WHat did Audiophiles hear during Tape deck era?

Vinyl, FM radio and chrome tapes.

No Dolby.

Sounded excellent but the tapes could get jammed and tended to get warped when used in overheating car stereos.

Necessary skills included the occasional editing/splicing of broken tape, manually adjusting tape head azimuth, demagnetising, and the cleaning of the heads and rollers.

My NAD 6050c gave great access for all of the maintenance until it was superceded by MiniDisc (which avoided all the issues and had infinitely superior editing options).


flatblackround,

It’s funny how I used to try so hard to edit out the DJs chatter when recording the chart show every Sunday but now decades later realise I should have left it in to capture that period feel.

I definitely would have if I knew back then of the approaching of the digital age. MP3s, downloading, streaming, CDRs all would have seemed like science fiction back then.

jmforge,

"Prerecorded sets were crap."

I found pre-recorded tapes to be listenable, but little more. The industry tended to only use the cheapest ferric tapes. Home recordings on the vastly superior chrome Cr02 formula, with increased dynamics and bandwidth, would be far superior, whether off the radio or vinyl. Both TDK and later Sony made some great tapes.

Since pre-recorded tapes cost the same as vinyl there was unsurprisingly a huge surge in home taping in the 1980s. So much so that the music industry began to regularly churn out ’Home taping is killing music’ warnings.

There were followed by calls to impose a financial levy on blank cassettes, but these quickly fell by the wayside during the 90s with the emergence of MiniDisc, DAT and CDR technology which went hand in hand the the rise of MP3 filesharing.

The rest is history.

Excellent revisit by Techmoan here

https://youtu.be/jVoSQP2yUYA

hypoman,

The Elcaset / L-cassette was sadly another one of those failed attempts to bring high quality playback to the masses.

To be honest I only heard of it mentioned in asides much later on. Yet in pure sonic terms it made great sense, twice the width and twice the speed of a compact cassette giving near reel to reel sound for the masses.

Alas, like SACD and DVD-A later, the implementation and support was seriously lacking. As they say, even a great idea/product is only 20% of the work done, it’s in the cut throat world of business and marketing where it’s make or break time.

Audiophiles seem destined to forever remain the thin tail wagging the very large dog as far as the commercial world is concerned. We remain a straggly tribe of audio pioneers in our push for generally accepted higher quality playback sound, waiting for the rest of the world to catch us up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elcaset

bigwave1,

"I had a Nak Dragon until about 7 years ago. One of its claim to fame was that is would automatically align the tape heads to any cassette made from any machine so it would play as well as the machine it was made on on. No comparison to LPs, still had tape hiss."

You lucky individual! Wasn’t that supposed to be the summit of all things cassette based?

My NAD 6050c required the odd manual head alignment via a precision screwdriver, but it did sound awesome - in a lovely expansive totally analogue fashion that still seems to escape my uber precise CD player.

And as the song almost goes - the hiss never bothered me anyway (especially with Chrome tape).

If the Nakamichi Dragon was everything that everyone back then said it was, then surely it must have been fabulous.

harrylavo,

"R2R decks stayed in many audiophile decks right up into the mid-to-late '70's, when stereo cassette decks started to become good enough (with new tape formulations and eq's) to be "acceptable" on a high-fi rig."


Yes, and I can't shake the feeling that with them also went the chance of attaining Master Tape sound quality at home.

https://www.analogplanet.com/content/copies-beatles-master-tapes-played-ces-and-rmaf-2013

mhztweaker,

"I have collected many tape decks and learned to perform repairs and restoration on them using the tools of the trade."

I tried too, but as Clint Eastwood once said, 'A man's got to know his limitations.'

Mine fell short at replacing drive belts.

asvjerry,

"....then discovered one could use a VCR to make seriously good recordings, near CD quality..."


Yes, I always wondered whether VCR with a bit of tech tweaking could have matched reel to reel quality audio.

Nice wide tape and up to four hours of it in standard mode! Sounds good.

According to the following article Ethan Winer didn’t seem convinced, but it’s not a direct quote. In any case I’m not so sure. After all tape speed was fairly similar (cassette 1.87 inches per sec and VHS ran at 1.31 ips). What if VHS speed had been doubled? Twice the thrills? Alas, we’ll never know now.

The future must be all about getting digital to live up to all its extravagant promise, and to do that expectations amongst the non audiophile consumers first need to rise.


How VHS belatedly re-entered music’s format war

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/nov/13/vhs-music-format-war-ty...

tomshults,

"None of the posts that I saw raised the matter of Dolby cassette noise reduction and its tracking issues."


I think a few of us did, albeit by omission.

I for one never liked what Dolby B did to the sound. It was a bit like throwing a heavy shirt over your speakers.

Dolby C was definitely better, but still you could hear it messing up the timing somewhat. 

No Dolby and good chrome tape (ferric was worse in every way especially dynamics and hiss) and it was like listening to a junior reel to reel deck.

Head alignment was also crucial, particularly for high frequency and separation. I used to wonder how many people might have been listening to tape with misaligned tape heads. 

Life before the internet would probably seem slow, strange and frustrating to those who never experienced it. We knew of nothing else.

uberwaltz,

Remember once cassette was the only way to get your music in your car.

One big reason for its existence was to play your favourite LPs on the move.

At one time companies such as Alpine and Blaupunkt offered seriously decent (and expensive) tape only units. If you wanted you could go even go active with some Rockford Fosgate amps and subs!

To think how times have changed.
Nowadays they’re not even putting CD players in most cars!

Who wants to faff about with streaming or Bluetooth whilst driving?