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Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Do

by ThJ 7y ago

Cassettes aren't actually that bad. A local radio station I worked at for a while used them for reruns. With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. Cassettes only sounded low-fi because most people listened to cheap tapes on cheap players with cheap speakers. Even some of the better portable players from the 1990s sounded very transparent if you attached them to a good pair of headphones or a good stereo system. I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Pee-Wee Herman's Big Adventure (1985) and Top Gun (1986) don't look blurry or grainy at all. Analog media kept improving until they were made obsolete. Everyone was trying to approach digital perfection long before it actually existed. Actually wanting artefacts and colouration is more of a recent phenomenon.

btgeekboy 7y ago
You should watch Top Gun again. The Blu-Ray version is good, and parts of it were definitely cleaned up (eg the title cards), but there are plenty of film scratches and grainy moments throughout the film.
pssflops 7y ago
My friend has an old cassette boom box hooked up in his garage to nice speakers and plays The Cure and old Industrial music from cassette tapes and it honestly feels like the music was written for that specific medium.
- tech2 7y ago
  The first time I heard Nine Inch Nails was Closer, from The Downward Spiral. It was being played on one of those tiny set of speakers plugged into the headphone output of a walkman... and it was glorious :)
l33tbro 7y ago
> I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Not sure what you mean by 'transparency'. Either way, go back and look at an 8k scan of 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'The Sound of Music'. The image quality is robust and resolves everything perfectly. Even an '80s title captured on 35mm that is scanned properly will hold up against something shot on an Arri Alexa today. The 'blurry' reputation comes only from the subsequent formats like broadcast television and VHS that people caught a lot of these titles on.
- grawprog 7y ago
  I recently watched this video by the 8-bit guy https://youtu.be/P00QS3lXJeI https://youtu.be/P00QS3lXJeI That goes into pretty good detail with comparisons about the difference the quality of vhs tape made in the end recording. The ones used by tv studios were far superior to both consumer recordable ones and even the ones consumer movies shipped on.
oceanghost 7y ago
Dolby isn't licensing their NR tech anymore, so "new" cassette players sound hideous. AND there is only one company making the mechanical movements, and they're not very good quality. I found this out when I was trying to archive some books on tape and had to resort to buying 20-year-old decks, as opposed to new electronics which I naively assumed would be better. There are some decks with something equivalent to dolby B which I believe was a 9db roll-off.
- wwweston 7y ago
  Shouldn't any NR tech from the 80s/90s be out of patent now? I'm sure a lot of cheap decks would neglect enhancements anyway, but why would licensing still be a hurdle?
  - oceanghost 7y ago
    I honestly don't know. What I've said about the movements / Dolby I learned from Techmoan.com, who I assume to be reliable.
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    Should have expired decades ago - B was introduced in 1968, there's no way that would still be patented. But since it's only a simple high frequency boost/cut it probably wasn't ever patented, just protected with trademarks to the point where if you can only call it 'generic NR' and not 'dolby B' or 'dolby C' noone would be interested. S and HX Pro were more complex, but S was rare on consumer gear, and HX Pro is more than just NR.
WalterBright 7y ago
> With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. When I was in my 20s, I could easily hear the difference between cassettes and vinyl on the same stereo. The cassettes had an annoying SSSSSS and the crispness of the notes was mushed over. The 12" vinyl singles sounded even better, especially the "promotional" ones. Now that I'm older, I no longer hear the difference and so it doesn't matter to me.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Cassettes have terrible fidelity. Dolby attenuates some of the hiss but doesn't remove it, so it's always there in the background. The original Type I tapes have the same frequency response as an old person with hearing issues. Type II Chrome is a bit better, but the low end has a hump and rolls far short of 20Hz, and the top end is nowhere close to the ruler-flat response of a 44.1k WAV or FLAC. You needed $$$$$$$equipment$$$$$$$ to get real hifi out of cassettes. The only brand that really solved the hifi problem was Nakamichi. The engineering on their high-end decks was legendary, but so was the price - the Dragon would be around $6500 in 2019 dollars. But... the terrible fidelity makes the sound more interactive. I started listening on cassettes, and when I moved up to a more revealing mid-fi vinyl system I was surprised to find that sometimes I liked the music less. With cassettes, I could interpolate and imagine details I wanted to be there. When I moved up to hearing the details that really were there, I didn't always enjoy them as much.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Vinyl also has hiss, and pop, and is why some people prefer it, like the motion blur of film, it feels more nostalgically arty, separate from reality.
- ThJ 7y ago
  You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible fidelity is an exaggeration. Some 16-bit consumer sound cards had outputs with way more hiss than the better tape decks. As for the high end, the differences aren't exactly easy to pick out. I don't know where these peaks and troughs are in the spectrum, but I'd have to listen for them explicitly to pick them out, because I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, I've heard bad cassette audio with warbling and pronounced hiss and high end loss, but if you take a brand new high quality tape and record to it from a CD and play it back from the tape, it's damn close to sounding identical. I have a fair bit of experience with audio. I have a home studio. I can pick out subtle quality differences between sound sources. I stand by what I have said.
kalleboo 7y ago
A video on the subject of cassette tape audio quality from Techmoan: "Cassettes - better than you don't remember" https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA

by ThJ 7y ago

btgeekboy 7y ago

You should watch Top Gun again. The Blu-Ray version is good, and parts of it were definitely cleaned up (eg the title cards), but there are plenty of film scratches and grainy moments throughout the film.

