Cassette - A Documentary Mixtape

TalismanRich

Well-known member
Has anyone else watched this documentary about the history of the cassette? It's got interviews with one of the original designers of the cassette, Lou Otten, who also worked on the CD. He created the cassette to be "foolproof" because he disliked fooling around with threading a reel to reel.

There are also a bunch of musicians, like Henry Rollins, many waxing romantic about putting together tapes, or listening to tapes, etc. Interestingly I don't think I heard any of them really saying that the sound quality is so great. It's more about the memories, like looking at old pictures taken with those dreadful Kodak 110 Instamatic cameras. They were great because you could throw it in your pocket, and pull it out an snap a picture of your girlfriend at the park. You didn't have a mess of lenses, no metering to slow you down. Cassettes were the same. Convenience and portability were the essence.

It's available on TubiTV, Prime and other places. For those interested in this bit of history, you might want to check it out.
 
I saw that, too. I agree; it was mostly about nostalgia. I don't think most people are trying to pass off the cassette as a hi-fi sound medium. However, I will say that it's more than adequate for my uses. If I dub an album from CD to a good cassette deck, I would probably have to have some pretty good headphones and listen very intently to hear the difference between the two.

That is to say ... it's certainly not the highest fidelity available, but it's well within my threshold of acceptable quality sound. I mean, it's the way I grew up listening to most of my music until about the age of 19 or 20. I was a little late to the CD party and clung to cassettes until about 91 or 92. Everything sounded great to me! :)
 
In the 70’s I had a stint in my first job where I sold hi-fi. Ferric oxide cassettes sounded very inferior to reel to reel. The sort of difference everyone could detect, not just the knowledgeable. Records, as in the black flat things, also had the same quality range. Discos were new and had Garrard SP25 turntables which were actually pretty good and they could take better cartridges, but there was a cheap BSR alternative and they only took nastier cartridges. When cassette chemical advances happened, we ended up with TDK SA and BASF chrome dioxide and the quality level took a big jump. People forget that our current quality moans over uncompressed vs mp3 sort of existed then too. The Sony 19.99 Walkman vs things like the Aiwa tiny one, with real metal not plastic was very obvious and the price was 59.99. Remember I was earning about 25 quid a week, so maybe we expect too much. Cassette on the more expensive machines was pretty close to the sound of the records, with good quality tape. Don’t forget too that the cheap records were made with recycled plastic from unsold product. The general public were happy with noise, either hiss or the pops and crackles. Today, the same people are happy with low bit rate mp3, on shitty ear buds, playing terrible recordings. I think our forum members are not really representative of society, we talk about tiny quality differences, and the music consuming public don’t even notice.
 
Rob, you and I probably grew up around the same time. We had a Philco console stereo from about the time I was about 7 or 8, and got a Ross cassette player when I was about 14. I bought my first real stereo equipment in '72, Sony integrated amp, Sony 5520 turntable and Marantz 5G speakers. I had a Dokorder cassette, my brother had a Sony R2R with his system, so we had all the bases covered. I upgraded to a Harmon Kardon cassette deck a few years later, which I still have.

The cassettes never sounded as good as either my brother's or my R2R decks. They were great for the car stereo, and dubbing albums down so you didn't wear out the records. I completely understand the nostalgia about having my old tapes, especially radio shows and concerts that I recorded, but once I moved to CD, the album dubs were pointless. There are a couple of boxes of tapes in the basement, and I've thought of hitting a bunch with the bulk eraser and selling them.

The thought of buying new ones baffles me. It seemed like most of the people that were buying new ones were under about 30. The older ones had tapes that had obviously been made about 40 years ago or more.

FWIW, I never made any mixtapes for girlfriends. I did have one girlfriend that liked one of the 8-track tapes that I had which was a bootleg of "Hits of 1970". She always wanted to play that one when we were on a date. Maybe I should hunt down an 8 track player, find that tape and wax nostalgic about my old girlfriend..... nah!
 
Yep, it was of it’s time. I joined the local record library, the reps for the tape firms kept me in blank cassettes, so every afternoon, I came back from the library with a new album, copied it to tape and in the end, I threw them away when I discovered I’d bought only a few of my old albums on records on the new CDs. The quality jump to CDs was so good that it was impossible to not appreciate the new quality we got on digital.
 
RE: sound quality- most people clearly do not care much about sound quality at all. I think for most everyday people, sound quality today surely is worse than it was in the cassette era. Soooo many people basically listen to music on their phone speakers and maybe earbuds. If they’re super into music, maybe a cheap Bluetooth speaker ha.

This is not a rant- basically, it seems to me that people by and large have never cared that much. Cassettes were good enough, and now iPhones are good enough. It’s always been about convenience and what was available at the time.
 
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A good song sells itself whatever medium it’s listened to on.

The worst however that I remember is the 8track cartridge. Not that it sounded all that bad, but that annoying click/ pop/clank as it switched tracks ruined things. Especially when it cut the song in half.
I was glad to see them how bye, bye.
 
I know it’s not a cassette, an analog machine, but I still have a Yamaha MD4.

It’s just like a 4 track cassette machine but it records in 16 bit to a compact minidisc.

Sounds pretty good, but the cool thing is that the workflow is just like any other 4track

Great fun for laying down inspiration in a hurry.
 
A good song sells itself whatever medium it’s listened to on.

