I still have my Technics 646 I bought new as a student, but do I use it? Barely. Chrome tapes seem to be a thing of the past, forget Type IV, and I don’t think I could spare the time anymore for anything less! Lol.
A lovely medium, but my favourite memory of them isn’t a Nakamichi-scented one. It’s a Sony Walkman-centred world that I miss! If only I still had that Sony DC2, I could retire.
Edit: my mate tells me to STFU, he can bring me some new Type IIs from Greece or Turkey. Result! Back in business!
I work in an art university and a surprising amount of new (underground/experimental) musicians release their music on casettes.
If you wanna sell music on concerts vinyl is too expensive/you would have to upfront too much money, CDs are dead, casettes however had some sort of revival. Vinyl is still king in those circles, but it requres you to be able to realistically finance and sell a run of 250 pieces to be economical.
I saw people buy casettes (with a download code) while not having a player — it is a neat physical artifact for some.
Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.
Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.
There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:
Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.
Not nearly niche enough for some hypebeasts, but nothing wrong with CDs in and of themselves. I think finding ways to recontextualize the experience of owning and listening are worthwhile.
I am a musician myself and I have frienda who live from touring — they told me there have been tours where they haven't sold a single CD while they sell 15 to 20 LPs on a small concert.
Killing the most ubiquitous format for free lossless digital audio and replacing it with analogue sources that degrade with each play or DRM and subscriptions purely because it’s not cool enough seems like a terrible idea. Apparently that’s where we are.
Cassettes are more expensive and worse quality, but significantly more robust in typical use until you put it in a bad device (or hands) that gets the tape out.
I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.
The cassettes sounded awful on day one, and rest assured they didn't get better with age. (Neither did the capstan in your cassette deck, which I'd suggest checking to make sure it isn't turning into goop that will literally ruin your tapes for good.)
Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.
Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.
You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?
As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.
These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.
I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.
> These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.
It's more than just a neat physical artifact - cassettes add a pleasing saturation and natural compression (of the musical kind, not the file kind) to the sound, which most would describe as a bit more 'warmth' and 'energy'. This is why people sometimes say that music just sounds better on cassette or vinyl. In some ways, it literally does! Perfect reproduction of sound is not the only dimension of musical quality or enjoyment.
I can understand the attraction of a set of needlessly complicated physical contraptions that outweighs the appeal of the actual outcome - and not talking about making coffee here - so cassettes make a lot of sense, they’re unusual, uncommon, and look better on a shelf :)
You can still find some artists on Bandcamp that release on mini disc. Whenever I see them, I buy one to try and help encourage more artists to do this.
And of course, many artists release on cassette. I have an album from Dirty Art Club on it's way to add to my cassette collection as we speak. My collection has grown considerably in the two-ish years I've been using Bandcamp, despite the sad controversy.
NetMD or Hi-MD deviceces even let you “record” over USB (Hi-MD even can expose a block device).
Not that long ago I would use scripts to dump CDs to MD using linux-minidisc. Much more convenient to Cary around than CDs, geat audio quality.
The only downside, imho, is when I’m on vacation I like looking at second hand places and if I find a some CDs I can’t play them until I get home. I really miss the CD deck in cars.
NFC isn't unlimited, and the bitrate is very low. For a storage medium, it's not really very suitable for files. It would probably make more sense to embed a URL, with the actual data hosted online.
> NFC tags are passive data stores which can be read, and under some circumstances written to, by an NFC device. They typically contain data (as of 2015 between 96 and 8,192 bytes) and are read-only in normal use, but may be rewritable.
The world of cassette tape is weird. You can still buy new Maxell UR60/90 type 1 tape but the tape you get in Europe or the US is made in China or Thailand or such and is packaged in red wrappers. The same UR60 if you buy it in Japan is in purple wrappers and in different shells (screws versus glued) and is manufactured in Indonesia and apparently much better quality
I recently started using RTM C90 type I cassettes for recording mix tapes for my kids on my Denon deck. Quite like them. No need for Dolby C and +5 dB are easily possible. All the NOS tapes I have used sounded awful. I guess this is due to chemical degradation over time (IANAC)
I think Type I tape has a fairly low ceiling, my old TDK AR-X were as good as they got, and I can’t imagine these Maxells are any good these days regardless of where they come from. Any other tips?
