Vinyl comeback now, cassette tapes next?

There is nothing wrong with preserving especially your analogue vinyl sound onto cassette. It's just a fun side road to this hobby. I have two nice three head cassette decks. A mid 90's upper end Yamaha KX-930 and a mid 80s's top of the line JVC DD-VR9. Both feature full computer test toned auto bias, level and sensitivity setup. Using good cassette stock especially type II or type IV or even a good type 1 can give me near indistinguishable recordings of vinyl from my LP's themselves.

The dancing fluorescent meters looks cool too.

The thing is, many listeners have never truly listened to a quality cassette recording on a good deck. If one wants to transfer analogue sound of vinyl onto another analogue format one really has it best with a good cassette deck and audio cassette tape. Yes, Reel to Reel is better, much so in some cases but it's not as user friendly.

Factoring though today that many used cassette decks can be had it can be hit or miss as to how well they still work. But if you land one that is operating properly and you truly do learn to record on it well, you can get killer copies of vinyl and Cd.

I for the fun of the hobby got back into cassettes oh about 2 years ago. I have bought many decks from thrifts and eBay, some pretty good 3 headers that are very cool and others that were snagged at thrifts for cheap. I have a few keepers though that I will never get rid of now. But let me tell you they work great in making very serious analogue copies of my vinyl. It gives me an ability to get most of that vinyl sound we all seem to love and be able to do it that is quicker and easier to use. Sometime I just do not want to bother dropping a vinyl disc on my turn table but want to get close to that sound. Rolling tape gives me longer playback times between flipping tapes over too.

Besides its just fun picking a tape out from my stock of blanks and setting it all up. The meters dancing and seeing tape rolling is just another part of our audio hobby so to speak.

Audio cassettes if they were the higher quality pre-recorded ones or better yet a properly recorded onto blank have a high level of fidelity. I find that the slight added hiss using for example Dolby B on recording vinyl can like the dither added to CD's add a level of depth and air to the perception of sound. On top of that a the slightly higher midband hiss that remains with Dolby B on vinyl recordings can help mask the sometimes rough and crackly background noise of used vinyl.

On my more quiet vinyl discs or CD's I often will up to Dolby C to gain the higher signal to noise ratio. The hiss it then below the noise floor of the very quiet high quality vinyl disc and a bit higher than the noise floor of cd's again then adding a slightly smoother and more depth perception to CD sound.

So one should not rule out the fidelity of a properly working and better quality cassette deck be it a top notch 2 header or more often than not quality 3 header.

Besides again it can be fun to make your own tapes and play with the tools of a cassette deck ultimately watching those meters dance as you listen to the music.