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

The BIC biro pens have always been exactly the right size for winding cassettes. They still are. I wonder if that was intentional.

 

I forgot about 100 minute tapes!
There were 45s too. Never had any of those though.
I bought 60 and 90 exclusively. TDKs and Maxells were fine. Sony's HF ferros were correct but their HF-S ones were excellent. And their UX and UX-S chromes were superb.
One brand that really surprised me with the quality of their ferro tapes (their chromes too, but were more on par with other brands) was Fuji. Best sounding ferro tapes I remember.

 

If you're only going to have so few, you've at least got great ones! Have you got anything to play them on?

 

I listen to my cassettes all the time, most are from 80’s-90’s and sound great still.
I made a mix tape for a girlfriend a couple years ago, she was all new-fangled and didn’t have a tape deck so I dremel’ed out a Maxell 90 to fit a flash drive and put it in a decorated, labeled tape case - so much better than a cd-r

 

I had a lot of cassettes back in the day as a kid, but I got my first CDs and CD player for Christmas '94 when I was 9, so I never looked back at that point.

And I actually do! Someone got me a Crosley radio/cassette/USB player as a gift last year! Haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I definitely will set it up at some point!

 

I used some Fuji and BASF ferric tapes from around the early 2000s recently. Both sound excellent. I got a better recording on the Fuji Type I than a Fuji Type II from the same era. I don't know why!

 

Can someone explain the concept of tape splicing? I see several folks mentioning it, but I don't really understand how it worked. All of the tapes that I remember were a solid brown color so how do you know when and where to cut and splice? Don't you hear a skip where the splice occurs?

I grew up with a handful of tapes...the ones I can remember was a single of "Simply Irresistible" by Robert Palmer and an oldies sampler that came with Reader's Digest. I didn't have much money growing up so that was about all I could afford. I would play those two over and over and over again. I do remember spending a lot of time as a teenager creating mix tapes from my CDs and recording songs from the radio. On many of those songs I would accidentally record the DJ bumpers just prior to the song starting or just after the song ended. To this day, those songs sound strange to me without hearing those snippets of talking.

 

Got it years ago from my father, who hardly ever used it. Works perfectly. I just never listen to cassettes anymore.

 

Don't build your hopes up or put a good tape in it first!

 

It may have to do with the music itself? Type IIs had usually better high end and clarity, but if your recording has a lot of low end you may be better served with a ferro one.

 

It's brand new in the box, so fingers crossed!

I own the albums in multiple masterings on CD and vinyl (not that I have a turntable, I just have them to get framed at some point), so it's not a huge loss if they get eaten or anything.

I had "Built For Speed" as a kid, so I'd give "Rant N' Rave" and Brian's "Live Nude Guitars" a spin first.

 

I didn't use cassettes for about 20 years but used them a lot as kid. About 3 or 4 years ago I got a very well looked after and clean Denon cassette deck for £5 in a house clearance shop. The nostalgia came back and it sounds very good. Definitely the best deck I've ever owned. I wouldn't buy music on cassette as any kind of priority, but I wanted to use it for something so I recorded stuff from YouTube and borrowed out of print soul and reggae LPs from friends to tape. It's a fun little sideline.

 

It was the levels that were the problem. The tape was turning out quieter than I set the levels at.

I do find that a quality ferric does give a nicely rounded sound. Mediocre ones can be a problem, then there's the many complete crap ones! I tried to record on a Bush C90. No amount of altering the bias could get a good recording on that thing!

 

Hmmm... I don't remember having that problem.
Maybe the type I was better preserved?

 

I was of the CD generation, but cassettes were still essential. I’d copy an album off a friend, then if I really liked it, I’d buy the CD. If I only liked it a bit, I’d keep the recording. If I didn’t like it, I’d record over it.

Making compilations, as many have said, was also fun on tape. Never as much fun burning CDRs other than for listening in the car.
I invested in Minidisc in the late 90s. I liked the tech, but couldn’t share them with friends - no-one else I knew had a unit. So I’d make tapes from Minidiscs, and on occasion, Minidiscs from tapes. Oh to have that spare time again!

 

I think so. It was a just opened type I and a type II I'd had for a while and had moved many times. It was probably shoved in a carrier and forgetten for years. I got superb recordings on a late Memorex type II tape. They're so hard to get now though and it's seems they're not going to ever be manufactured again. Now Maxell have stopped there's no half decent blank tapes available new now in the UK. That's the thing that's putting me off getting a better deck. I got the Fuji and BASF tapes off eBay.

 

I remember a crappy tape brand called Shibata. It was impossible to make one of those sound half decent.
Cheap tapes were hit and miss. Usually they were crap, but I remember a chain of shops here in Spain that had their own brand of cheap ferro and chrome tapes and they sounded surprisingly good! Very cheap and the quality was Sony or BASF level.

 

Chances are they were made by Sony or BASF. Often the brand was just a trademark. Late 90s BASF and Memorex are exactly the same for example. I don't think TDK ever made tapes for anyone else, but other brands did.

 

I think some 80s production values lent themselves to cassette playback. I remember owning Van Halen's '1984' on cassette and it was Trebly to the max - the synths on the title track positively FIZZED.

 

the C120s ended up having more problems than the C90s, so the C90s hit the sweet spot between length and quality. I remember in the 80s some cassettes that were C100s, which were great for those extra long albums.

 

I can’t understand the nostalgia for them

 

Childhood nostalgia can be very powerful!

 

Yes, tapes longer than 90 minutes didn't have a good reputation. They managed to get the extra length by making the tape thinner, which... usually lead to the disastrous consequences you may have in your mind right now.

 

Late 80s and early 90s I bought lots of stuff on cassette. Really wish I’d bought vinyl instead. Ended up throwing out all my cassettes when I came to Canada. The lure of cassette only bonus tracks slowly took me away from vinyl at that time.

 

ZZ Top - Eliminator was a blinder on tape!