I did use cassette for some time because my old car only had a cassette player! But, let us be realistic about 'tape'?
What follows is about OR machines at 15ips but bear with, I shall get to cassettes! Magnetic tape suffers many serious audio shortcomings.
1) Harmonic distortion. Most machines were aligned for 0VU= 3% THD and that is diabolical compared to digital. Yes, THD falls with level but at -20VU it is still going to be 0.1% or so and that is several orders worse than digital.
2)Distortion is frequency dependent and gets worse at HF. Called "HF squash"
3) Noise,hiss is pretty high. Without Noise Reduction the very best you will get is perhaps 70dB below 0VU (but remember that distortion again?) Noise CAN be traded for THD especially if NR is used)
Tape has to move! And that motion has to be nigh on perfectly controlled. Even so wow and flutter cannot be entirely eliminated*. 'Flutter', rapid 'jitter' of the tape across the heads also causes a particularly insidious form of distortion called "scrape flutter" and this can be seen as extra side bands on say a 1kHz tone on an RTA. Very high grade transports managed to reduce this to (then) acceptable levels but like wow, it can never be eliminated entirely.
All these audio ills are compounded in the very narrow track, very low speed cassette format. I do however agree that a really good tape, I liked TDK SA but it needed a high bias, and a really good machine CAN be subjectively very hard to tell from a dubbed CD but I doubt the recordings would stand scrutiny against original digital recordings and reproduced at realistic levels on the very best monitors? Plus of course for Home Recording the short running time can be a nuisance.
I have two excellent cassette decks (but the Sony needs fixing) and probably over 100 cassettes and ONE day I shall get around to digitizing them!
*It is likely that wow at least could be eliminated on OR machines by some form of digital control/pilot tone system but why use a system that needs a digital 'crutch'? Just use a 'puter!
Dave.
What follows is about OR machines at 15ips but bear with, I shall get to cassettes! Magnetic tape suffers many serious audio shortcomings.
1) Harmonic distortion. Most machines were aligned for 0VU= 3% THD and that is diabolical compared to digital. Yes, THD falls with level but at -20VU it is still going to be 0.1% or so and that is several orders worse than digital.
2)Distortion is frequency dependent and gets worse at HF. Called "HF squash"
3) Noise,hiss is pretty high. Without Noise Reduction the very best you will get is perhaps 70dB below 0VU (but remember that distortion again?) Noise CAN be traded for THD especially if NR is used)
Tape has to move! And that motion has to be nigh on perfectly controlled. Even so wow and flutter cannot be entirely eliminated*. 'Flutter', rapid 'jitter' of the tape across the heads also causes a particularly insidious form of distortion called "scrape flutter" and this can be seen as extra side bands on say a 1kHz tone on an RTA. Very high grade transports managed to reduce this to (then) acceptable levels but like wow, it can never be eliminated entirely.
All these audio ills are compounded in the very narrow track, very low speed cassette format. I do however agree that a really good tape, I liked TDK SA but it needed a high bias, and a really good machine CAN be subjectively very hard to tell from a dubbed CD but I doubt the recordings would stand scrutiny against original digital recordings and reproduced at realistic levels on the very best monitors? Plus of course for Home Recording the short running time can be a nuisance.
I have two excellent cassette decks (but the Sony needs fixing) and probably over 100 cassettes and ONE day I shall get around to digitizing them!
*It is likely that wow at least could be eliminated on OR machines by some form of digital control/pilot tone system but why use a system that needs a digital 'crutch'? Just use a 'puter!
Dave.
❤