I have a Sony similar to the one mentioned at the end of the article (Edit: TC FX 420R https://www.cassettedeck.org/sony/tc-fx420r). It's been a bit of a journey, replacing the power supply so it can run at 230V, replacing belts, and fixing the autoreverse. It is fairly user serviceable but you need to have a degree of knowledge, a steady hand, and a soldering iron and other tools. Also you'll want to check you can download the schematics and service manual before you buy. That was a huge help for this Sony.
Looks really cool when it's running, but not massively practical unless you have lots of tapes that you took good care of.
Edit: And it's going to need recapping one day.
Good quality 1970s/80s cassette decks in working order on eBay are not cheap these days.
Cassettes in the 1970s were great for recording music off FM radio and also for making copies of LPs you owned (or borrowed) that you could play in the car. I bought very few if any prerecorded cassettes as the sound quality didn't seem as good as LPs. Dolby and other forms of noise reduction were big for getting rid of "tape hiss." Sometimes the cassette deck would mangle the tape "bandsalad" I have heard it called. Cassettes with screws were preferred so you could fix a mangled tape. C-90 length tapes were the optimum since they could easily hold an LP and seemed a bit more robust than the C-120s. John Peel was the DJ I listened to and recorded from the most off the Beeb back in the UK.
I am all for nostalgia and stuff, but one item I don't miss is the cassette.
These things failed all the time, the tape would get stuck in annoying places, and then you'd end up with 10 meters of tape to try and rewind without tying a knot, and the tape was screwed anyways. Ugh.
Like with all analog media, what you get out of cassettes depends heavily on the actual media you use, as well as the equipment. Tape getting stuck or unwound doesn't really happen with quality decks, and the fun part is those are much more affordable nowadays.
And as far as the quality goes - well, audio quality was a solved problem a few decades ago. Since then, it's only getting worse. Cassette cannot be better than a well mastered vintage vinyl or CD. It is better though than a YouTube video listened over Bluetooth on crappy headphones, which seems to make most people happy these days. It can, importantly, also sound better than a lot of modern vinyl.
It's mostly dependent upon tape quality and deck quality. With a good deck and good tapes, it was extremely reliable. Cheap tapes and cheap decks OTOH were a nightmare.
Same! My dad laughed at me for getting into vinyl - he remembered it as scratchy and irritating. Cassettes are nostalgic, for sure. I used to sit for hours waiting for whatever song to come on the radio so I could record it for future enjoyment. That was pretty cool.
I expect at some point CDs will see a renaissance like vinyl and cassettes. I'm here for that one. CDs were really the high-water mark of enjoying music to me.
Oh! Only a few hours ago I was lamenting I never had a cassette deck; I was born in the 70s and went from [0] (like the top picture) straight to cd. So I never had anything for playing or making cassettes like the other kids. I made mix tapes on this enormous thing which no one else could play.
I've seen one of those at a music shop once, it seemed to be studio grade equipment. The book it came with had the electrical diagrams of the whole thing, so you could in theory repair / re-engineer its electrical components. That was a rare thing to see.
I believe including diagrams for the ease of repair was actually quite common back then before all production was heavily automated and moved overseas.
Those schematics used to be included with computers too in the 80s. It was normal as far as I know as we had them with anything electronic. At least where I was. Do not remember when it stopped.
My dad had something like that too. We got to play a bit with it but mostly used to record conversations with old relatives or musicians in the family. I think it had 4 channels that you could switch between separately. We got normal tape recorders pretty early so it was more a fun thing for us to play with.
* Cheap decks just ran the tape backwards, and used alternate coils in the heads.
* slightly better ones flipped the heads too. (Aiwa at least)
Nakamichi had the tape in a carrier, it popped it out, physically flipped the cassette tape around and put it back in the player. Apparently it was better because the tape heads were always perfectly aligned and the motors only had to go one direction.
(really cheap walkmen did something that occasionally misaligned the head so that autoreverse was actually play the front side backwards. This was really awesome in the Satanic Panic stuff's encoded in reverse era. My favorite at the time was Drugs from Fear of Music)
> Nakamichi Dragon 1000P 1000MB 1000 DAT - Nothing Better at $20K! The Best Audio Products Ever Made!
> The repair and restoration of a Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Tape Deck. Belts and the idler tire are replaced. Rare Nakamichi 1000P DAC, 1000MB CD changer along with the 1000 Digital Audio Tape(DAT) deck. Nakamichi produced some amazing digital products although they were best known for their cassette tape decks. At more then $17,000 in the late 80's these were very high end pieces of audio equipment.
Nakamichi made amazing machines. I had a CR2 - it was all I could afford at the time - and even that had a sweet, musical sound.
