So, do you think a new cassette deck will be made again?

I have concerts on VHS and Laserdisc that I have recorded the audio to CD-R (to the analog inputs of my CD recorder) - Lots of great music that is not available
on CD or DVD, and probably never will be. Easy to do, and has added quite a lot of great live music to my collection.

 

talking about "niches" ... hifi it's a niche, totally.

so, world consumer numbers are in major part relative to portable low quality music (in thousand variants) ... we can't use "universal" numbers to talk about "niches".
what we really know it's that vinyl gets over cds in 2020 sales ... it means that the promedy consumer is buying vinyl? no.

but surely that means vinyl market it's really healthy and you can see that on any major hifi brand launching a turntable (or many models), you can see vinyl records on shopping malls, etc.

i don't see it on cassette format ... far from that ... but, things change. In the 80s i thought vinyl was a thing of the past and i sold my inmaculated beautiful technics mk2 at bananas price, a spectacular mistake, the worst thing i do in audio.

 

The vinyl resurgence is almost entirely due to the proliferation of cheap Crosley, Victrola, AT-LP60, etc. turntables, which comprise almost 90% of all new turntables sold. Certainly there is the mystique of "analog warmth" and the group of die-hard vinyl enthusiasts who never stopped insisting that it is the best-sounding audio format, so you'll often see teenagers who grew up listening to the built-in speaker of an iPhone praising vinyl's sound quality, even if the device they're using to play it isn't even remotely capable of delivering it. And according to a BBC survey, almost half of the people who buy new records don't play them at all, even if they do own a record player.

That audiophile mystique of superior sound quality is one thing cassettes lack, which may limit its growth potential, even if a side-by-side comparison between a new $59 Sony cassette boombox and a $59 Crosley suitcase record player would reveal that the cassette player sounds far better. Indeed most of the articles that have been written about the recent resurgence of cassette tapes are filled with backhanded compliments and even outright disdain for the format, and combined with the negative opinions about the quality of the currently available tapes and players/recorders even from supporters of the format (as seen in this thread!), the regrowth of the cassettes in recent years is more in spite of the press and word of mouth, than because of it.

 

Do you think that Technics / VPI / Project / SME / Rega / Lenco / Thorens / Marantz / Clearaudio / Cambridge / Audio Technica / Linn / McIntosh / (i can add many, many more) ... are selling NEW turntable models, like never before, because hipsters are buying them? I'm not talking about records, i'm talking about record players with great quality.

I respect your opinion, but the data available says other things to me (apart that hipsters buying Crosleys / records to collect).

Maybe you can check https://www.cognitivemarketresearch.com/consumer-goods/stereo-turntable-market-report

... or many (y already said many?) other reports from RIIA, etc. Vinyl it's a growing and healthy community in the world with more sells that CDs, we can't talk about fashion right now.

Talking about sound i got my opinion, but i think (as i posted before) that's irrelevant. If you don't like vinyl ... great!, listen only to digital music.

 

Cassettes are being made but probably not top quality. Some artists are even releasing cassette versions of albums. I still think their best application was in cars. Much preferable to CD and even messing with plugging in an Mp3 player. In 2019 Bjork reissued her catalogue on cassette! It's just not underground lo-fi stuff. The main barrier to comeback is probably the lack of new playback equipment. With vinyl there was still a mainly specialist interest in producing decks and many titles being pressed even when the format was invisible to the public at large. Cassettes and player manufacture just dropped of a cliff from being bigger than vinyl sales. Cassettes were a convenience medium and not a collectable format. Still more portable than CD which replaced them.

 

Cd in a car is a faff unless you use a carousel type but then that's hardly convenient for swapping programme and was part of the popularity of tape with the notion of putting your albums in a form that was easier for the car and other portable applications?

 

Bud, the Single Disc factory installed auto CD Player was a godsend for all who ordered that option as it better supported quick song selection, higher fidelity, and playlist browsing than cassette tape.

 

carousel cd players brings me bad memories ... much prone to mechanical failure.

what bothered me the most about cassettes was azimuth settings, a cassette recorded in one cassette deck can sound horrible in other player ...

 

According to the latest data I've seen, turntables selling for over $200 -- the category which all of the brands and models you're referring to would fall into -- only account for around 11% of all turntables sold.

Yes, that's still hundreds of thousands of units sold per year, which I'm sure is more than enough to keep all the companies you mentioned in business and making a good profit, but is a far cry from the millions of Crosleys, Victrolas, and $99 Audio-Technicas that are sold every year.

I never stated my opinion of which format I prefer. I just stated the facts of the relative market share of entry-level (or even "sub-entry-level", according to audiophiles) brands versus high-end brands.

 

I'm sorry you didn't read the report ... tts aren't used only for domestic audio, also in clubs / music creation and with the same levels of marketshare. They don't use Crosley for that.

I repeat, you can't explain vinyl success with "hipster" users, not anymore. But, it's ok, we can think different, obviously.

 

I have 5 “40 year old” machines...they all work great and are fun to play!

