A Primer on Vintage Cassette Decks: How to Find a Good One
insheepsclothinghifi.com
insheepsclothinghifi.com
A lovely medium, but my favourite memory of them isn’t a Nakamichi-scented one. It’s a Sony Walkman-centred world that I miss! If only I still had that Sony DC2, I could retire.
Edit: my mate tells me to STFU, he can bring me some new Type IIs from Greece or Turkey. Result! Back in business!
If you wanna sell music on concerts vinyl is too expensive/you would have to upfront too much money, CDs are dead, casettes however had some sort of revival. Vinyl is still king in those circles, but it requres you to be able to realistically finance and sell a run of 250 pieces to be economical.
I saw people buy casettes (with a download code) while not having a player — it is a neat physical artifact for some.
you never know if that flutter / wow effect was originally in the song or coming from the deck
But we’re getting philosophocal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
> Types of readymades
> Readymades - un-altered objects
> Assisted readymades - putting several readymades together taking away their use
> Rectified readymades - an altered or marked readymade
> Corrected readymades
> Reciprocal readymades - a unique art work presented as a mass-produced utilitarian object
Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.
There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:
https://www.dookiedemastered.com/
Previously on HN (788 points 16 days ago 205 comments):
Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.
I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.
I have a box full of unreadable CDRs from 20 years ago and a box full of perfectly playable cassettes from 40 years ago.
Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.
Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.
As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.
These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.
Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.
I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.
Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.
Great. They can get that with a DSP plugin. "They" being the artist, if that's what they want their music to sound like.
Of course real hipsters do FLAC on Iomega ZIP drives.
And of course, many artists release on cassette. I have an album from Dirty Art Club on it's way to add to my cassette collection as we speak. My collection has grown considerably in the two-ish years I've been using Bandcamp, despite the sad controversy.
Not that long ago I would use scripts to dump CDs to MD using linux-minidisc. Much more convenient to Cary around than CDs, geat audio quality.
The only downside, imho, is when I’m on vacation I like looking at second hand places and if I find a some CDs I can’t play them until I get home. I really miss the CD deck in cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication
> NFC tags are passive data stores which can be read, and under some circumstances written to, by an NFC device. They typically contain data (as of 2015 between 96 and 8,192 bytes) and are read-only in normal use, but may be rewritable.
> 424 kbit/s
...which will promptly disappear once the company decides to end their incredible journey.
But in the kpop world buying albums is less about listening to the CD and more for the merch/supporting specific artists.
Looks really cool when it's running, but not massively practical unless you have lots of tapes that you took good care of.
Edit: And it's going to need recapping one day.
Good quality 1970s/80s cassette decks in working order on eBay are not cheap these days.
These things failed all the time, the tape would get stuck in annoying places, and then you'd end up with 10 meters of tape to try and rewind without tying a knot, and the tape was screwed anyways. Ugh.
And as far as the quality goes - well, audio quality was a solved problem a few decades ago. Since then, it's only getting worse. Cassette cannot be better than a well mastered vintage vinyl or CD. It is better though than a YouTube video listened over Bluetooth on crappy headphones, which seems to make most people happy these days. It can, importantly, also sound better than a lot of modern vinyl.
I expect at some point CDs will see a renaissance like vinyl and cassettes. I'm here for that one. CDs were really the high-water mark of enjoying music to me.
* Cheap decks just ran the tape backwards, and used alternate coils in the heads.
* slightly better ones flipped the heads too. (Aiwa at least)
Nakamichi had the tape in a carrier, it popped it out, physically flipped the cassette tape around and put it back in the player. Apparently it was better because the tape heads were always perfectly aligned and the motors only had to go one direction.
(really cheap walkmen did something that occasionally misaligned the head so that autoreverse was actually play the front side backwards. This was really awesome in the Satanic Panic stuff's encoded in reverse era. My favorite at the time was Drugs from Fear of Music)
I'm pretty sure there was a 1980s movie that had the protagonist using one of these, but I can't remember what that was now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxbEE_rdazk
> Nakamichi Dragon 1000P 1000MB 1000 DAT - Nothing Better at $20K! The Best Audio Products Ever Made!
> The repair and restoration of a Nakamichi Dragon Cassette Tape Deck. Belts and the idler tire are replaced. Rare Nakamichi 1000P DAC, 1000MB CD changer along with the 1000 Digital Audio Tape(DAT) deck. Nakamichi produced some amazing digital products although they were best known for their cassette tape decks. At more then $17,000 in the late 80's these were very high end pieces of audio equipment.
The Dragon was the pinnacle of the art. I tried one out in a hifi store and it was night and day against the competition. The others reproduced sound, the Dragon reproduced the music.
https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=172984247...
Good speakers would also give you the pleasure of the chest-thumping harmonics of a good drum set (or Japanese drums).
The best cassette deck ever was the Revox B215, direct drive, all about performance, no nonsense, flawless for what it was designed to do.
Common' ... You can find one for $500. Take, say, a Technics 1200 25 years anniversary, gold plated, turntable and that's 5-digits territory by now.
Three digits is still okay if you're a enthusiast in that kind of thing.
Solution was simple : put a blank tape then record, play, record, play short chunks of tape in order to clean the record/play connections in the mechanism. Problem solved.
I haven't listened to a cassette in at least a decade.
I wonder what I should do with them when I retire and sell my house in two years.