4 ms·

I say it's time to bring back cassette tapes and a new edition of the TPS-L2. If Leica can release a new M6, Sony should release a new TPS-L2

sincarne 4y ago
Well, we're halfway there. "Last year, cassette sales grew 28% to 440,000 units, up from 343,000 in 2021." https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/01/the-cassette-comeback-is-not-just-hype-and-here-are-stats-to-prove-it.html https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/01/the-cassette-comebac...
Hackbraten 4y ago
Even if cassette tapes become popular again, decent-quality cassette mechanisms aren’t coming back. If Sony (or anyone else) ever chooses to release another cassette player, brace yourself for a meh listening experience, and a crap mechanism with lots of plastic that’s going to deteriorate and break, with no one around who’d be skilled enough to fix your unit.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  Is the knowledge to make good read heads just lost? There's definitely a market for them. You'd think a Chinese manufacturer would have started cranking them out by now.
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    I don’t know much about read heads. To me, they seem like complex mechanical devices on their own. The head must be able to move vertically, yet end up perfectly flush with the tape material. Its design requires special consideration just so it won’t damage the tape. It needs to take some degree of abuse, mostly in the form of abrasion but also (inappropriate use of) cleaning agents. Then the angle of the head needs to be adjustable, and the head needs to maintain the angle even in the face of vibrations. Even if someone knew how to design a good read head, producing one might turn out difficult in a less-than-mass market. What worries me even more than that is the art of building a drive. A tape drive must maintain the angular velocity of the capstan(s). If yours varies by more than a few tenths of percent, you’ll be dealing with “wow and flutter”. Not all listeners may care enough, but most do notice. Drive makers used to have all those issues under control, at least in the higher-end segment – as Sony has shown with their DD series and the D6C. Trying to mass-produce a decent drive in 2023 would, however, eat up incredible amounts of engineering time just for _designing_ a workable mechanism. Trying to copy and paste one of the old designs may turn out even more laborious. Those designs are tied to a huge stack of specific parts [0], for which there used to be an ecosystem of suppliers but those all long gone of course. I can imagine that they’ve taken their own specific knowledge with them, too. [0]: If you’re interested, elektrotanya.com has service manuals for a few higher-end Walkmen with exploded-view diagrams and BOMs. Looking at those has been a very humbling experience for me!
  - TonyTrapp 4y ago
    One issue, completely independent from manufacturing, is that Dolby no longer licenses their noise reduction algorithm used for tapes encoded with Dolby noise reduction.
  - jccalhoun 4y ago
    It is more the wow and flutter and the quality of the gears and belt. They could either spend the time and money creating quality parts that they might not sell or they could keep pumping out the same crap that is already selling.

sincarne 4y ago

Well, we're halfway there. "Last year, cassette sales grew 28% to 440,000 units, up from 343,000 in 2021." https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/01/the-cassette-comeback-is-not-just-hype-and-here-are-stats-to-prove-it.html https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/01/the-cassette-comebac...

Hackbraten 4y ago

Even if cassette tapes become popular again, decent-quality cassette mechanisms aren’t coming back. If Sony (or anyone else) ever chooses to release another cassette player, brace yourself for a meh listening experience, and a crap mechanism with lots of plastic that’s going to deteriorate and break, with no one around who’d be skilled enough to fix your unit.

bobsmooth 4y ago
Is the knowledge to make good read heads just lost? There's definitely a market for them. You'd think a Chinese manufacturer would have started cranking them out by now.
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  I don’t know much about read heads. To me, they seem like complex mechanical devices on their own. The head must be able to move vertically, yet end up perfectly flush with the tape material. Its design requires special consideration just so it won’t damage the tape. It needs to take some degree of abuse, mostly in the form of abrasion but also (inappropriate use of) cleaning agents. Then the angle of the head needs to be adjustable, and the head needs to maintain the angle even in the face of vibrations. Even if someone knew how to design a good read head, producing one might turn out difficult in a less-than-mass market. What worries me even more than that is the art of building a drive. A tape drive must maintain the angular velocity of the capstan(s). If yours varies by more than a few tenths of percent, you’ll be dealing with “wow and flutter”. Not all listeners may care enough, but most do notice. Drive makers used to have all those issues under control, at least in the higher-end segment – as Sony has shown with their DD series and the D6C. Trying to mass-produce a decent drive in 2023 would, however, eat up incredible amounts of engineering time just for _designing_ a workable mechanism. Trying to copy and paste one of the old designs may turn out even more laborious. Those designs are tied to a huge stack of specific parts [0], for which there used to be an ecosystem of suppliers but those all long gone of course. I can imagine that they’ve taken their own specific knowledge with them, too. [0]: If you’re interested, elektrotanya.com has service manuals for a few higher-end Walkmen with exploded-view diagrams and BOMs. Looking at those has been a very humbling experience for me!
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  One issue, completely independent from manufacturing, is that Dolby no longer licenses their noise reduction algorithm used for tapes encoded with Dolby noise reduction.
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  It is more the wow and flutter and the quality of the gears and belt. They could either spend the time and money creating quality parts that they might not sell or they could keep pumping out the same crap that is already selling.