The Dragon was the pinnacle of the art. I tried one out in a hifi store and it was night and day against the competition. The others reproduced sound, the Dragon reproduced the music.
I remember back in the 1980s that if you had a cheap microcomputer (I had a Dragon32) you actually needed a cheap, low-quality cassette deck to save/load your code/data successfully - the higher-fi ones would simply not work well, for reasons I never understood but can definitely attest to from experience.
Perhaps the HiFi ones used some additional processing like Dolby Noise Reduction, which interfered with whatever signal modulation method was used by your computer to save digital data on cassettes.
The received wisdom of the time was that a hi-fi was simply too powerful and would blow up the computer (or at least damage the mic/ear circuits). Also quite inconvenient dragging your Speccy next to the family hi-fi, compared to attaching a cheapo portable cassette deck.
Not to hijack the thread but before cassettes became popular there were 8-track tapes that were designed for car players primarily in the US. The design is amazing a continuous play tape that doesn't have to be rewound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge
They were less popular than cassettes mainly because you couldn't record them easily yourself.
I miss the rituals of listening to music in the 80’s. It was not a casual experience, but a deliberate one - you decided you’d listen to some music and you did a series of steps before you could relax in your carefully positioned armchair.
Good speakers would also give you the pleasure of the chest-thumping harmonics of a good drum set (or Japanese drums).
When I was a kid in the late 80s and had a walkman I remember I'd rewind tapes by sticking the gears on a pencil and shaking that back and forth. That would not only save the motor but the batteries were lasting for a few hours tops and rewinding seemed like a lot of power waste. I miss and I don't miss those days at the same time. Tapes had a charm and the experience wasn't bad for the times but there were so many problems, the tape would frequently get jammed, as far as walkmans, the batteries were really problematic and would last from 45 minutes to a few hours. It'd take a few seconds up to half a minute to realize I had to change batteries as the music would drop in pitch, at first imperceptibly but then more and more until it'd just stop playing.
Bought a Technics M12 at a garage sale. When I plugged it in, it had an horrible hiss when playing, even with no tape in it.
Solution was simple : put a blank tape then record, play, record, play short chunks of tape in order to clean the record/play connections in the mechanism. Problem solved.
I still have my Technics 646 I bought new as a student, but do I use it? Barely. Chrome tapes seem to be a thing of the past, forget Type IV, and I don’t think I could spare the time anymore for anything less! Lol.
A lovely medium, but my favourite memory of them isn’t a Nakamichi-scented one. It’s a Sony Walkman-centred world that I miss! If only I still had that Sony DC2, I could retire.
Edit: my mate tells me to STFU, he can bring me some new Type IIs from Greece or Turkey. Result! Back in business!
I work in an art university and a surprising amount of new (underground/experimental) musicians release their music on casettes.
If you wanna sell music on concerts vinyl is too expensive/you would have to upfront too much money, CDs are dead, casettes however had some sort of revival. Vinyl is still king in those circles, but it requres you to be able to realistically finance and sell a run of 250 pieces to be economical.
I saw people buy casettes (with a download code) while not having a player — it is a neat physical artifact for some.
CDRs just make more sense here in every way. Higher quality, cheaper to produce and les degradation. Fucking hipsters.
Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.
i love vaporwave on cassettes, because the medium lends itself to the art
you never know if that flutter / wow effect was originally in the song or coming from the deck
Art has to be deliberate surely? What you’re describing is just noise I would say.
But we’re getting philosophocal.
Art has to be deliberate?! Don't tell Duchamp!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
> Types of readymades
> Readymades - un-altered objects
> Assisted readymades - putting several readymades together taking away their use
> Rectified readymades - an altered or marked readymade
> Corrected readymades
> Reciprocal readymades - a unique art work presented as a mass-produced utilitarian object
Choosing a medium that carries particular characteristic can be a deliberate choice.
Like film grain or contrast. Still love the look of pushed kodak tri-x.
With an art definition from before the first world war, maybe.
Only if you assume people are after the music and not a cool artifact, memento or souvenir.
How is a CD-R not also an artifact, memento, or souvenir?
It misses the "cool" bit
To follow-on:
Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.
There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:
https://www.dookiedemastered.com/
Previously on HN (788 points 16 days ago 205 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41790295
>Niche physical releases are cool
Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.
Not nearly niche enough for some hypebeasts, but nothing wrong with CDs in and of themselves. I think finding ways to recontextualize the experience of owning and listening are worthwhile.
I am a musician myself and I have frienda who live from touring — they told me there have been tours where they haven't sold a single CD while they sell 15 to 20 LPs on a small concert.
