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Vintage Tape (Audio), Cassette, Wire and Magnetic Disc Recorders and Players Open-reel tape recorders, cassette recorders, 8-track players etc.

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Old 27th Oct 2022, 10:23 pm   #21
Tractionist
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

It's main virtue was that of transportability - as exemplified by the Sony Walkman and in-car units etc. A high quality cassette/recording and player can sound extremely good - I frequently use cassettes in Sony MHC3500 and 5500 units. Never forget ... most vinyl formats of the time were also cut from mixed-down 'master tapes' (admittedly reel-to-reel high-speed units) and certain people reckon that the latter format is somehow acoustically 'superior'? I still occasionally record the odd 'live on air' concerts via FM broadcasts (easy on MHC 3500/5500's) and they sound great. Equally, I haven't had a tape jam or get chewed up in decades .... the technology had come a long way prior to CD superseding it c.f. DAT etc.
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Old 27th Oct 2022, 11:16 pm   #22
Robert Gribnau
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

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Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
The vibration in a 70s car was very hostile to cassette players, leading to all sorts of problems.
...
I can't remember the cassette player in the car of my father at the time ever gave any problems (I'm pretty sure it was a Blaupunkt).

When I was 13/14 years of age, I prepared a couple of cassettes (recorded from records I already had) for a holiday, driving up and down from The Netherlands to Spain. I was very much into Paul McCartney and the Wings at the time while my father only had prerecorded cassettes, most of them by Demis Roussos (I have to admit that I didn't dislike them...).

The (only) two loudspeakers at the back of the car were small (globe like ones), so the bass must surely have been lacking. But when you already know songs by listening to them on proper loudspeakers, the mind (at least mine) just filled in the lacking bass.

My earliest memories of listening to cassettes in cars are mostly of Buffalo Springfield, and Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young). I still love their music a lot.

To return to Paul McCartney and the Wings: I was a member of their Dutch fanclub when I was young. One of the nice things of becoming a member was receiving a cassette with 'special' songs, not easily available in The Netherlands at the time. That is how I got to know the song "Oh woman, Oh why", a song I still like a lot.
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Old 27th Oct 2022, 11:19 pm   #23
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

Yes Tractionist, portability was a big plus. The very first Philips cassette recorders were small, battery powered and, not often acknowledged, came with a good quality mic. So many events, conversations and interviews would not have been preserved without the ease with which they could be captured from the mid 60's by people with minimal technical skills.

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Old 28th Oct 2022, 8:44 am   #24
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Originally Posted by Kentode View Post
I'm going to go on record as being the first, but surely not the only, forum member
Who made a Mixtape for a putative girlfriend and either gave it to them or played it to them in the car in the hope of a little reciprocal enjoyment!
I did once make a cassette copy of Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy for the car in the hope of attracting a certain young lady into it. After about two seconds she said "trust you to listen to a load of noise like that", and walked off I subsequently discovered that her favourite song was Rupert the Bear by Jackie Lee.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 9:31 am   #25
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Originally Posted by Lloyd 1985 View Post
What I loved about cassettes was the simplicity! They were just so easy to use, power on, tape in, press play, music comes out!
I think that's a huge plus for cassettes, they're just so easy to use! Even CD's take several seconds to read, before you can do anything. And a cassette you can wind through to the start of something, take it out, put it in another machine, and it's there! Or to the start of a blank section if you want to start recording.

I'd guess the sheer convenience drove the development from an 'adequate' quality at launch to the hi-fi standards of the late 1970's onwards. It's astonishing how the technology was pushed to its limits - an awesome achievement, at consumer volumes and affordable prices too!

And don't forget that Fischer-Price managed to use the Compact Cassette to (just about) record video, too...
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 9:38 am   #26
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that other big use of tapes in the 1980s, loading computer programs.


Your ZX81 or Commodore 64 was nothing without a shoebox style cassette player so you could load up Frogger or one of the flight sim games that were popular back then.

"Press Play on tape"
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 10:30 am   #27
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

The responses are really interesting and I am finding that many are of the same mind as me.

Another advantage I have found is that making a mix tape - for me or someone else - encourages me to delve deeper into music to find things that are a bit out of the ordinary.

I also find it interesting that, as a format, you get to trust your ears a bit. Setting the levels and bias, and even the type of tape you use, invites an element of personal choice and experience.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 11:38 am   #28
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The responses are really interesting and I am finding that many are of the same mind as me.

Another advantage I have found is that making a mix tape - for me or someone else - encourages me to delve deeper into music to find things that are a bit out of the ordinary.

I also find it interesting that, as a format, you get to trust your ears a bit. Setting the levels and bias, and even the type of tape you use, invites an element of personal choice and experience.
Exactly, there's much to just listening to cassette tapes, it's a whole hobby in itself!
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 1:04 pm   #29
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

Cassette tapes were just about the only affordable portable recording medium for many years. Like millions of people, I used them for recording music and with home computers until other options became available.

