I had tapes growing up (though CDs were already a thing and much more popular), but aside from doing mixed CDs and burning MP3s on CD-R and CD-RWs, I was a total MiniDisc geek. I got into its second wave in the US circa 2000 or so, but for the 18-24 months before I got my first iPod (the 10G second gen model in summer 2002), it was not just the best MP3 player I ever had (you could output from your sound card to the MiniDisc, complete with meta-data applying to title info and then later iterations allowed more direct digital file writes), but paired with a good microphone or plugged into a soundboard, it was an excellent DAC for concerts or in my case, the best way for an aspiring high school filmmaker to record audio separately while making her mini-DV masterpieces.
Anyway, this is a cool project. I mostly used tape as a little kid until the price of DiscMans became cheap enough my mom would let me have one in the car for road trips, but it’s cool to see how many options there were.
Funny how that works. I had a huge collection of cassettes at some point (I was pretty active in the dutch pirate radio scene and making mix tapes was a great way to while away the long nights), and just seeing the images of some of these cassette shells immediately triggers memories of particular pieces of music.
I still have one weird piece of disco music that I've never been able to tie to a particular artist, pretty good mystery that one. I managed to recover it from the tape after not playing it for decades.
There's a set by Sven Vath, I've downloaded it circa 2003 and lost the mp3 since. Every now and then I take a few hours to research then listen patiently to the sets in hope to find the one I'm looking for.
I encountered the same issue once. Was trying to identify a song in a DJ set and all I had was a tape dub converted to MP3. Making a snippet and playing it back to my phone through a TRRS cable didn't work to identify the song through Shazam or Soundhound.
Playing it loud on an average, bass boosted bluetooth speaker box (almost to the point of distortion) and letting my phone's crappy microphone pick up the song... Did.
Given that the song detecting apps expect to pick up songs people play by sticking their phone in the air, I would not be surprised if a signal could also be _too high_ of a quality for a match.
I have no idea why it didn't work on previous tries, my conclusion that the song wasn't in the Shazam database was faulty though, as that Twitter user proved.
I was asked by a younger person how many giga bytes does a (magnetic) tape hold?
I had to decribe the concept of analogue/ digital, A2D process, error rate, even the home computers of the 80's. all this whilst completely and utterly drunk
the conversation latest for ages - no idea whether he fully understood or if I was talking rubbish.
But it it made me realise how much life has changed
my older brother had a weekend job where he would go and change backup tapes for some company on the weekends. he'd bring his Amiga and we'd play video games while we waited for the tapes to do their thing. I was pretty young so I don't remember the details, but they had to rewind/seek/? which took a long time.
Those were most likely backup tapes made specifically for data like DLT or LTO, Travan, etc. DAT and 8mm (Data8) could legitimately be used for backup. VHS was never a widespread backup medium especially when affordable more reliable options were readily available in the 90s - DVHS itself flopped and backup onto consumer VHS was always a gimmick.
Tape is still widely used for backup, it’s not quite dead.
While never popular, Metrum/MountainGate VHS drives and libraries saw significant use by at least a few large customers for a number of years, so were presumably more than a gimmick (source: personal tech support experience).
Note that, in spite of the recording media (S-VHS, IIRC, not D-VHS) used, these drives were rugged, expensive, rack-mount devices and were never marketed as consumer products.
I wouldn’t really call that a standard, more like an inexpensive consumer offering - there a bunch during the 90s it’s sort of an enticing offering - just use the vhs recorder you already have. You’d be crazy to use that for mission critical backup.
I used my 16-bit 192 kHz sound card to determine how much data can fit on a cassette by "prolonging" the length of each bit until I got an acceptable error rate. I found that the absolute best you can do with a decent old Technics tape deck is 8-bit at 12kHz which means for a 90-min Tape you can fit about 60 MB on one tape.
I noticed however that switching between bits produced a "ringing artifact" oscillating at about 60 kHz. If this is caused by my particular setup I don't know. With a better modulation than just PCM this could be compensated and you could pull probably more data out of the stream.
Thanks for the hint. The next thing to try would be to connect the tape head directly to the IO-Pins of a Raspberry PI and then use a simple manchester encoded signal ramping up the frequency. A Raspberry PI can push up to 1 MHz and has an internal Schmitt-Trigger which would be perfect for reading the data back.
The absolute ceiling for a high quality Type IV tape is probably around 600MB, assuming a dynamic range in the low 60s and low 20s frequency response - ie that is how much it would take to sample losslessly. Though storing digital data losslessly is another story, it will be some fraction of that for forward error correction, but with sophisticated encoding you could probably get a few hundred megs on a high quality tape. A type I tape will be well under 100MB.
>> triggers memories of particular pieces of music.
It triggers my memories of scanning for songs, using toothpicks to extract broken tapes from car dashboards, and spending afternoons rewinding loose tape back into cassettes. Cassettes (8-tracks included) were a horrible bridge technology between vinyl and CDs. I'm glad people can find joy in their external appearance. That is their only redeeming quality.
Same here. Although I have no interest in it myself, I can sort of understand the back-to-vinyl movement. But it’s a mystery to me why anyone today would want to listen to music on cassettes.
But for those who lean that way, there’s a store in Tokyo that is ready to serve you:
Same as vinyl - "the sound", and tactility. Plus tapes are pretty cheap, still. Usually around $8 last I checked. Also, it forces you to sit and listen to a contiguous album - no skipping around.