 

These modern units are all junk. Nobody makes quality heads anymore, and they aren't capable of handling metal or even recording on chrome tape anymore. Dolby stopped making their noise reduction ICs years ago, so kiss that goodbye as well, which is a real issue for a deck with crummy heads that can't use metal tape.

These are toys at best. Crosleys for cassette.

 

I would actually avoid late-model cassette decks like the plague. Manufacturing quality had gone way downhill by the '90s with rampant cost cutting, and manufacturers no longer gave a crap about cassette, especially once recordable CDs began dropping in price during the second-half of the '90s. That was also the era where bad capacitors flooded the market - you can bet a lot of those have blown up in the interim, requiring costly replacement and also potentially damaging the board around them and any nearby components. Nightmare.

The best decks in general were made between the late '70s and the mid to late '80s, before cost cutting at name brands like Sony began destroying product quality and especially longevity. The proliferation of auto reverse decks didn't help - they were never especially reliable, always tended to have azimuth problems, and dramatically increased the overall mechanical complexity of a deck. Which in turn would lead to even more cost cutting.

The sweet spot for decks are probably 3-head units with Dolby C and Dolby HX Pro from the mid-'80s. They might not be quite as well made as decks from the late '70s and early '80s, but they should be able to play anything and their performance was approaching the peak the format would ever achieve. Dolby S was wonderful, but those decks aren't going to hold up as well in general and are going to be more difficult to repair. And unless you're planning on doing a lot of recording (why?), Dolby S is useless. B and C are all you'll need to playback virtually all pre-recorded or home-recorded tapes (unless you have a collection of dbx encoded tapes laying around - decks with dbx are also available and most hail from the period of maximum quality).

 

I don't think the formulation of tape they use is compatible with audio cassette decks, although I do wonder if the manufacturers could make audio tape if the demand were there. It's highly unlikely there's going to be substantial demand for more advanced cassette tape formulations anytime soon, tho.

 

DNR is in no way, shape or form a substitute for Dolby. Dolby tapes are encoded with Dolby noise reduction. DNR does not decode that - it's simply designed to remove hiss. It cannot reverse Dolby encoding, so the audio is still going to be messed up even if DNR tamps down the hiss.

DNR itself doesn't work all that well - it often muffles out the treble portion of the music as well as snuffing hiss. Later digital noise reductions schemes like the one Pioneer employed in the mid-'90s were more successful, but by that point largely irrelevant as recordable CDs plummeted in price.

 

The problem is those decks are all cheap junk stuffed with Tanashin mechanisms or - worse - knock offs. The heads and mechanisms are all inferior to even cheap cassette decks from the '80s. You'd be far better off going onto eBay and spending a similar amount of money on a working used machine from the '80s. It will likely last longer and will almost certainly work better. It'll also support chrome and metal tape and Dolby noise reduction, which today's decks don't.

 

I think all the patents on Dolby NR have expired. JVC's ANRS was an attempt to create a patent-unencumbered clone of Dolby, which largely worked. ANRS could decode tapes encoded with Dolby B, and a Dolby B deck could decode ANRS encoded tapes. JVC later release Super ANRS, but I can't recall offhand if it was compatible with Dolby C - I think it wasn't, although it offered similar performance. ANRS would be another option if you could get it from JVC.

The problem is, nobody is going to make these IC's because there's no market. I suppose you could just digitize the signal and do it with an off-the-shelf DSP as well, but that would freak out the analog purists. Although it would make it possible to implement digital noise reduction schemes as well, like the ones Pioneer used on decks they made in the '90s.

 

Exactly. These are collectibles to most people, like t-shirts or posters, not an actual audio format to be listened to. Roughly half of all vinyl being sold today is the audio equivalent of a pet rock. Why do you think Shure dropped out of the cartridge market after a hundred years or whatever in it? Because virtually nobody is buying decent turntables or cartridges - it's all Crosley junk and the remainder of the industry is a teeny boutique for the obsessive set. I wouldn't be surprised if Audio Technica bailed next - if their own-brand cheap turntable business weren't doing relatively well they'd probably already be long gone...

Good luck getting anybody to manufacture good tape heads.

Yeah, and I'm sure that's a rare and in-demand collectible for Bjork fans. I'm also sure most of the people who bought those never even opened them, let alone listened to them, or even had anything to listen to them on.

 

The biggest problems looming up ahead for the cassette revival are the coming CD revival (wait for it - it's gonna happen, because hipsters gotta hipster) and the ongoing reel to reel revival happening in the audiophile world.

The latter actually interests me, because unlike vinyl or cassette, reel to reel is an actual high-fidelity home audio format that faded out right around the time it had achieved near parity with the best the studios could deliver, in large part due to improvements in cassette but also thanks to the arrival of the CD, which finally killed it off. Unlike cassette, reel to reel doesn't require exotic tape formulations or Dolby to deliver pretty astounding analog performance. The only problem is the price of the things, which is outrageous. This is one area where Chinese manufacture could make a huge difference in price, but I doubt demand will ever rise to a level that makes it practical.