Killing the most ubiquitous format for free lossless digital audio and replacing it with analogue sources that degrade with each play or DRM and subscriptions purely because it’s not cool enough seems like a terrible idea. Apparently that’s where we are.
You missed the part where I mentioned download codes, right?
Cassettes are more expensive and worse quality, but significantly more robust in typical use until you put it in a bad device (or hands) that gets the tape out.
I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.
CDR degradation can be total and I don't know of any tools to recover them.
I have a box full of unreadable CDRs from 20 years ago and a box full of perfectly playable cassettes from 40 years ago.
The cassettes sounded awful on day one, and rest assured they didn't get better with age. (Neither did the capstan in your cassette deck, which I'd suggest checking to make sure it isn't turning into goop that will literally ruin your tapes for good.)
Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.
Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.
You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?
As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.
These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.
I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.
> These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.
You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?
Great. They can get that with a DSP plugin. "They" being the artist, if that's what they want their music to sound like.
It's more than just a neat physical artifact - cassettes add a pleasing saturation and natural compression (of the musical kind, not the file kind) to the sound, which most would describe as a bit more 'warmth' and 'energy'. This is why people sometimes say that music just sounds better on cassette or vinyl. In some ways, it literally does! Perfect reproduction of sound is not the only dimension of musical quality or enjoyment.
I can understand the attraction of a set of needlessly complicated physical contraptions that outweighs the appeal of the actual outcome - and not talking about making coffee here - so cassettes make a lot of sense, they’re unusual, uncommon, and look better on a shelf :)
Frustrating that MiniDisc was always a niche thing - those were cool looking physical artifacts and even practical.
Of course real hipsters do FLAC on Iomega ZIP drives.
You can still find some artists on Bandcamp that release on mini disc. Whenever I see them, I buy one to try and help encourage more artists to do this.
And of course, many artists release on cassette. I have an album from Dirty Art Club on it's way to add to my cassette collection as we speak. My collection has grown considerably in the two-ish years I've been using Bandcamp, despite the sad controversy.
I still have my minidisc player. It can even record. It's an awesome little machine.
NetMD or Hi-MD deviceces even let you “record” over USB (Hi-MD even can expose a block device).
Not that long ago I would use scripts to dump CDs to MD using linux-minidisc. Much more convenient to Cary around than CDs, geat audio quality.
The only downside, imho, is when I’m on vacation I like looking at second hand places and if I find a some CDs I can’t play them until I get home. I really miss the CD deck in cars.
I was wondering if NFC tech could bring back physical media. I think NFC can transmit unlimited data and you could embed it in a collectible card.
NFC isn't unlimited, and the bitrate is very low. For a storage medium, it's not really very suitable for files. It would probably make more sense to embed a URL, with the actual data hosted online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication
> NFC tags are passive data stores which can be read, and under some circumstances written to, by an NFC device. They typically contain data (as of 2015 between 96 and 8,192 bytes) and are read-only in normal use, but may be rewritable.
> 424 kbit/s
> make more sense to embed a URL
...which will promptly disappear once the company decides to end their incredible journey.
You're right, of course. It should obviously be a magnet link or NZB file. :P
Some kpop groups have released "NFC cd" albums that use nfc and an app to "play the album". They are essentially keychains.
But in the kpop world buying albums is less about listening to the CD and more for the merch/supporting specific artists.
The world of cassette tape is weird. You can still buy new Maxell UR60/90 type 1 tape but the tape you get in Europe or the US is made in China or Thailand or such and is packaged in red wrappers. The same UR60 if you buy it in Japan is in purple wrappers and in different shells (screws versus glued) and is manufactured in Indonesia and apparently much better quality
I recently started using RTM C90 type I cassettes for recording mix tapes for my kids on my Denon deck. Quite like them. No need for Dolby C and +5 dB are easily possible. All the NOS tapes I have used sounded awful. I guess this is due to chemical degradation over time (IANAC)
I think Type I tape has a fairly low ceiling, my old TDK AR-X were as good as they got, and I can’t imagine these Maxells are any good these days regardless of where they come from. Any other tips?
I buy NOS chrome tapes on eBay. They sound pretty darn good.
I have a Sony similar to the one mentioned at the end of the article (Edit: TC FX 420R https://www.cassettedeck.org/sony/tc-fx420r). It's been a bit of a journey, replacing the power supply so it can run at 230V, replacing belts, and fixing the autoreverse. It is fairly user serviceable but you need to have a degree of knowledge, a steady hand, and a soldering iron and other tools. Also you'll want to check you can download the schematics and service manual before you buy. That was a huge help for this Sony.
