advertisement


Cassettes? Seriously?

Deebster,

deebster said:
It's all about the inconvenience.
Click to expand...

Panasonic had the solution, the RS-296 — the perfect device if you wanted uninterrupted music from cassettes for 2.5 days.

1000w



Barmy AF, but…

Joe
 
Rockmeister said:
and the implied deep serious appreciation of 'good stuff' that age confers.
Apparently.
Click to expand...

Er...

Cassettes were there when I was growing up so I assumed they'd be around for ever. Then I turned my back and they weren't. So definitely there's the nostalgia, but as well as that, playing old tapes and making new ones, for me it's become more about the machines. Only later in life can I appreciate the effort and engineering that has gone into some decks.

No decent cassette mechanism is being made new and it's unlikely there ever will be, so every day there are fewer decks around (and fewer techs to repair them). I want to preserve as many as I can in working condition so they'll be around that bit longer and someone else can also enjoy using them. Up to 9 now, and in the last couple of years I've spent close to a grand on having 3 Sony Pro Walkmans serviced. I don't use them that much but that's not the point really. I think of them more like living works of art.
 
Rockmeister said:
But as a HiFi goal?
Not even Nakamichi ever claimed that that was a thing.
Click to expand...
I grew up in the compact cassette era, and fondly remember taping songs off radio on my portable when I was 10 years old. My first hifi cassette deck was a Teac A-103. It was poor sounding compared to vinyl. I upgraded to a three-head Teac A-770, which was much better, but vinyl was still better. It wasn't until I bought a three-head Nak that I thought cassette could be indistinguishable from source.

I still have my Nak and about 200 NOS cassettes to feed it. I just don't have the time to make mix tapes like I used to when I was much younger.
 
James said:
I grew up in the compact cassette era, and fondly remember taping songs off radio on my portable when I was 10 years old. My first hifi cassette deck was a Teac A-103. It was poor sounding compared to vinyl. I upgraded to a three-head Teac A-770, which was much better, but vinyl was still better. It wasn't until I bought a three-head Nak that I thought cassette could be indistinguishable from source.

I still have my Nak and about 200 NOS cassettes to feed it. I just don't have the time to make mix tapes like I used to when I was much younger.
Click to expand...
used to record the "TOP TWENTY" every Sunday, back when it was worth the trouble! :)
 
deebster,

Ha indeed. It's the nuttiest audio thing ever. Well, maybe. This could be nuttier -- the Sony Mega Storage 400CD.

614QteKBq9L._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg


Even at just 40-disc capacity, The Onion thought the concept was worthy of a mockery —

Man With New 40-Disc CD Changer Needs 18 More CDs​
​
OVERLAND PARK, KS—With 22 slots filled in his new Sony 40-disc CD player, Overland Park restaurateur William Fedorisko still needs 18 more discs, it was learned Monday. "I was thinking of maybe getting that five-disc Paul Simon box set. That would fill up some of those slots in a hurry," the 43-year-old Fedorisko told reporters. "And then, for the remaining 13 slots, maybe I'll get the You've Got Mail soundtrack, the new Eric Clapton and maybe some Sheryl Crow. But whatever I get, I'd better do it fast: That 40-disc-changing technology is just going to waste."​


Joe
 
I have a few superb cassette decks, which still work beautifully.
I had three Nak at some point but have kept only one (the CR-4E).
But these days they are ornamental objects. ☺️
 
Playing Bach cello suites now by Misha Maisky (1985 recording) on TDK MA-X recorded in the first year of the 90s. Can't say it lacks anything. Good idea to take the deck out for a walk. I sometimes switch it on for a day or two so it won't clog up.
 
I had my tape deck serviced a couple of years back, sounds bloody amazing! It‘s a three head and using the monitor function doing a/b on a decent MA tape the difference between it and the source is honestly not noticeable.

just looked on eBay for one and they are now £1500 plus. Nuts.
 
Zombie said:
I exchanged a 4-track A77 for a new two-head Nak in the early 90s
Click to expand...

I used to record onto my A77 from vinyl and thence onto various top cassette recorders of the day (Aiwa, Teac etc.). Very early 70s so maybe before Nak. I thought quality home-recorded cassettes could sound very good indeed (as opposed to shop-bought ones). By the 90s I guess things would've improved further. Walkmans and their stablemate sounded v. good on decent cans in the late 70s/early 80s too.
 
Last edited:
Hi AAll,

My Last Cassette Deck was a Yamaha KX230. It was a pretty good performer for a 2 head deck. It was a two-motor design with the pinch roller / capstan getting its own dedicated motor, the correct way to do it. While it was only a two head deck the record-playback head was one of the better, more solid designs since the deck was setup to use metal formulation tapes. Metal tapes require much higher biasing levels and so a beefier head structure was required if you want to record properly onto a Metal tape and maximize higher saturation levels. The KX230 also had Dolby B, C and HX-Pro which was a form of dynamic biasing to improve the linearity of the tape during the record process, to my ears HX-Pro was a game changer. All up the KX230 was about as good a two head tape deck could get; it also gave me years of trouble-free service.

I totally get the appeal and the retro vibe of the cassette medium but for me I'm not going back. The modern tape formulations sold today are not as good as the High-end tape formulations that were available back in tapes heyday and I certainly don't miss all the issues that come with the medium. Tape dropout, print through, High-Frequency fade-outs if your tape has been exposed to higher levels of heat or strong magnetic fields and tape does loose its magnetic permeability over time.