The worst however that I remember is the 8track cartridge. Not that it sounded all that bad, but that annoying click/ pop/clank as it switched tracks ruined things. Especially when it cut the song in half.
I was glad to see them how bye, bye.
Yeah, it was impossible to time a whole album and not have either the click or the fade out/fade in the middle of some songs.

As bad as the old 8 tracks are, they were infinitely better than than the then standard AM radio with a5x7 speaker in the dashboard. You didn't have commercials, you could throw in Machine Head, or The White Album, crank up the speakers that you have mounted in the rear deck or door panels and groove away. Mine was later replaced with an in dash cassette unit, which was much harder for thieves to rip off than the 8 track player that were just mounted below the glovebox.
 
I know it’s not a cassette, an analog machine, but I still have a Yamaha MD4.

It’s just like a 4 track cassette machine but it records in 16 bit to a compact minidisc.

Sounds pretty good, but the cool thing is that the workflow is just like any other 4track

Great fun for laying down inspiration in a hurry.

It seemed to me that when using the standalone units like my R24 or old AW1600, you work like a tape deck most of the time. You just don't have to wait for the tape to rewind. There is no big screen with lots of waveforms, just a time counter, and maybe bouncing "meters". You record the track, back up and record another. When you screw up, back it up and do it again. The advantage is that you don't have to spend time bouncing tracks. From a workflow standpoint, it's pretty similar.
 
Do you remember the ¼" endless loop NAB cartridges that ran st 3 3/4IPS? They were great - we used them for radio with that strange lubricated tape - very similar to 8 tracks, but just stereo.
 
Yeah, we had a whole rack of NAB carts at the college radio station when I was there. They held commercials, show intros, etc. Most were short, anything from 1 to 5 minutes, and they were set up with a cue track to recue them to the start. No pinch roller like an 8 track. The pinch roller would pop up through a hole in the case. We had 3 cart machines in the broadcast studio, and 2 more in the production room.
 
Cassette wasn't really terrible like it's often described as. This file is an mp3, from a .wav, from a digitised BASF CRO2 cassette - recorded by me from a 1/4" master in 1978. That should mean that after all that format to format conversion it should be dreadful! So - before you listen, guess what you think it will sound like. I found the album on an old hard drive, and the band hadn't ever heard it, as it was a new record company recording and everyone fell out and it never got released. I copied the master before it got buried.
 

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One of the problems with cassette from the consumer's point of view was the vast range of tape formulations around.
A basic type 1 ferric BASF was not bad quality IF biased correctly which it would be, sort of on a eu and some other machines. Much better quality could be had, as said from TDK SA but this tape needed a much higher bias. TDK AD was T1 ferric but also a high bias tape and in fact was very close to SA when properly setup. The average punter just bought what was cheap and available.

Eventually decks appeared with 'hi/low' bias switches then later actual bias controls and with a 3 head machine tapes could be optimized. The last word was CPU auto setup. I had a Denon with that plus Dolby B and HX. Bloody fantastic machine.

With digital control you could eliminate wow and flutter but it has come too late for cassette. Might see it in pro R2R machines?

Dave.
 
Eventually decks appeared with 'hi/low' bias switches then later actual bias controls and with a 3 head machine tapes could be optimized. The last word was CPU auto setup. I had a Denon with that plus Dolby B and HX. Bloody fantastic machine.
Denon DN-790R is the one I have that has the auto setup. It is in my opinion the best of the best in terms of cassette decks in my opinion and can never understand why the Teac/Tascam counterparts fetch substantially higher prices on the used market.
 
A good song sells itself whatever medium it’s listened to on.

The worst however that I remember is the 8track cartridge. Not that it sounded all that bad, but that annoying click/ pop/clank as it switched tracks ruined things. Especially when it cut the song in half.
I was glad to see them how bye, bye.
We started recording on 8-track cartridges around 1973 because the sound quality was absolutely excellent. You could afford to get a very high spec unit for quite cheap, and a lot of decks were quad and let you record in 4 track mode and playback in stereo, even on another deck. These units were insane cheap compared to a Teac reel to reel. We recorded 3 albums in 1975 this way and the sound quality was in the same league as stuff coming from pro studios.

And l really don't understand all this hoopla going on around Teac Tascam stuff. In the 70's l though all of it was highly over rated. We recorded one song on a Teac 4 track and it was such a pain to overdub because of the space between the record and playback heads. Plus the sound was nowhere near as good as the 8-track cartridge machines. The channel pop was just mechanical and when we mixed down to 2 stereo none of that could be heard.

But to avoid the channel click disaster when recording, we had to time out pieces very carefully and had an extra person watching the counter to signal us to stop before the channel switch occured.
 
Denon DN-790R is the one I have that has the auto setup. It is in my opinion the best of the best in terms of cassette decks in my opinion and can never understand why the Teac/Tascam counterparts fetch substantially higher prices on the used market.
I agree. The cassette cartridge really wasn't useable until 1980, then it got better overnight and was in fact an insanely good medium. At least once you learned how to use it properly. But to me Teac was the very bottom, and Tascam was just above it. In 1982 we settled with an Akai pro series mastering deck that smoked any Tascam. If you had the money you went Nakamichi. People wanted Masters in the 1/4 half track format simply because they wanted to use the machines they had, but our cassette Masters sounded just as good and local radio stations preferred the cassette format for speed and simplicity, even in the early mid 70's.
 
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