Looks really cool when it's running, but not massively practical unless you have lots of tapes that you took good care of.
Edit: And it's going to need recapping one day.
Good quality 1970s/80s cassette decks in working order on eBay are not cheap these days.
Cassettes in the 1970s were great for recording music off FM radio and also for making copies of LPs you owned (or borrowed) that you could play in the car. I bought very few if any prerecorded cassettes as the sound quality didn't seem as good as LPs. Dolby and other forms of noise reduction were big for getting rid of "tape hiss." Sometimes the cassette deck would mangle the tape "bandsalad" I have heard it called. Cassettes with screws were preferred so you could fix a mangled tape. C-90 length tapes were the optimum since they could easily hold an LP and seemed a bit more robust than the C-120s. John Peel was the DJ I listened to and recorded from the most off the Beeb back in the UK.
Apropo of nothing in particular if you miss those Old Peel Session days (like I do) YouTube is very much your friend now - https://www.youtube.com/@FruitierThanThou/videos
Amazing variety of old and new. Thanks for posting.
I am all for nostalgia and stuff, but one item I don't miss is the cassette.
These things failed all the time, the tape would get stuck in annoying places, and then you'd end up with 10 meters of tape to try and rewind without tying a knot, and the tape was screwed anyways. Ugh.
Like with all analog media, what you get out of cassettes depends heavily on the actual media you use, as well as the equipment. Tape getting stuck or unwound doesn't really happen with quality decks, and the fun part is those are much more affordable nowadays.
And as far as the quality goes - well, audio quality was a solved problem a few decades ago. Since then, it's only getting worse. Cassette cannot be better than a well mastered vintage vinyl or CD. It is better though than a YouTube video listened over Bluetooth on crappy headphones, which seems to make most people happy these days. It can, importantly, also sound better than a lot of modern vinyl.
It's mostly dependent upon tape quality and deck quality. With a good deck and good tapes, it was extremely reliable. Cheap tapes and cheap decks OTOH were a nightmare.
Same! My dad laughed at me for getting into vinyl - he remembered it as scratchy and irritating. Cassettes are nostalgic, for sure. I used to sit for hours waiting for whatever song to come on the radio so I could record it for future enjoyment. That was pretty cool.
I expect at some point CDs will see a renaissance like vinyl and cassettes. I'm here for that one. CDs were really the high-water mark of enjoying music to me.
You must have had very bad luck because I used cassettes non-stop for decades and have never had this happen.
Oh! Only a few hours ago I was lamenting I never had a cassette deck; I was born in the 70s and went from [0] (like the top picture) straight to cd. So I never had anything for playing or making cassettes like the other kids. I made mix tapes on this enormous thing which no one else could play.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_recorder
I've seen one of those at a music shop once, it seemed to be studio grade equipment. The book it came with had the electrical diagrams of the whole thing, so you could in theory repair / re-engineer its electrical components. That was a rare thing to see.
I believe including diagrams for the ease of repair was actually quite common back then before all production was heavily automated and moved overseas.
Those schematics used to be included with computers too in the 80s. It was normal as far as I know as we had them with anything electronic. At least where I was. Do not remember when it stopped.
Yep. I have a full set of IBM schematics of the original PC on a bookshelf somewhere in the basement.
My dad had something like that too. We got to play a bit with it but mostly used to record conversations with old relatives or musicians in the family. I think it had 4 channels that you could switch between separately. We got normal tape recorders pretty early so it was more a fun thing for us to play with.
It's not really relevant to the article, but I find the orange lighting and brushed finish of a Nakamichi Dragon beautiful.
Nakamichi had the best autoreverse --
* Cheap decks just ran the tape backwards, and used alternate coils in the heads.
* slightly better ones flipped the heads too. (Aiwa at least)
Nakamichi had the tape in a carrier, it popped it out, physically flipped the cassette tape around and put it back in the player. Apparently it was better because the tape heads were always perfectly aligned and the motors only had to go one direction.
(really cheap walkmen did something that occasionally misaligned the head so that autoreverse was actually play the front side backwards. This was really awesome in the Satanic Panic stuff's encoded in reverse era. My favorite at the time was Drugs from Fear of Music)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRSDp1JI5BQ
I'm pretty sure there was a 1980s movie that had the protagonist using one of these, but I can't remember what that was now.