Back in the late 1980s I began collecting 8 track cartridge tapes after I was given a player and a tape ("Motown Chartbusters III") to repair. Having grown up in the 70s I remembered the format but didn't take much interest in it at the time. However, I liked the music on the tape I was given, so this encouraged me to seek out more of them. Luckily at the time, old 8 track tapes and players were considered worthless junk by most people, which meant I could get them very cheap or free. Along the way, I discovered lots of music that I wouldn't otherwise have bought. By the late 1990s I had built up quite a collection. I installed an 8 track player in my car. It was guaranteed that no-one would break in and steal it!

Cassettes eventually went the same way as 8 tracks, entering the 'worthless junk' phase of their lifecycle. But by then, other methods of recording had become more affordable like CD, CD-R(W) and MP3 so I didn't collect massive quantities of old cassettes. Instead over the last few years I've been collecting lots of music CD's now they've become available for pennies. You can't beat the sound quality of a CD, they're convenient (instantly skip to a particular track with no rewinding) and they don't get tangled. CDs can be converted to MP3 at high speed.

One thing that's fun about old home-recorded tapes is that they can be a time capsule. Sometimes I find a tape with an old chart show recorded on it. Hearing the old jingles and the DJ's voice (some of them are no longer alive now) together with the old songs can be a very nostalgic experience.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 1:30 pm   #30
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

I notice that many of the responses are about using the tape as a music source. My introduction to the cassette was slightly different, a machine bought by my father in the early 1970’s.
A large thing that used 6 D cells and came with a shoulder holster to carry it. It also came with a microphone!

My father had been recording using reel-reel tape for some time but now he had portable technology to record anywhere.
As an avid steam rally fan, he was now able to record the sounds of the traction and showman’s engines as they huffed and puffed their way across a field.
He would spend hours listening and cataloguing the sounds. I think for many the ability to be able to make you own recordings via a microphone was the attraction to tape.

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Old 28th Oct 2022, 1:31 pm   #31
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

The other day my wife and I were watching a recent TV drama in which one of the characters went to visit another in hospital. The visitor had thoughtfully prepared a playlist of music for the one in hospital. The conversation between them was interesting.

"You'll be able to find this in your iTunes"
"What's that? Where's my iTunes"
"It's here, look. What's your Apple ID and password?"
"I have no idea. Do I have one?"
"OK, let's sort this out. It'll take a while to download on to your phone, so hey, let's listen on mine for now"

What a palaver! It had me thinking that 20 years ago they'd have just handed over a cassette. Maybe that was the subtle point the scriptwriters were trying to make.

Chris
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 1:57 pm   #32
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

Fascinating! I still use cassettes and have a large collection of good-quality cassettes full of music that I’ve copied from various sources. I’m slowly transcribing the cassettes to MiniDisc for ease of access, but retaining the original cassettes.

My first decent cassette deck was a Goodmans SCD100 (a rebadged Nakamichi, apparently) and it’s still in use, although I have better machines. I always stuck with TDK cassettes as they were recommended in the Goodmans manual, and never had any problems, mechanical or otherwise. Commercial pre-recorded tapes, on the other hand, I found prone to going ‘stiff’ or jamming - mechanical QC issues.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 2:51 pm   #33
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

As several people have said, convenience comes top of the list (for cassette, not open-reel!).

Like Ken (#12) did, you could record a mixtape, listen at home, pop it in the car player then hand it to a girlfriend for them to play at home on their hi-fi, bedroom shoebox player or they could take it with them on their Walkman, all the while being hugely impressed by your impeccable musical taste. No compatibility issues (well, not with the tape format).

It's only recently that you can send a friend a playlist they can stream on their phone to listen to on the move or Bluetooth to other devices - we're getting back to the age of convenience again. Mind you, some of us still like their physical media.

Like many I'm impressed where cassette technology actually led. I had a Nakamichi in for service a few weeks ago and let it play on the bench. 'Is that REALLY a cassette playing?' was a friend's response.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 3:38 pm   #34
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

If you just want to listen to a series of tracks, the differences in convenience between cassette, CD and minidisc are marginal. But if you want to get to a particular track cassettes are extremely tedious. If you're lucky (a deck with the facility and minimal noise between tracks) searching for the Nth track sometimes works. Otherwise you have to fast forward for a bit, listen, try to work out which track you're at, fast forward or reverse, etc, until you get there. For that purpose, give me digital (but not DAT) every time.

I did a fair amount of live recording with portable machines from the late 60s to the 90s, but never on cassette: I moved straight from open-reel tapes on a Uher to DAT.
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Old 28th Oct 2022, 4:17 pm   #35
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I didn't buy any of the early popular small cheap and cheerful cassette player/recorders that appeared but I have some now [free]. I saved up for a stand alone "Hi-Fi" unit when these became more affordable [late seventies]. Here's a topical ghost story for this month. The first time I made a cassette recording, it was Brian Matthews, a very well known BBC presenter [Pick of The Pops] who by then had his own late night talk show [1978]. It was getting on for 2am, I was alone in a large house and he did a quite a long presentation re the now well known, "Enfield Poltergeist" event. It included "found" audio recordings from the flat that were fairly terrifying to say the least, in my circumstances. Now it's a whole industry of not very convincing "Ghost Hunt" TV programs but this was completely different. The cassette still plays!

