Anyone remember cassette tapes?

[andrewsrea]

Tonight I am letting out a great sigh of relief. Since my two track PCM-Betamax unit crapped out, the only access I have to years of recordings are some cassette tapes and the original 1/2" 8-channel tapes. I basically had none of this in a format that I can play.

My Nakimichi MR2 professional cassette deck has been in its box since 2005, just came out of mothballs. Much to my surprise, it is 100% good to go. All rubber is taught and pretty much like it was in 1989.

My next concern was gooey-shreddy cassette tape. I tested three of the most important to me and they were all in good playing shape and in the MR2, sounded as good as cassettes can sound.

Whew! I was afraid this personal history was gone forever, never to be heard again.

So tomorrow, I begin baking 1/2" tape and transferring the cassettes to my DAW, for digital mastering and storage.

I am a happy boy tonight!

[Mossman]

I'm surprised the tapes still sound good. Magnetic tape tends to degrade just sitting in a box. One time I came upon a large cache of VHS tapes from the '80s and early '90s that had been in storage (in a cool, dry place), and almost all of them were unwatchable, mostly due to degraded audio. Some of them were home videos of myself and my best friend at the time when we were in our teens to early twenties.

It's probably best those tapes went bad.

[uwmcscott]

Cool stuff - I have an old Harmon-Kardon cassette deck that was once part of my home hi-fi setup, then it was in the basement workshop of a ski shop for many years, and then back in my basement. I dug it out years ago to digitize some cassette recordings of old interviews for a professor in my university tech days, then mothballed it again. When I got laid off and cleaned out my office last fall I almost dumped it but still have it sitting right here in my new home office. I don't even know if I have any tapes but might have to find a few!

Speaking of Nakamichi, had a friend back in the heyday of cassettes that had the "Dragon" model. It was an autoreverse deck with a mechanism that flipped the tape itself and the transport rather than the head - which I believe was supposed to keep the alignment of the head much truer. I know it was very expensive and we used to sit and watch it flip the tape just for kicks.

[PoodlesAgain]

Casettes: one of my engineering professors worked at Philips during the cassette design phase. he said it took years to solve internal friction problems.

He also had cool stories of working in Brazil when inflation was raging wild, one had to rush cashing a paycheck before the value could evaporate!

I found a shopping bad full of 8-track cassettes in the new house upper storage room. Some classics, Dark Side of the Moon, and what ever was popular then. No player though. Best bet: buy a vintage car with 8-track player!

[mickey]

Poodles, you have reminded me of back in the late 1980's or early 90's when I was working in Nashville.
One of my co-workers was a 40ish guy who had never been married & still lived at home with mama.
He drove an early 1970's Chevy Nova with a six with a three speed manual tranny & basic bottom of the line trim.
One day he traded it in on a new Jag XJ6 sedan and paid ca$h difference (as opposed to financing.)
The first thing he did was rip out the expensive AM/FM Stereo with cassette player and
replace it with an 8-track player that matched nothing else in the car. A real redneck mod.

He was funny. He was going to Atlanta for the weekend, got a few miles the other side of Chattanooga
when he ran out of gas. He walked to the nearest exit on I-75, purchased a gas can & 5 gallons of gas,
then walked back to the car. When he opened the filler, the tank was full, that was when he remembered
the XJ6 had two gas tanks. He went around to the other side of the car and poured the 5 gallons he had
carried a few miles into the empty tank.

[dabbler]

...
The first thing he did was rip out the expensive AM/FM Stereo with cassette player and
replace it with an 8-track player that matched nothing else in the car. A real redneck mod.

OK, I wouldn't have done that mod on a Jag, BUT I did love my 8 tracks, back in the day! Why? 2 Reasons:

1. Higher tape speed means better frequency response! And if you had one with Dolby (they were RARE) even better!

2. I never bought a commercial 8 track tape. I made my own mixes from my vinyl. But even so, sometimes I might not want to hear a particular song at a particular time. With an 8 track you hade 3 more choices at the push of a button!

Man those were the days!

Alas, however, I AM enjoying the USB jack in my current daily driver, I plug in one of my thumb drives, and I have better sound and MANY more choices of tracks (made from my CDs). Technology is a wonderful thing!

[andrewsrea]

I'm surprised the tapes still sound good. Magnetic tape tends to degrade just sitting in a box. One time I came upon a large cache of VHS tapes from the '80s and early '90s that had been in storage (in a cool, dry place), and almost all of them were unwatchable, mostly due to degraded audio. Some of them were home videos of myself and my best friend at the time when we were in our teens to early twenties.

It's probably best those tapes went bad.