pssflops 7y ago

My friend has an old cassette boom box hooked up in his garage to nice speakers and plays The Cure and old Industrial music from cassette tapes and it honestly feels like the music was written for that specific medium.

tech2 7y ago
The first time I heard Nine Inch Nails was Closer, from The Downward Spiral. It was being played on one of those tiny set of speakers plugged into the headphone output of a walkman... and it was glorious :)

l33tbro 7y ago

> I feel we reached transparency for professional analog recordings some time in the 1980s, and I would argue that this applies to analog film as well. Not sure what you mean by 'transparency'. Either way, go back and look at an 8k scan of 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'The Sound of Music'. The image quality is robust and resolves everything perfectly. Even an '80s title captured on 35mm that is scanned properly will hold up against something shot on an Arri Alexa today. The 'blurry' reputation comes only from the subsequent formats like broadcast television and VHS that people caught a lot of these titles on.

grawprog 7y ago
I recently watched this video by the 8-bit guy https://youtu.be/P00QS3lXJeI https://youtu.be/P00QS3lXJeI That goes into pretty good detail with comparisons about the difference the quality of vhs tape made in the end recording. The ones used by tv studios were far superior to both consumer recordable ones and even the ones consumer movies shipped on.

oceanghost 7y ago

Dolby isn't licensing their NR tech anymore, so "new" cassette players sound hideous. AND there is only one company making the mechanical movements, and they're not very good quality. I found this out when I was trying to archive some books on tape and had to resort to buying 20-year-old decks, as opposed to new electronics which I naively assumed would be better. There are some decks with something equivalent to dolby B which I believe was a 9db roll-off.

wwweston 7y ago
Shouldn't any NR tech from the 80s/90s be out of patent now? I'm sure a lot of cheap decks would neglect enhancements anyway, but why would licensing still be a hurdle?
- oceanghost 7y ago
  I honestly don't know. What I've said about the movements / Dolby I learned from Techmoan.com, who I assume to be reliable.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  Should have expired decades ago - B was introduced in 1968, there's no way that would still be patented. But since it's only a simple high frequency boost/cut it probably wasn't ever patented, just protected with trademarks to the point where if you can only call it 'generic NR' and not 'dolby B' or 'dolby C' noone would be interested. S and HX Pro were more complex, but S was rare on consumer gear, and HX Pro is more than just NR.

WalterBright 7y ago

> With a good cassette deck, brand new chrome tapes and Dolby noise reduction, it's hard to hear much of a difference between that and a digital recording. When I was in my 20s, I could easily hear the difference between cassettes and vinyl on the same stereo. The cassettes had an annoying SSSSSS and the crispness of the notes was mushed over. The 12" vinyl singles sounded even better, especially the "promotional" ones. Now that I'm older, I no longer hear the difference and so it doesn't matter to me.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Cassettes have terrible fidelity. Dolby attenuates some of the hiss but doesn't remove it, so it's always there in the background. The original Type I tapes have the same frequency response as an old person with hearing issues. Type II Chrome is a bit better, but the low end has a hump and rolls far short of 20Hz, and the top end is nowhere close to the ruler-flat response of a 44.1k WAV or FLAC. You needed $$$$$$$equipment$$$$$$$ to get real hifi out of cassettes. The only brand that really solved the hifi problem was Nakamichi. The engineering on their high-end decks was legendary, but so was the price - the Dragon would be around $6500 in 2019 dollars. But... the terrible fidelity makes the sound more interactive. I started listening on cassettes, and when I moved up to a more revealing mid-fi vinyl system I was surprised to find that sometimes I liked the music less. With cassettes, I could interpolate and imagine details I wanted to be there. When I moved up to hearing the details that really were there, I didn't always enjoy them as much.

lonelappde 7y ago
Vinyl also has hiss, and pop, and is why some people prefer it, like the motion blur of film, it feels more nostalgically arty, separate from reality.
ThJ 7y ago
You make it sound way worse than it was. That mild hiss would barely be detectable once the song started and masked it out. Calling mild hiss terrible fidelity is an exaggeration. Some 16-bit consumer sound cards had outputs with way more hiss than the better tape decks. As for the high end, the differences aren't exactly easy to pick out. I don't know where these peaks and troughs are in the spectrum, but I'd have to listen for them explicitly to pick them out, because I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, I've heard bad cassette audio with warbling and pronounced hiss and high end loss, but if you take a brand new high quality tape and record to it from a CD and play it back from the tape, it's damn close to sounding identical. I have a fair bit of experience with audio. I have a home studio. I can pick out subtle quality differences between sound sources. I stand by what I have said.

kalleboo 7y ago

A video on the subject of cassette tape audio quality from Techmoan: "Cassettes - better than you don't remember" https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA