Blank cassette tape types and how to choose the right one

https://theaudioowl.com/cassette-tapes/blank-cassette-tape-types/

by derwiki • 4 years ago

54 59 4 years ago

PaulHoule3• 4 years ago

I got into watching techmoan and similar YouTubers who got me interested in vintage audio. I thought seriously about getting into tapes because I have nostalgia for them and saw you could make really great recordings w/ metal tapes and a deck that supports Dolby S…. Decks like that can be had on ebay but the metal tapes are crazy expensive, for what a deck like that costs plus two metal tapes you could probably get two minidisc recorders and 100 discs.

Today the new decks all use a cheap mechanism that is reliable but sounds awful. New tapes are ‘type 0’ frequently. On top of that it is really no fun to rewind so I gave up on getting a cassette deck but who knows, if a really elite deck shows up at the community reuse center I might grab it.

derwiki• 4 years ago

Do you have tips on a good tape deck model, or manufacturer that consistently made high quality decks? A friend gave me his old Sony TC-W365 which worked admirably, until recent mechanical failures.

itintheory• 4 years ago

Nakamichi is widely regarded as the highest quality manufacturer. The decks can be expensive and some of them are extremely complex to service.

/r/cassetteculture is a decent resource for info.

PaulHoule3• 4 years ago

I would repair the one you have or get a refurbished Sony from ebay like

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185721049456

those Sony(s) do need maintenance more than some decks but they are very available.

crispyambulance• 4 years ago

The best ones seemed to use direct drive motors.

In my opinion, the "god-tier" would be Revox B215 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revox_B215) and the Nakamichi Dragon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamichi_Dragon).

I've personally used the Revox in the late 80's and early 90's as a DJ in a college radio station. It was super durable (it had to be, in a punk environment). I don't have any experience with the Dragon but it looks cool and I see it has good performance.

I think anyone who adopts a tape deck these days had better be ready for getting it serviced. Aside from the mechanical stuff that just wears out, the electronics are likely to need work after 30+ years. Capacitors, mainly.

tenebrisalietum• 4 years ago

I have a TC-WE525 circa 1999 or 2000 that stopped working - when I would start a tape playing, it would play for a second, then stop, like it got to the end of the tape.

The belts disintegrate over time and must be replaced. I successfully repaired mine from a belt kit I was able to get on Amazon. It's not terribly easy to replace the belts but I did manage to do it.

whoopdedo• 4 years ago

it is really no fun to rewind

You gotta make a game of it. I crafted a tape rewinder made from an old ballpoint pen and bent paperclip that held the cassette as I whirled it around. Like a '80s fidget spinner.

aliqot• 4 years ago

i use two hands on a pencil and race. have to remember to slow down at the end though.

skykooler• 4 years ago

it is really no fun to rewind

Does Dolby S have double-sided tapes? For regular cassette tapes I’ve never really had to worry about rewinding because after playing both sides you’re back at the beginning.

Tsiklon• 4 years ago

Dolby S is a type of noise reduction that’s done in the deck, and actively works on the audio stream as it’s being written to and read from the tape.

It’s best used with a high quality tape, but I believe it can be used with any of the 3 major tape types.

arielweisberg2• 4 years ago

Can I get a DSP filter or something to simulate tape and skip the tape :-)

It seems like everything about records and tape is not really technically superior and the sound signature could be emulated.

squidsoup3• 4 years ago

Yes, there is some great tape emulation out there (uHe's Satin is killer https://u-he.com/products/satin/), but tape machines aren't desirable for the sound alone - they can be instruments in their own right. Allesandro Cortini from NiN is an artist that uses tape very effectively in his live performances for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdbgEHsPkes).

trynewideas2• 4 years ago

See also looping tapes:

https://www.guerrilladigital.cc/2021/03/10/i-spent-the-last-...

and anything AMULETS does:

https://cdm.link/2017/01/heres-make-tape-loop-cassette-tape/

https://www.youtube.com/@amuletsmusic/videos

UncleOxidant2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I really don't get the nostalgia, but maybe it's because I lived much of my life in the vinyl and then cassette tape eras. There are so many downsides to both. Vinyl records take up a lot of space and they degrade just a little bit every time you play them unless you have a very expensive laser player and even then...). Cassettes also degrade quite quickly and the sound was never that great with cassettes. Of the two, though, vinyl nostalgia is a bit more understandable because you can watch the record rotate and the theory of operation is quite simple.

kid642• 4 years ago

How do you figure? An analog impression directly mirrors reality, digital is just an approximation. So digital seems inherently inferior.

arielweisberg2• 4 years ago

The two analog mediums I mentioned are both pretty flawed and difficult to get clean sound out of.

Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest.

Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.

dragontamer2• 4 years ago

An analog impression directly mirrors reality

A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably.

Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape.

Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically)

--------

In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out.

Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them.

Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

They’re both approximations. In this case and most cases, the digital approximation is much closer to the original than the analog approximation.

caned2• 4 years ago

An analog signal recorded to tape is subject to all manner of distortions that don't apply to digital recordings, including frequency-dependent phase shift, crosstalk between tracks, print-through, tape hiss, and saturation.

I can never buy the argument that analog recordings are better _because_ they are more faithful. I do think they can sound very beautiful and be aesthetically pleasing, however.

caned2• 4 years ago

New production, Type II cassette tapes are available from ATR Magnetics, e.g.: https://www.atrtape.com/products/atr-magnetics-colbalt-silve...

taylodl• 4 years ago

What we need is an audio playback tool allowing you to select VST plugins into the playback chain. We already have VST's mimicking tape playback (and they're good!). We even have VST's mimicking LP vinyl playback - complete with dust and hiss. Plug those into your audio playback app and voila! You can re-create any of the old sounds you want!

lancesells• 4 years ago

Have any VST's to recommend for those things?

palmaltd• 4 years ago

Soundsource [0] on macOS can do this! I run Chow Tape [1] and it performs quite admirably. I've never measured the latency but it has never affected me much. I'm certain a similar solution is available on Linux.

