| The Death of the Cassette Tape [message #66539] |
Sun, 06 March 2011 14:59  |
GuitarStrings
Messages: 45
Registered: December 2010
Location: Ohio
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Baron |
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Would you call the cassette era officially dead and buried at this point? I haven't seen them in the stores for so long, and the only places it seems possible to get them would be from garage sales.
I know that vinyl records came back for a while, do you think cassette tapes will have that chance as well?
The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.
Jimi Hendrix
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| Re: The Death of the Cassette Tape [message #66605 is a reply to message #66539] |
Thu, 10 March 2011 20:32  |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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Magnetic Tape is wonderful, but not cassettes. They were made with such poor quality that dubbing your own tape from a CD is a much better quality recording.
Tapes are still very popular in some regions, for some reason.
Actually, thier worth is debatable because whichever version of the album the mastering engineer spent the most time with and was best at doing is going to sound superior. That is the reason, other than using the vinyl masters, early CD's sucked. The mastering engineers hadn't figured it out yet and were likely spending more time on the much more popular cassette format in mastering. The CDs were often just the cassette master thrown on a CD, which is why a lot of the CDs early were missing a lot of highs. A lot of Remastered CDs were released as a tape too in the early 90's and unfortunately I firmly believe they mastered for the tape and threw it on a CD. I think Aerosmith did this, or they hired the worst mastering engineer to do their disco in 1993.
A lot of bands only sold well through tape. There was NEVER a time where CD simply took over from Vinyl. Tapes outsold CDs I believe until the late 90's and were always more abundant than Vinyl in the 80's, not necessarily by amount, but you couldn't find a lot of albums on Vinyl but were everywhere on Tape. When I was heavily involved in a record store I always asked why certain albums he never seemed to have on vinyl were unavailable. He started in 1987 and told me that certain records just never came out that way. I wanted the first Skid Row album on Vinyl and was basically told it didn't exist as far as being obtainable in any real sense. That album in particular sold very well and his store was opened and established by the time it came out, so I'm inclined to believe that.
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| Re: The Death of the Cassette Tape [message #66991 is a reply to message #66987] |
Sun, 10 April 2011 23:31 |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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| Clueless wrote on Sun, 10 April 2011 19:35 | I still have a whole bunch of cassette tapes, but mainly for nostalgic reasons. Every time I do Spring cleaning, I get rid of a couple. One day I will have to let them all go. There is no way they will make a comeback. Their deterioration is like a voyage with no return.
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I've not found records to be any better. Accidentally drop the needle or anything else at all during the playback will destroy it. It's gonna happen. Compared to Vinyl, Cassettes are workhorses that offer every ounce of analogue and none of the hassle. They don't have that beloved specific tracking noise and commercial tapes were notoriously awful. The bottom line is a high quality high bias tape straight from the mixing board is very very good. I only had one tape ever break on me and it's probably the machines fault or the fact I didn't know to wind up the tapes if they get a little too loose. I have tapes that are 20 years old that still work. They could make a return if someone can make them small and exceedingly high quality. Like if they could support the analog equivalent of 256-bits per sample of resolution (digital is at 24bits at best, 32 being an internal rate) and and could support every frequency in the audio spectrum flat. Make them play without any degradation after 5000 plays and it you'd only have to hear one before you ran out and replaced everything again. Either way, music is going to be hyper-realistic in the near future.
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| Re: The Death of the Cassette Tape [message #67133 is a reply to message #67115] |
Wed, 20 April 2011 13:21 |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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| audioaudio90 wrote on Tue, 19 April 2011 12:24 | Analog often sounds better because you don't have the data losses that digital does. The higher the sampling rate, the closer digital gets to analog, but you will always have some loss.
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This is negated by the poor S/N ratio though.
Analogue rounds off it's inability to capture a sound and digital does not "round" numbers, but represents them through errors very very high in the frequency range.
Analogue will not be able to beat digital in any respect once those errors only appear in the 80-96Khz range.
If one wants to argue that sampling is the problem, they won't get that far in my opinion because tape and vinyl have their own limitations that are analogous and perform worse compared to 44.1Khz digital.
Analog rounds off numbers and presents errors as mucicially as possible and digital does not, even though it is far far more accurate.
Just my 2 cents.
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