Cassette tape decks, what is the fascination?

I like cassettes and cassette players a lot, because they're an electro-mechanical marvel. To get that kind of sound quality out of such cheap, small, and simple mass produced equipment, from the era they're from is really impressive. Reel to reel is a brute force solution.. make it as good as possible, don't take short cuts. Cassettes on the other hand are a polished turd, but near the end it was so well polished you could hardly tell its turd origins.

This made me laugh. And it reflects my feelings about the medium too. They just shouldn't sound as good as they do. And I find the machines fun to operate. I don't know if I would be into cassettes had I not grown up with them, but I definitely enjoy playing/listening to them.
 
I never understood the point of "preserving" vinyl. Who are you preserving it for? The person who gets it from a thrift shop when you're 6 feet under? I have records from my childhood in the 80's that I played on my crappy Quasar stereo that still sound great. And if it's wear one is concerned with, tape heads have a limited life span and are NLA. Your tape head will wear much faster than your LPs.
 
Why?

Nostalgia, low cost, I like to twiddle with knobs, meters. Another illogical but compelling toy. No need to go there unless intrigued. If you are trolling through used music at a store or yard sale, and you find something cool on a cassette-you can play it. Same thing happened to me with 8 tracks.
 
I never understood the point of "preserving" vinyl. Who are you preserving it for? The person who gets it from a thrift shop when you're 6 feet under? I have records from my childhood in the 80's that I played on my crappy Quasar stereo that still sound great.

Actually, I was preserving it for me. Many of those albums I that listened to a thousand times in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are all still in immaculate condition, because I taped them right away, put the album away, and listened to the tape. So now when I don't want to bother with cassettes anymore and I've got a much better stereo than I did years ago, I've still got a whole lot of LPs in excellent condition. And, in fact, some of those that I didn't tape, but just played many, many times sound like they were played thousands of times, so for the most part, the taping strategy has paid off, and I'm glad that I did it, and I enjoy the benefits now . . . ;)
 
With many tapes still in great shape I find having a cassette deck pretty handy at my bench. I don't have to be as careful handling them like a cd or record. I usually have four or five laying about. My deck was built in 76 or 77 and with new belts it's still going strong. The permaloy heads are in nice shape too. And how can you not like two big dancing blue analog meters?
 
Well, my days as an audio enthusiast began when my dad allowed me to use his tape deck to make my own tapes. This blossomed into me making a name for myself in junior high school (early '80s) for making awesome sounding tapes. That was about the machine (harman kardon hk1000), the tape (TDK SA and Maxell UDXL were my faves), and the talent. I went out of my way to achieve the best dynamic range from each tape I made. First with LPs, later with CDs.

I got HUGE into car audio in high school and my system's sound began with a bad ass tape. I never demoed my system with store bought tapes! Over time, I graduated to a Kenwood TOTL DIN deck with dbx. This served me well.

Sure, it would have been nice to have a 3-headed Nak back then but nobody I knew could afford one. Today, we can. Let me assure you, these machines live up to the hype. I like to record 45rpm vinyl to tape for obvious reasons. While I do also like my RT-909, the Nak holds its own at one quarter the tape speed. And the kids love the idea of making mix tapes ... If you can believe that in 2017!

As a hardcore enthusiast, I want a machine to serve each medium well. So that's how it fits in my world.
 
When I moved house 18 months ago, I very nearly ditched all my cassettes. As they emerged in boxes from the attic, I thought "When did I last listen to them?".

Common sense prevailed, and the boxes went with us after I realised 20 years of my life was wrapped up in them.

Today I started to listen to some of them. Nostalgia is very powerful when you get past 60!

I probably have a 1,000 cassettes, mostly recorded "off-air" in the 70's, 80's & early 90's.

Most are in the garage, but when I finally get my music room finished I fully intend to restore a cassette deck to my stereo system.

I don't think I have the patience to digitise all (or even any) of them despite listening currently to the majority of my music via my PC. As my car has a tape player I may even record some mixtapes (I have a few blanks).

So to answer the question WHY? Obvious answer is NOSTALGIA!
 
z-adamson said:
PS: I am in no way suggesting that cassette tapes and decks are not something worth being fascinated with, I simply want to understand the draw to them.