To be fair, (quite janky, ime) VST hosts are available for Windows, via the music player (e.g. Musicbee) or system-wide, but those have never been reliable. Your mileage will vary.

[0] https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ [1] https://github.com/jatinchowdhury18/AnalogTapeModel/tree/dev...

UncleOxidant2• 4 years ago

You know, there was a time when we used to save our programs on cassette tapes. I don't wanna go back there, but maybe some of the youngsters who are nostalgic for cassettes would like to try that out?

Maybe GitHub could have a 'save to cassette' button on repos and then make money by sending you the cassette? ("Only $9.95 + shipping & handling")

fatnoah• 4 years ago

I had the cassette drive for my C64, and I remember just how amazingly long it took to load and save even the most trivial things.

robohoe• 4 years ago

As a youngster, I did not enjoy aligning the cassette tape drive heads.

buildsjets• 4 years ago

GitHub has some old software-on-cassette already. The best part is you don't need a cassette player to use it, just connect the headphone jack of your cellphone (if the manufacturer wasn't courageous enough to remove it) to the casette-in port of your favorite 8-bit machine and hit play on the WAV file from GitHub.

https://github.com/sonic2000gr/TI99

cpsns• 4 years ago

You can build a device to do this yourself over a serial port.

https://maker.pro/pcb/projects/make-uart-cassette-tape-inter...

codazoda• 4 years ago

I do this with an old TRS-80 and a digital voice recorder. I just made up a cable to hook them up.

LeoPanthera• 4 years ago

If you still have a working Acorn Electron or BBC Micro computer you can load software into it directly from a web page using only an audio cable with PlayUEF:

https://www.8bitkick.cc/playuef.html

jeffbee• 4 years ago

It's odd to make a guide to objectively choosing the "best" cassette. Someone who has chosen cassette tape as a medium has already transcended objectivity and has motivations that do not lie within the plane of rational discourse. You could choose the Maxell XLII because its flat black finish looks bitchin' and that would be as good a reason as any other.

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Pretty nonsensical comment considering this is a common title for the kind of article which says "if you want X, choose A; if you want Y, choose B". And indeed, second paragraph has a summary:

Ferric – Type I – high hiss, good bass response Chrome – Type II – Low hiss, good treble response Ferrichrome – Type III – Low hiss, even bass and treble Metal – Type IV – Low hiss, balanced frequencies

jareklupinski• 4 years ago

yup, I bought a random cassette deck ebay that I'm sure was worthy in its time, and only use it to listen to vaporwave / synth music

you can't really tell how much wow and flutter it has with that genre

it's almost a feature

eweise• 4 years ago

Back in the record days, I would record the first play of the record to tape, and then listen to the tape so that the record stayed in good condition.

kloch• 4 years ago

The struggle was real before digital. I always tried to use Type IV Metal tapes and type C NR when supported.

The entire line of Metal tapes by TDK were awesome.

Then there was the mythical MA-XG which retailed for something like $20/tape in the 1990's. They go for $120 on eBay today https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313... I did eventually buy two of them. I tested one (it lived up to the hype) and the other might still be unopened.

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

Some of this article is just complete nonsense:

Originally developed for studio and live applications, [metal] tapes will produce a low noise recording

No one ever used 2- or 4-track cassette recorders in a recording studio. They were used in basements and garages to make home recordings of amateur bands. And those 4-track recorders pre-dated metal tapes anyway. This guy is just making shit up as he goes along.

metal tapes sound closest to a digital recording.

No, they don’t. They don’t sound anything like digital recordings and never did.

When music started being published on CD in the 80s, no one lamented cassettes going the way of the dinosaur. No one (records, yes). Now there’s a revival, fine. But admit that it’s nostalgia and different than digital, not better.

ubermonkey4• 4 years ago

I regret I have only one upvote to give you.

I'm 52. I had lots of musician pals in the late 80s, 90s, and early 21st century (still do!). In that era no piece of kit was more coveted by those folks than the 4-track recorders from Tascam or Teac or whatever that worked with regular cassettes. They were game-changers for amateur and aspiring musicians!

But then digital audio happened, and real quick anybody with a decent laptop suddenly had access to recording capabilities that only a few years before were only available in professional studios. Shit, Apple even started shipping, for free, a home recording tool that opened the door for a lot of people.

Nobody who lived the cassette era, though, misses using them for playback or mixing down to them for demos. Everything about music recording and playback is astoundingly better now than it ever was back then. The level of sonic fidelity you can have in your living room for a couple hundred bucks today is staggering. Hell, the audio quality you get out of a basic iPhone and the earbuds it ships with is stunning vs. what we had access to in 1985 or 1995.

ubermonkey4• 4 years ago

Nothing baffles me more than cassette nostalgia. They were such SHIT for fidelity and quality, and so prone to failure!

Digital music on the go is an unalloyed win. With a nice enough rig I guess you MIGHT be able to tell CD source from streamed digital in your living room, but it's unlikely.

Vinyl is legitimately fun to use, and with decent gear you'd be surprised by how good it can sound (way better than cassette), but it's nowhere near CD or digital. It is, however, a bit more visceral and intentional, which is nice.

Blank cassette tape types and how to choose the right one

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