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Cassettes

Last year I bought a decent cassette and CD player. Most of my 80s cassettes sound amazingly excellent, you wouldn't know it wasn't a CD. In my head cassettes were always shit. However I recently bought a ltd edition CD that came with a cassette, which disappointingly was exactly the same as the album, and also bought the LP, so I could compare all three formats.

IMG_20160817_153229.jpg

The tape was well shit in comparison.
 
people buying cassettes is nothing to do with sound fidelity or convenience or anything like that though on the whole - I posted this on another cassette thread the other day:

killer b said:
As it happens, I run a label releasing music on cassette, and gave a lecture at the local uni last week that touched on this exact topic... :hmm:

The quick answer is that a lot of people don't actually play them, they'll download the digital files that are generally included in the sale and listen to them - the modern tape is mainly just a promotional item, and a way for fans to own the music in a world where almost all music is available for free on demand.

But for those who do play them (I do - I never stopped. Mind you, I even get the minidisc out every now and then, I like an obsolete format...) - I think we have a different relationship with music we have a physical collection of than the music we have on our computer / stream through spotify: could you imagine having the same attachment to a spotify playlist that you had for those mixtapes we made in the 90s?

The fact that you have to choose which tapes you take with you on a car journey, rather than taking a collection of thousands of hours of stuff to play on random forces you to think more carefully about what you might like to hear. Digging through a box of tapes (or records) looking for an album you're sure you have and finding it feels different (to me, much more satisfying) to searching for it on youtube and pressing play.

There's loads of reasons I like different physical formats, almost all are about the way it makes me think or feel about the music. I also stream loads of stuff off the internet too though, cause it's really convenient. Sometimes I'll do that instead of looking for the tape. :D
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Maybe, but I would like a promotional cassette to be something different, like being able to unlock a special mode.
 
The absolute joy that my auntie still had this amongst a whole load of stuff seemingly untouched for about 20 years in her spare room :cool:

308zdaa.jpg
 
seeformiles said:
View attachment 127204 Our car still has a Blaupunkt tape player in it and I’m surprised how good all my mixtapes from the 80s still sound. Realised I have this box of blank TDKs upstairs (liberated from educational stocks...)
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Even as a kid I knew that the longer tapes appeared to be of a worse quality. Never bought anything over 60 after my early teens. That is apart from this, that I couldn't resist from a charity shop five or six years ago. Also bought some TDK FE90s at 30p a pop. Just looked quite nice.

I used one to tape a song from an album I did in 2014. I played the song from the desk and recorded it in the middle of the room on a cheap portable tape machine. I then played that cheap tape recording (still from the middle of the room) back to the desk, with the first mic that came to hand a few meters away just laying on the floor. I was hoping for some authentically shit badly recorded rough stuff. . . but it actually sounded fine. Left it on the album anyway. It originally got rejected from the pressing plant because they thought the 'click' of the tape player going on and off
 
ATOMIC SUPLEX said:
Even as a kid I knew that the longer tapes appeared to be of a worse quality. Never bought anything over 60 after my early teens.
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I remember C120s were notorious for unraveling inside cassette decks - leading to lots of surgery involving small screwdrivers, glue and Biro pens...
 
This film is pretty good - available free on Amazon if you have Prime:



Quite melancholic in places, has some good footage of the (now very old) inventors of the cassette who worked at Phillips. Plus Rollins, Thurston Moore etc.

I had to buy a new cassette deck recently because mine broke.
 
I haven't trawled through the earlier pages, but in my day the "demo tape" was a big deal for bands. You went to a studio, recorded some songs, and the guy gave you a few copies on cassette. We ambushed John Peel outside the BBC one evening and gave him a copy of ours.

He never got back to us, and we never became famous. Bastard.

Others were fruitlessly sent off to festival organisers and that sort of thing.

Someone put the tape onto CD for me a few years ago, and now I have it on my ipod for self indulgent listening on the train!
 
I had a soft spot for tapes in the mid/late 90s and spent a lot of time making compilations and that to play on my Aiwa walkman. It was one that detected the blanks between songs so you could skip a song, like a cd. Imagine that! The future was here. :thumbs:

In all honesty though, they were a means to an end, cheap to buy, but fuck me was it tedious taping stuff. As soon as I got a CD copier for the pc it was a revelation. And then mp3s and now streaming, listening to music is easier than ever. My old TEAC tape deck never saw the light of day again.

Vinyl is also a funny one, I've got loads of old records and collected quite a bit before the fairly recent vinyl boom, when records were relatively cheap, and some things couldn't be found online or even on CD. A fiver for a record down a second hand shop, great.

But fuck paying 30 odd quid for a new release on vinyl, when you can listen in digital clarity. I mean, the reason vinyl was used in the 1st place was because it was the standard format at the time, not the best ever.

I have a rule that if a record came from the period when vinyl was king, then by all means listen to it on vinyl. But for a new band? No. If the past was so great, sell your 3 grand guitar and drums and bash a rock with some fucking sticks. :thumbs:

Basically, cassettes are shit.
 
mx wcfc said:
I haven't trawled through the earlier pages, but in my day the "demo tape" was a big deal for bands.
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They were a big thing for me, working for pirate radio stations in Waterford & Limerick in the 80s, that clearly couldn't be heard in Dublin, so tapes of our output to demonstrate how professional we were on-air was the only way of getting the ad agencies in Dublin to place national clients' avertising with us.

Without the money from them, we would have been fucked TBH.
 
Rosemary Jest said:
I had a soft spot for tapes in the mid/late 90s and spent a lot of time making compilations and that to play on my Aiwa walkman. It was one that detected the blanks between songs so you could skip a song, like a cd. Imagine that! The future was here. :thumbs:

In all honesty though, they were a means to an end, cheap to buy, but fuck me was it tedious taping stuff. As soon as I got a CD copier for the pc it was a revelation. And then mp3s and now streaming, listening to music is easier than ever. My old TEAC tape deck never saw the light of day again.
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It's worth mentioning again that tapes now serve a different purpose to their 90s utility - then they were for sharing and pirating music cheaply, for the most part, or for listening to on the move. Both of those things are covered much better in other ways now - the modern tape is instead a way for underground & DIY artists to release and promote their music.
 
killer b said:
It's worth mentioning again that tapes now serve a different purpose to their 90s utility - then they were for sharing and pirating music cheaply, for the most part, or for listening to on the move. Both of those things are covered much better in other ways now - the modern tape is instead a way for underground & DIY artists to release and promote their music.
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Which is all well and good, but a twitter page is free and much less faff, and doesn't get chewed up in your Dad's tape player.

Bloody hipsters :thumbs:
 
I am really gutted I don't have any of the demo tape my teenage band made.... Bought a load of cheap cassette spectrum games from the computer shop to tape over, sold them for a pound each which was like 80% profit.
 
rutabowa said:
That biro logo is sick, Def want to hear this.

Edit: "too old for youth," is also a classic song title
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Yeah, we were pretty proud of the logo. Fred the bassist did that. He's a professor now.

If I had any idea how to put the songs up here, I might, but probably not. Looking back, it was all a bit naive and could have been much better. "Too old for youth" may be a great song title, but it was a rubbish song!
 
mx wcfc said:
Yeah, we were pretty proud of the logo. Fred the bassist did that. He's a professor now.

If I had any idea how to put the songs up here, I might, but probably not. Looking back, it was all a bit naive and could have been much better. "Too old for youth" may be a great song title, but it was a rubbish song!
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Mina Past Munt?

What does it say?
 
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