If you go looking for a modern tape deck of reasonable quality and performance level these days, you can only find 3 Serious tape decks available as a new item. The Pyle double cassette deck offers a reasonable price, but its wow & flutter performance is very poor as it uses a very basic Chinese sourced transport mechanism.

The Teac W-1200 (also sold as a Tascam 202 MKVii) offers respectable performance but again if you look inside, you still see obvious signs of cost cutting. These are a single motor unit (with one motor per Trasport as they are a double well cassette deck), with the one motor having to drive both the take up spool and capstan spindle. The spindle flywheel is also a cheap plastic pully with a pressed steel washer molded or glued onto the side of the pully to provide a little more inertia, better than the Pyle unit but still a far cry from the precision machined fly wheel normally used on better decks back in cassettes heyday. Tascam also make a recordable CD & Recordable Tape deck combo; this uses the same Tape transport mechanism as the Teac/Tascam double cassette and offers similar levels of performance with a few more options.

I'm also reluctant. to buy second hand decks these days. Cassette decks are complex devices with intricate mechanisms that eventually fail. Belts can be replaced; the tiny plastic gears and cams however will eventually fail through either wear or ageing of the polymers used for such gears and levers. The tape heads are also subject to wear over time and the finely polished surface of the head eventually becomes scuffed and loses its profile over decades of use. Getting a new head for nearly any tape deck is going to be a serious challenge.

I fondly remember the fun times I had back in the 80's and 90's with cassettes, doing mix tapes, sharing music with friends, not having the internet to downloads or stream music but owning the media and having shelves lined with cassette tapes. they were heady days filled with enthusiasm and constantly discovering new things. But I'm also happy to leave it in the past as we embrace newer, better and more reliable methods of storing and playing music. I'm sorry to burst a few bubbles of nostalgia but to my ears, an AAC 320kbps file played back on my iPod classic, outperforms any portable cassette machine I have ever encountered. At home I have LP's & CD's as sources of music with internet steaming available as a medium quality music source, given the quality of high bitrate streaming available these days it is a great way of discovering new Music and artists and allot more convenient.

LPSpinner.
 
LPSpinner said:
Hi AAll,

My Last Cassette Deck was a Yamaha KX230. It was a pretty good performer for a 2 head deck. It was a two-motor design with the pinch roller / capstan getting its own dedicated motor, the correct way to do it. While it was only a two head deck the record-playback head was one of the better, more solid designs since the deck was setup to use metal formulation tapes. Metal tapes require much higher biasing levels and so a beefier head structure was required if you want to record properly onto a Metal tape and maximize higher saturation levels. The KX230 also had Dolby B, C and HX-Pro which was a form of dynamic biasing to improve the linearity of the tape during the record process, to my ears HX-Pro was a game changer. All up the KX230 was about as good a two head tape deck could get; it also gave me years of trouble-free service.

I totally get the appeal and the retro vibe of the cassette medium but for me I'm not going back. The modern tape formulations sold today are not as good as the High-end tape formulations that were available back in tapes heyday and I certainly don't miss all the issues that come with the medium. Tape dropout, print through, High-Frequency fade-outs if your tape has been exposed to higher levels of heat or strong magnetic fields and tape does loose its magnetic permeability over time.

If you go looking for a modern tape deck of reasonable quality and performance level these days, you can only find 3 Serious tape decks available as a new item. The Pyle double cassette deck offers a reasonable price, but its wow & flutter performance is very poor as it uses a very basic Chinese sourced transport mechanism.

The Teac W-1200 (also sold as a Tascam 202 MKVii) offers respectable performance but again if you look inside, you still see obvious signs of cost cutting. These are a single motor unit (with one motor per Trasport as they are a double well cassette deck), with the one motor having to drive both the take up spool and capstan spindle. The spindle flywheel is also a cheap plastic pully with a pressed steel washer molded or glued onto the side of the pully to provide a little more inertia, better than the Pyle unit but still a far cry from the precision machined fly wheel normally used on better decks back in cassettes heyday. Tascam also make a recordable CD & Recordable Tape deck combo; this uses the same Tape transport mechanism as the Teac/Tascam double cassette and offers similar levels of performance with a few more options.

I'm also reluctant. to buy second hand decks these days. Cassette decks are complex devices with intricate mechanisms that eventually fail. Belts can be replaced; the tiny plastic gears and cams however will eventually fail through either wear or ageing of the polymers used for such gears and levers. The tape heads are also subject to wear over time and the finely polished surface of the head eventually becomes scuffed and loses its profile over decades of use. Getting a new head for nearly any tape deck is going to be a serious challenge.

I fondly remember the fun times I had back in the 80's and 90's with cassettes, doing mix tapes, sharing music with friends, not having the internet to downloads or stream music but owning the media and having shelves lined with cassette tapes. they were heady days filled with enthusiasm and constantly discovering new things. But I'm also happy to leave it in the past as we embrace newer, better and more reliable methods of storing and playing music. I'm sorry to burst a few bubbles of nostalgia but to my ears, an AAC 320kbps file played back on my iPod classic, outperforms any portable cassette machine I have ever encountered. At home I have LP's & CD's as sources of music with internet steaming available as a medium quality music source, given the quality of high bitrate streaming available these days it is a great way of discovering new Music and artists and allot more convenient.

LPSpinner.
Click to expand...
df_genius will sort you out with used decks :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top Bottom