I have the same experience with Beta tape. In 1987 I bought a state of the art Sony PCM 501ES, a 41.1Khz 16 bit digital converter that you would store to some magnetic tape medium, the most reliable and affordable at the time being Beta. It recorded to the video portion of the tape with what appears on screen to be mono-chromatic UPC digital language. Everyone thought these would last forever as compared to audio, you only needed enough resolution for the PCM to read the digital code for it to play back at 100% audio. Each tape would hold 4 hours of music and I have about 50 tapes with master recordings, live recordings and bounces (when the 8 multi-track channels were full, you committed a sub mix to bring back and get 6 more tracks).

Last fall I attempted to transfer them to computer land and the PCM would not consistently read the tapes. To boot, the Beta stopped powering up (power transformer crapped out).

I am not sure if VHS and Beta tapes suffer from the 'goo and shred', internal friction or magnetic degradation. Some day I'll experiment to find out. For now, I am transferring cassettes and the multitrack tracks for remastering. Which requires baking the 1/2" tapes.

[andrewsrea]

Cool stuff - I have an old Harmon-Kardon cassette deck that was once part of my home hi-fi setup, then it was in the basement workshop of a ski shop for many years, and then back in my basement. I dug it out years ago to digitize some cassette recordings of old interviews for a professor in my university tech days, then mothballed it again. When I got laid off and cleaned out my office last fall I almost dumped it but still have it sitting right here in my new home office. I don't even know if I have any tapes but might have to find a few!

Speaking of Nakamichi, had a friend back in the heyday of cassettes that had the "Dragon" model. It was an autoreverse deck with a mechanism that flipped the tape itself and the transport rather than the head - which I believe was supposed to keep the alignment of the head much truer. I know it was very expensive and we used to sit and watch it flip the tape just for kicks.

I had a similar Sony cassette duplicator which had the auto reverse. Cool stuff!

[BatUtilityBelt]

Last year I went through a box of unlabeled cassettes to determine whether they needed to be archived. None was important, but they sounded as good as they used to, and were from the 80's. Like you, I have a lot of old masters to transfer to digital at some point. My half and quarter inch machines are in plastic waiting for that day.

[Stoli]

I had an 8 track tape player in my nerdy looking Dodge Colt station wagon back in the early 80s. Someone gave my dad the player and we paired it up with some Radio Shack speakers. Around that time, the record companies stopped making the 8 tracks and the stores started putting them on clearance and I bought several for a dollar or two a piece in most cases. I still have them laying around. Some of the ones that I recall having included a Kansas live Album, Lynyrd Skynyrd (One more from the Road), Hotel California, Urban Cowboy Soundtrack, The Long Run, a Southern Rock compilation (may have been K-Tel} and a really long live Jimmy Buffett recording. I imagine an 8 track player is hard to come by these days unless someone has some old stereo equipment from the 70s laying around.

Of course nowadays, I have thousands of songs on a San Disk for my car and use the free Spotify a good bit.

[bc rich]

Cool stuff - I have an old Harmon-Kardon cassette deck that was once part of my home hi-fi setup, then it was in the basement workshop of a ski shop for many years, and then back in my basement. I dug it out years ago to digitize some cassette recordings of old interviews for a professor in my university tech days, then mothballed it again. When I got laid off and cleaned out my office last fall I almost dumped it but still have it sitting right here in my new home office. I don't even know if I have any tapes but might have to find a few!

Speaking of Nakamichi, had a friend back in the heyday of cassettes that had the "Dragon" model. It was an autoreverse deck with a mechanism that flipped the tape itself and the transport rather than the head - which I believe was supposed to keep the alignment of the head much truer. I know it was very expensive and we used to sit and watch it flip the tape just for kicks.

And still very expensive , sold as is . But then i paid $400 for my first CD player .
https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/13013 ... ipping-tab

[nomadh]

I was an 8track guy from an 8track family. My dad would "rent" tapes from a used place. Then record the best to 90 min 8tr. I got real good at rebuilding those things. One was so mangled in a paper bag I had to cut the tape 7 or 8 places. All different angles so I could put it back.
I never had albums. Around college I did finally go to cassettes but only because the Walkman and jogging. At 24 i got my first Vette, a 67 roadster. I didnt want anyone chopping up a $1000 dash or soft top for a $200 stereo. So i made a stealth system with a JC whitney catalog 100 watt / channel power amp. I ran a signal and power cable to my walkman. Put some very good 6x9s in speaker boxes in the back with enough efficiency to over come the hooker side pipes. I was ballin!
I designed it to be sacrificial but I kept it through 3 C2 vettes and I think it's still in my garage.
That setup lasted for years until I got the mp3 cd portable and a cassette adapter to the family mini van.,

The cassettes were that 1st step into personal private life soundtrack. And it's been awesome