Was it 9 1/2 Weeks (1986)?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091635/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENV4IRtu95g
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/movies-or-tv-show...
That's the one. If that scene was any more '80s it'd have to wear shoulder pads.
You'll get a kick out of this then!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxbEE_rdazk
> Nakamichi Dragon 1000P 1000MB 1000 DAT - Nothing Better at $20K! The Best Audio Products Ever Made!
> The repair and restoration of a Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Tape Deck. Belts and the idler tire are replaced. Rare Nakamichi 1000P DAC, 1000MB CD changer along with the 1000 Digital Audio Tape(DAT) deck. Nakamichi produced some amazing digital products although they were best known for their cassette tape decks. At more then $17,000 in the late 80's these were very high end pieces of audio equipment.
Nakamichi is what we used in theater tech in the 80s and 90s.
Nakamichi made amazing machines. I had a CR2 - it was all I could afford at the time - and even that had a sweet, musical sound.
The Dragon was the pinnacle of the art. I tried one out in a hifi store and it was night and day against the competition. The others reproduced sound, the Dragon reproduced the music.
I remember back in the 1980s that if you had a cheap microcomputer (I had a Dragon32) you actually needed a cheap, low-quality cassette deck to save/load your code/data successfully - the higher-fi ones would simply not work well, for reasons I never understood but can definitely attest to from experience.
Perhaps the HiFi ones used some additional processing like Dolby Noise Reduction, which interfered with whatever signal modulation method was used by your computer to save digital data on cassettes.
The received wisdom of the time was that a hi-fi was simply too powerful and would blow up the computer (or at least damage the mic/ear circuits). Also quite inconvenient dragging your Speccy next to the family hi-fi, compared to attaching a cheapo portable cassette deck.
Site is having Cloudflare SSL handshake errors (Error code 525) for me. Struck out on archive.org and .is, so here's Yandex:
https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=172984247...
Well, that didn't work. This will have to do.
https://pastebin.com/iLFdzStE
Link says 'account has been suspended' now. HN kiss of death.
And that's why I always archive before submit links to HN!
Not to hijack the thread but before cassettes became popular there were 8-track tapes that were designed for car players primarily in the US. The design is amazing a continuous play tape that doesn't have to be rewound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge They were less popular than cassettes mainly because you couldn't record them easily yourself.
anyone else seeing the article replaced with a "This account has been suspended" page? hugged to death I guess
I miss the rituals of listening to music in the 80’s. It was not a casual experience, but a deliberate one - you decided you’d listen to some music and you did a series of steps before you could relax in your carefully positioned armchair.
Good speakers would also give you the pleasure of the chest-thumping harmonics of a good drum set (or Japanese drums).
All that ramp up prepared you for an experience that you'd take in with minimal interruptions. We completely lost that way of enjoying things..
When I was a kid in the late 80s and had a walkman I remember I'd rewind tapes by sticking the gears on a pencil and shaking that back and forth. That would not only save the motor but the batteries were lasting for a few hours tops and rewinding seemed like a lot of power waste. I miss and I don't miss those days at the same time. Tapes had a charm and the experience wasn't bad for the times but there were so many problems, the tape would frequently get jammed, as far as walkmans, the batteries were really problematic and would last from 45 minutes to a few hours. It'd take a few seconds up to half a minute to realize I had to change batteries as the music would drop in pitch, at first imperceptibly but then more and more until it'd just stop playing.
I loved cassettes in the 80’s and 90’s. Never could afford anything “hi-if” back then but got to use some stuff as a college radio dj.
The best cassette deck ever was the Revox B215, direct drive, all about performance, no nonsense, flawless for what it was designed to do.
Bought a Technics M12 at a garage sale. When I plugged it in, it had an horrible hiss when playing, even with no tape in it.
Solution was simple : put a blank tape then record, play, record, play short chunks of tape in order to clean the record/play connections in the mechanism. Problem solved.
Oftentimes it's just a dirty head, careful cleaning with isopropyl alcohol fixes it.
I have two Ultrix/Sanyo decks in my closet that do Dolby B/C and dbx.
I haven't listened to a cassette in at least a decade.
I wonder what I should do with them when I retire and sell my house in two years.
> is so ridiculously expensive and rare that only the richest readers could chase one down
Common' ... You can find one for $500. Take, say, a Technics 1200 25 years anniversary, gold plated, turntable and that's 5-digits territory by now.
Three digits is still okay if you're a enthusiast in that kind of thing.
DCC is where it’s at. My parents still have the deck. Probably the most useless technology ever.