The chance for beautiful analogue enjoyment :)
 
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I came about a tape deck by accident and am contemplating wether or not to expand into the world of cassette tapes with my new acquisition....an hk cd301.
I have that exact deck. Back in the day, these gave Naks a run for the money at a lower cost. With metal tape, this one specs out to 22kHz (20kHz with Type I). The next model up, the CD401, had three heads vs. two. I rarely use mine, but try to exercise it every so often. Still works as well as the day I bought it new. I used to trade cassettes made on TDK D90 tape that amazed the recipients who thought the D90 was a "crap" cassette. Just shows how well a tape can perform if recorded on a worthy deck.

I haven't read the rest of the thread but if you need info on how to set bias and Dolby levels for recording, let me know and I'll post them later on.

FWIW, it seems the hipsters have abandoned vinyl for cassette now... ;)
 
I would say that LP, R2R, and Redbook are all superior formats. Of those three, I only listen to LP and Redbook as I can't find any good prerecorded R2R media. So I'm not sure why I actually have a R2R machine other than it's
Pre-recorded reels are for the most part mediocre. These were the early days of high speed mass duplicated tape, and you can bet this was never on the best tape stock made. I only got a used reel deck because there have been a few albums never available on CD, and clean vinyl impossible to find. Recording my own reels can be fun though!
 
Those are cool, I almost bought a corvette which had one of those, but the car needed too much work!

The problem with cassette is the track width is too narrow for excellent dynamic range, and the speed is too slow for excellent high frequency response. If you use Dolby, and High bias tape, etc you can make it sound better, and dual capstans can help too, but it's still crappy. Half track 1/4" tape running on a decent machine at even 7.5ips blows cassette out of the water.

Then again, portable cassette machines are really neat to use and work on. The typical design of making two flywheels spinning in opposite directions, to make a machine more immune to movement, was a very clever and widely used design.
Oh very true.... cassette specs were given at -20 db while RtoR were given a -10 db. Set up and bias was done at -20 for cassette decks while it was -10 for reel machines. That said, the later high end cassette decks from Teac, for example, would meet and often exceed performance for many less than high end consumer reel machines, as well they should for their cost....keeping in mind it was at -20 db for the cassette, Dolby off of course. I'm saying this while agreeing that the cassette was a fun medium with good sound. None the less.. a decent reel machine running at 7 1/2 was much more open sounding which I always attributed to it's dynamic head room, evident by the -10 db performance specs compared to the -20db for the cassette... and sometimes, depending on the system and/or the music, one couldn't tell the difference. Now pre-recorded, factory tapes... that's a different story... a good factory Reel tape at 7 1/2 on a decent machine was decidedly superior to either a cassette or a record... except, maybe, tape hiss... hiss being a problem with quiet passages when the overall system gain was high, classical music mostly... in those cases one would just train themselves not to hear/ignore the hiss. That was my experience.
 
Pre-recorded reels are for the most part mediocre. These were the early days of high speed mass duplicated tape, and you can bet this was never on the best tape stock made. I only got a used reel deck because there have been a few albums never available on CD, and clean vinyl impossible to find. Recording my own reels can be fun though!
That became generally true.. key word being for the most part... there were some excellent ones though and they made a point of describing the tape stock and technics used for duplication of their reel tapes, knowing it was a specialty market they were appealing to. A good factory reel tape on a decent machine sounds excellent... very clean and open.
 
That became generally true.. key word being for the most part... there were some excellent ones though and they made a point of describing the tape stock and technics used for duplication of their reel tapes, knowing it was a specialty market they were appealing to. A good factory reel tape on a decent machine sounds excellent... very clean and open.
Here's another one--RCA had some excellent sounding tapes early on, and in fact, their first Living Stereo recording was issued prior to stereo LPs...on reel tape. Those were duplicated at lower speeds (although maybe not in real time), but I can imagine they would be hard to locate today, and would have a price tag to match! I have one RCA reel from the 60s that isn't half bad, but a clean LP from the same era still outperforms it.

Interesting, too, is that RCA also introduced a cassette-based tape system back in the late 50s, but it pretty much died off without fanfare.

Some of the worst are those reels duplicated at Ampex in Elk Grove Village. I've had sound quality ranging from dismal to nearly acceptable. For some reason, Verve's reels sounded better than others (same era, same Ampex/EGV duplication facility). I had some that you'd swear were recorded under a blanket.
 