There were plenty of tape decks in the '80s and '90s that let you auto-seek between gaps of silence on a tape or even program the tape counter values for seeking to specific tracks.
While cassette tapes can be somewhat dodgy, they are repairable to a degree that's difficult to achieve with modern media. The cassette decks are also very repairable.
Personally, I can no longer tell the difference between digital media and a high-quality cassette recording of it. That's probably due to age though...
Ok, I wasn't expecting this to be as nostalgic as it was for me. Less for music, but more for my first programs in BASIC on the TI-99/4A. All I could remember was "red" — and then there is a color search. Ahh, it was Kmart. http://www.tapedeck.org/400/k_mart.php
It gave me a very peculiar feeling. Some of them triggered a memory I can't quite recall, due to how young I was at the time. Quite unsettling. But then at the age of three or four I was quite scared of the vinyl cover of "ABBA: The Album".
Now I need to see if I can dig up any of the 10 minute ones that were used in an office I worked in to send little voice memos around before they moved to a digital system.
Are you collecting pre-recorded tapes or recording your own stuff to them?
After not having actively listened to a tape for twenty years, I was recently exposed and really surprised by how good the sound was. With some half-decent tapes and a half-decent deck, I was struggling to make out the difference between cassette and CD during A/B testing.
There was enough variation between different types of tape (type I Fe2O3, type II CrO2, type IV metal) and different tape decks. Is it possible you’re listening to better tapes or on a higher quality deck? Tapes aren’t “CD quality” but they can get pretty dang good. Type I tapes, the cheapest and oldest technology, are noticeably worse than the other types.
and just the crispness of the sound was gone. I had a reel-to-reel which was indistinguishable from playing the record. But, RtR was just a nuisance. I finally replaced it with a MiniDisc player, which was just as good. Then recordable CDs, and then, finally, mp3.
Interestingly, my old cassettes have not degraded over the decades at all, while the VHS tapes certainly did.
The "standard" head gap for a tape machine is not great, which limits the bandwidth to about 12 kHz. That would certainly take out the crispness of audio... and you wouldn't be able to hear it if you had hearing damage, but if you had a nicer tape deck with a non-standard, narrower head gap, the bandwidth would be much higher (20 kHz no problem).
There are a lot of reasons why you might hear the hiss in one system and not another... besides different tape types, there are systems like Dolby noise reduction. The noise reduction comes in different varieties and must be paired with the correct decoding circuitry... if the wrong type of noise reduction is selected at playback, it may sound noticeably worse. I'm sure you know this, but plenty of people on HN are too young.
Most compact cassettes used Dolby B. You could use newer systems like Dolby C or Dolby S instead, and it would get rid of most of the hiss. These weren't used much when cassettes were common because tapes made with Dolby C or S sounded horrible without decoding, and Dolby S also came out very late when cassettes were on the way out.
If you combine all of these things... a tape deck with a narrower head gap, with a high-quality CrO2 or metal tape, and Dolby S noise reduction, you will get something that sounds very good, like a CD.
If you were using compact cassettes for music production, like with a Tascam Portastudio, the situation was even better, since it ran the tapes at a higher speed.
I always used Dolby (don't recall which one), and played them back on the machine that recorded them. SSSSSSSS :-( The MiniDisc ended all my interest in cassettes.
Weirdly, I never minded the rumble and crackling of vinyl.
I remember the first time I listened to a CD. The song ended, and there was silence. Dead silence. It was like the song faded away and sucked me in :-)
I'm sorry. I don't doubt you're right, with spending enough money on the cassettes and cassette player you can get decent results, but that just wasn't what mainstream cassettes and players were like. I've long since replaced my cassettes with CDs and threw them out. There's no nostalgia for them for me.
You were probably using Dolby B, like everyone else.
Not trying to convince anyone to use cassettes, there are enough reasons to avoid them. But it is worth explaining that you can get very high-quality sound from them.
If you struggle to tell the difference between cassettes and CDs maybe you should upgrade your headphones/speakers to something worth more than 5 bucks :)
Cassettagram: Send loved ones an audio greeting on a cassette tape for the vintage vibe. One of my worse 'startup' ideas (none of which have I ever acted upon).
I've got a top of the line Pioneer LD player (with the head that moves around the disc so you don't have to flip it) with less than 20 hours on it. I've got no use for it but just can't bear to toss it.
Hang on to that one please. These old formats are getting harder and harder to play back to and format transfer if possible. Maybe Archive Team would be willing to take it off your hands?
I could not afford a Sony Walkman so I bought a broken one from a garage sale for $5 and it had a loose belt on the cassette gears. I had friends who had Stereo systems with a turn table record player and cassette recorders. They made me mix tapes.
TDK SA-C90. That was the ticket! I just found some recordings made with these the other day. Now if I could just get a new drive belt for my JVC component tape deck with Super-ANRS.
I expect the site owner took the photos themselves. I assuming copyright would even apply to the appearance of most cassette tapes, why would the copyright holders sue, what would they expect to gain? The web site itself could likely use a fair use defense, maybe not the T-shirt business.
They're more likely to have trademark issues with the T-shirt business. A consumer might reasonably assume a t-shirt with an image of a Sony cassette tape on it was made by Sony. Maybe they were careful in their selection of which tapes are on t-shirts on their own, the links to the actual store (on a German site) don't work for me.
Anyway, this is a cool project. I mostly used tape as a little kid until the price of DiscMans became cheap enough my mom would let me have one in the car for road trips, but it’s cool to see how many options there were.