have this, and it does perform very well.