Here's another one--RCA had some excellent sounding tapes early on, and in fact, their first Living Stereo recording was issued prior to stereo LPs...on reel tape. Those were duplicated at lower speeds (although maybe not in real time), but I can imagine they would be hard to locate today, and would have a price tag to match! I have one RCA reel from the 60s that isn't half bad, but a clean LP from the same era still outperforms it.

Interesting, too, is that RCA also introduced a cassette-based tape system back in the late 50s, but it pretty much died off without fanfare.

Some of the worst are those reels duplicated at Ampex in Elk Grove Village. I've had sound quality ranging from dismal to nearly acceptable. For some reason, Verve's reels sounded better than others (same era, same Ampex/EGV duplication facility). I had some that you'd swear were recorded under a blanket.
Yeah.. recorded under a blanket.. that describes the bad ones. I couldn't, and still can't imagine what was going on in the minds of the people responsible for releasing those using the brands label.. it really gave them a bad name. It became harder to find examples of good ones and I quit looking... once in a while the package notes describing tape stock, duplicating machines and technics would convince me to buy one but it was still kind of a crap shoot... but I must say, a good one blew away the LP every time, at least for me. I agree about the Elk Grove Village tapes.. they had the subsonic auto reverse tone at the end of the tape for Ampex bi directional machines. I had an Ampex 2100 machine that, except for the short lived belts and wimpy idler tires, had excellent performance.. till the heads and tape guides wore, which didn't take long. Ampex really screwed the pooch.. they thought making computer tape drives was the same as marketing to the consumer hi fi market... one could feel corporate board room influence oozing into their line.. the 2100 I had looked like it belonged in an aerospace environment. $500 brand new.. I quickly tired of it. At any rate... my experience is that a good.. a good one... factory tape at 7 1/2 was the best available source. I've heard real time duplicated third generation quarter inch reel tapes at 7 1/2 on good consumer hi fi equipment and it was and remains the best I've ever heard. I don't know what machine produced the tape(s), the reps didn't know, I asked, but the play back would have been a top Teac or Tandberg consumer deck, depending on what was in the room... nearly always through the JBL L-300s... we'd use others too for the experience. Memory doesn't serve well for comparisons, but I'd like to have an example of a good CD back then... impossible of course... for comparison to the those tapes. If I had to give an opinion through memory though I would say those real time third generation tapes provide the best listening experience.. spacious, open, it's like they could breath... they would be the best source... keeping in mind all that equipment was new, in their prime.
 
I have 3 cassette decks. 4 if I count the old Wollensak 4765 I now have under rebuild. All with dual capstan, full Dolby and full function auto rewind/play. I rebuilt them and the sound is terrific. Biggest issue is finding good high setting tapes.
 
Currently getting my Nak BX-100 running again. A challenge, but it's such a pretty thing when it's working. I have a nice JVC auto-reverse deck in the main system that was bought in 1987 and has never needed ANY service. I also have 2 HK decks and they seem to be extremely reliable.

I don't play cassettes very often but I have a few older Advent/Connoisseur Society CR70 cassettes (classical, advant-garde, piano stuff) that I went off to college with that I still love, and have never found on any other format. I guess I have about 125 cassettes in all - I've purged a bit over the years. Every now and then I poke around at my local shops and something pops up in the cassette bin, and they are always dirt cheap.

I have a lot of machines, and won't elect to fix them all as they age out. Other equipment (amps, cd decks) are a higher priority. But it's hard to say goodbye. Back in the 70s, cassette decks were an integral part of one's system. Still feels that way to me, but I know it's mostly nostalgia.

Those higher level Nak's with their classic transport still make me drool, but I know they'd be nothing but trouble, time and money - so I resist.
 
Too bad the original Cassette didn't catch on. I lost the link, but it was huge. Basically a RTR tape in cassette form. Philips, RCA?, I can't remember. I always thought having a better RTR quality recording in the big cassette was a good idea, no threading the tape. It died fast though, being brought back later in the smaller form we have now. here is a picture of just the tape. 220px-RCA_Quarter_Inch_Tape_Cartridge_2A.png
 
Techmoan did a video about the RCA Sound Tape Cartridge:


It didn't die as quickly as people think -- it hung on in the educational market until the early '70s. And nor was it exactly "RTR quality". The sound tape cartridge used 3¾ IPS when most reel-to-reel tapes were still using 7½ IPS, so there was a noticeable degradation of audio quality.
 
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