Later, I bought a Sony semi-professional, portable stereo cassette recorder [although it was quite heavy, using big bicycle lamp type batteries]. That was the one with twin round level meters on the front, perhaps copying the really expensive makes. It looked the business though! Re the heavy battery drain, I used it via the mains input nearly all the time-even on "location" if there was a suitable plug socket available.
I found out later that a similar version was in use at one of the commercial Radio Stations in Manchester.

Eventually, wanting something really portable for discrete recording [1983?]. I bought one of the new top of the range black Sony Walkman recorders-about the size of a VHS cassette! £200 [on easy payments] a lot of money for me then but many recordings over 20 years. That worked out at £10 a year so the longer I used it, the cheaper it became It had great sound quality and the auto record circuit always seemed to keep overloading at bay with optimal levels, even in the loudest environment! The BBC used a version of this model for their reporters instead of the previous [and heavy] twin 5" reel recorders but I was told that their Walkmans were modified to provide an option for manual recording onto the cassette as well. The Beeb always goes it's own way!

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Old 28th Oct 2022, 10:27 pm   #36
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

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Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that other big use of tapes in the 1980s, loading computer programs.


Your ZX81 or Commodore 64 was nothing without a shoebox style cassette player so you could load up Frogger or one of the flight sim games that were popular back then.

"Press Play on tape"
Our Acorn Electron used a WH Smiths Data Recorder which was fitted with a Granada plug that my Dad had taken off a rented set!

I remember it had a monitor function to help find a program on a tape, which made a lot of screeching sounds through the speaker. Many a time it was useful to back the tape up after a "Data? Rewind Tape" error.

I imagine this was just a standard mono tape recorder mechanism with a few bells & whistles, like Play labelled Load & Record as Save.
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Old 29th Oct 2022, 1:34 am   #37
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Cassette tapes were used with early home computers purely because of their low cost and widespread availability, not because they were good. Tape loading was slow and quite often ended in the dreaded Error message. Back in the day, I longed for a disk drive.

Some computers like Commodore 64, Vic 20 and Atari 400/800 had dedicated cassette decks. You couldn't just plug an ordinary cassette recorder in, you had to buy the official (and more expensive) data recorder with special plug that fitted into a data port on the computer. At least this meant no volume or recording level adjustments were necessary. The Atari 410 model was stereo. One of the channels carried the data, the other channel could be sound or music. The Atari 400 computer could play the sound channel through the TV speaker. A few pre-recorded program cassettes took advantage of this feature. While the program was loading, you could listen to instructions or recorded information about the program. There was an educational one called Conversational French which played phrases from the tape; the computer then asked you to type a response.

There was another use for cassette tapes. In the 80s I came across some called Audio Mail. They were supplied with a small cardboard box for sending them in the post. The idea was that you could record a personal message and send it to family or friends possibly overseas. At the time, not everyone had a telephone. International phone calls were very expensive and could also be impractical due to time difference between countries. Did anyone here actually send audio correspondence?
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Old 29th Oct 2022, 7:15 am   #38
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Those cassette mailers, yes I remember there was a thing in the 70s, 'tapesponding' which was a bit like an audio version of penpals. There were clubs for such stuff,
I wonder if any stills continue

Also, In the pre-internet days and when international phone calls were expensive, making a cassette to send to your family in Australia was a good way to keep in touch. I
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Old 29th Oct 2022, 9:30 am   #39
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

A direct parallel is "what's good about vinyl records?" Many people would say without hesitation, and unless you're being esoteric or pedantic, that CDs were much easier to use and arguably better. But, as we have said many times before it's more than just the end result of music being piped out from a pair of speakers. It's a nostalgic love of the format, the karma of taking a record from its sleeve, placing it on the deck, cueing the stylus, and sitting reading the album notes and enjoying the artwork of the sleeve whilst listening to the music. And that kind of thing is the reason why I have little or no interest in downloading or streaming. To me that's like 'hiring' music. It may sound materialistic, but I like to own my music in a physical format, and I suspect I'm not on my own there. I can peruse my records and CDs and select one to play to suit my mood or desire, not so with an infinite list of 'albums' on the internet.
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Old 29th Oct 2022, 10:20 am   #40
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Default Re: What's good about tape?

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Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that other big use of tapes in the 1980s, loading computer programs.


Your ZX81 or Commodore 64 was nothing without a shoebox style cassette player so you could load up Frogger or one of the flight sim games that were popular back then.

"Press Play on tape"
Used them with my Nascom setup. The only thing was that I stripped an old deck and provided my own electronics to achieve NRZ recording, which was much more reliable due to the tape saturation, rather than rely on the audio decode.
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