Vinyl comeback now, cassette tapes next?

Cassette's are actually quite trendy now within the uber hipster music scene. It's so much cheaper to record on a cassette then make a 7" record. Obviously the sound quality is sub par and that's why the lo-fi indie hipsters love it. It's also retro to the younger generation who only know digital formats so it makes it cooler. Legendary indie rocker Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth, wrote the book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.

Those who put down cassette have never heard a Tandberg TCD3014a, or a Nakamichi 1000ZXL recording onto Sony Metal Master, Maxell Vertex, or TDK MA-XG tape.

Back when cassettes were still popular, I found the biggest sonic problem to be the poor quality of most prerecorded tapes. I considered that to result from the high-speed duplicating necessary for mass-production. With care and good quality raw tape I felt I could make decent tapes of my own.

So imagine my surprise when I visited a friend recently and he played a couple of prerecorded jazz cassettes he just picked up from a thrift and they sounded very good. They were from labels I was not familiar with. If they were from smaller companies they could have been produced with greater care and possibly not from high-speed duplication. My friend is more of a music lover than audiophile but still has a well chosen system. It was revealing enough to cause my surprise.

Winyl never left....

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.