 

Reel to reel does interest me but it is only going to be for a few (not me) due to the cost of the tapes and prices of really good vintage recorders + maintenance. The few decks being manufactured now are crazy expensive (just for a playback only machine). Thorens TM 1600 Reel To Reel Tape Machine

 

Your best bet for reel to reel is a used machine, same as with cassette. You'd have to be loaded to blow $15 grand on a tape deck.

That having been said, people blow as much or more on turntables. A reel to reel deck like that blows any turntable to oblivion. But good luck finding pre-recorded tapes to play on it. A few are still being issued but they're also outrageously expensive. Still, if digital audio offends you, this is easily as good as analog gets, at least outside of a recording studio.

 

I have been into R-2-R for decades. The blank media we were able to buy was far superior to what major labels were selling as pre-recorded albums. After WWII and into the 1980's, most studio recording was done on magnetic tape. Most used good brands of tapes but the major thing they had going for them was that they recorded the tapes at high speed, 15-30 i.p.s. The speed could cover up most hiss and drop-outs.
On the consumer market, the tapes were recorded at high speed on not so great of quality tape stock. R-2-R pre-recorded tapes were usually released in both 7.5 and 3.75 i.p.s. Tape hiss was an issue and could usually be heard on the 7.5 i.p.s. tapes, mainly from the cheap tape stock. I could record a pristine record album at 7.5, using Maxell UD and UD-XLI tape and not only would my tapes blow away the pre-recorded tapes but often sounded better than the LP itself. The same could also almost be said of cassettes, but I usually used TDK-SA tapes, the last ones I used. The recording process would cover up a lot of the flaws that might have been in the records. That's one reason radio stations started recording all their records to tapes. I know, I was there and did it.
So, if you think that you are going to get any pre-recorded tapes today which sound better than records or CD's, you are sadly mistaken. With the pre-recorded cassettes coming out lately, they are still junk. Some are putting out pre-recorded Reels, like Acoustic Sounds, but they are $450. They are 10.5 inch reels recorded at 15 i.p.s. Now how many people are willing to fork over that kind of money? Eventhough my Pioneer RT-909 deck can play 10.5 inch reels, the fastest speed it will play is 7.5 i.p.s. I can't believe the money they are getting for theses decks. Maybe I should sell mine and pocket the money. The deck I most often use it my Teac 4-channel quadraphonic deck.

 

Yeah, the sweet spot right here. Only now, having installed a Parasound P6 Preamplifier into the stereo portion of my audio system can I distinguish some noise from Maxell UR type 1 cassette recordings when compared to the LPs from which the cassettes were recorded, backgrounds not quite as black as dead wax .

 

I disagree, the last of the Yamahas were well made with good performance, likewise for Sonys until at least 2000, those companies at the very least were still investing heavily in decent cassette playback even as Nak were giving up and Aiwa had already made their best decks, the reason to go for those last good decks is that many got limited use, people were still conditioned to buy a deck, but them many hardly used them because cassette sales collapsed and everyone was playing CDs. I've picked up several late nineties/early noughties decks that were effectively mint, when it comes to reliability I've never had an issue with a Yamaha, even earlier ones and I've had a lot as I used to pick them up for anyone wanting a deck 10/15 years ago, Sony's are probably a little less reliable, but any bad ones would have died already.

I don't know about elsewhere, but in the UK recordable CD blanks were still £1 a piece in 1999 and that was for TDKs and if you shopped around, standalone recorders were several hundred, my first Marantz cost £660 in '98 or '99, down from the three grand one would have cost two or three tears earlier, it wasn't until the early 2000s that blanks got down to 50p for CD Audio and under 20p for ordinary blanks, I think those early Philips and Pioneer recorders that were the cheapest were still around £300 then, in fact I don't recall any mainstream branded consumer CD recorder going much below £200 meaning a decent cassette deck was still cheaper to buy and run though over here most people embraced Mini Disc.

Incidentally my favourite deck that I own is a Sony TA-KC6ES which was made between 1995 and 2001 it wipes the floor with pretty much anything below the best Naks with or without noise reduction, it may have been made in the late 90s, but Sony definitely weren't skipping on either design or build quality.

 

Sidebar: Yeah, reel to reel is the real deal. I own an ad agency and years ago, before digital, we produced radio commercials on reel to reel, mostly A-B roll on 1/4 inch Fostex Recorders. In the early 90's we went all in for digital, whereby hard drive editing and DAT Mastering/Distribution replaced reel to reel. The DAT Recorders were godsends, convenience and better sound than reel to reel. In fact, I still have a pair of Sony PCM-7010F Time-Code DAT Recorders, barely running now, but when running are capable of ADC and DAC which delivers a product reel to reel can't touch. At any rate, I have ZERO interest in reel to reel, knowing what I know about Pro-DAT. Only thing that makes me cry is at some point DAT will indeed be dead due to parts shortage.