Casette tapes

[luvlz2]

Got this on consignment at my local record store in the early 90's-late 80's.

[Sems Fir]

Some examples of '80's old school boots, that I have:

Included in the image is a copy of the complete "The Can". I passed on an example of The Can. It was $200.00 which was a lot for someone in high school. I took the cheap route instead! I have a lot on cassette, even some cassette singles. Concerts, radio specials etc. Those were the days.

Robert

www.behindthetoys.com

[Plantpothead]

I used to buy TDK Chrome tapes, I have hundreds of them, I still listen to them and the sound quality is STILL excellent.

[Charles J. White]

When I was a kid, I had a cousin in America who would record the Howard Stern show on casette tapes and mail them to me so I could listen to it because there was a time when living in Canada that Howard wasn't broadcast. I would play them on a Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck

Edited September 25, 2013 by Charles J. White

[Glyn]

I have a handful of factory recorded cassettes, the Led Zeppelin Box Set, and two cases of these - live bootlegs

[tomloge]

I still have some old cassettes from the 70s and they play pretty good.

Derek & the Dominoes in Concert

Quadrophenia-The Who

Physical Graffitte -Led Zeppelin

Nobody's Perfect-Deep Purple

House of Blue LIght-Deep Purple

Best of the Rascals

Best of Black Oak Arkansas

Best of Foghat

Also have an old Foghat bootleg that I recorded in New York City at Central Park, around the time they released Night Shift-Lots of great songs on it: Fool for the City, My Babe, Slow Ride, Drivin Wheel, Night Shift, Chateua Lafitte '59 Boogie (about 15 minutes long or so), I just Wanna Make Love to You, Dreamer, Maybelline. The best part of the tape is between encores when you can hear one of my friends say "Wanna do another joint"?

[luvlz2]

That's pretty funny, I taped quite a few concerts in the past that I went to. It's a flashback to go back and listen to them.

Also have an old Foghat bootleg that I recorded in New York City at Central Park, around the time they released Night Shift-Lots of great songs on it: Fool for the City, My Babe, Slow Ride, Drivin Wheel, Night Shift, Chateua Lafitte '59 Boogie (about 15 minutes long or so), I just Wanna Make Love to You, Dreamer, Maybelline. The best part of the tape is between encores when you can hear one of my friends say "Wanna do another joint"?

[Strider]

Been doing some excavating lately...haven't found my box of Led Zeppelin tapes yet. But here are some of my factory as well as hand-decorated home-grown tapes.

[apantherfrommd]

90 Minute Tapes.

I wonder why they didn't release 90-minute blank CDs. You could fit Led Zeppelin I and Led Zeppelin II on it.

[LIVIN]

Check out this old tape machine. D-1 Sony component (uncompressed 4:2:2) digital video from circa mid '80s. These babies cost around $150,000 each but were pinnacle of mastering formats at the time.

Here is a large sized cassette from this format. Check out the scale because these cassettes are much larger than your laptop in size.

 

[apantherfrommd]

Check out this old tape machine. D-1 Sony component (uncompressed 4:2:2) digital video from circa mid '80s. These babies cost around $150,000 each but were pinnacle of mastering formats at the time.

Here is a large sized cassette from this format. Check out the scale because these cassettes are much larger than your laptop in size.

 

Where did you find the shovel to dig up this relic? She looks sweet! I wonder how many of these babies were sold on Black Friday in the 80's.

[LIVIN]

Where did you find the shovel to dig up this relic? She looks sweet! I wonder how many of these babies were sold on Black Friday in the 80's.

Oh they are still around and some edit facilities still used them up to a few years ago for mastering of animated features before HD became the standard. Now they are pretty much just considered a legacy format used to for transferring old content to file based content like Prores 422 HQ and JPEG-2000 for archiving.  I just thought I would include the photos because they are 'cassette based' tapes as opposed to open reel tape formats like 2in.

I'm sure it has been discussed here someplace but the Zep bootlegger Mike Millard used a high quality cassette machine to nick a few concerts in his day. What Millard achieved with such a limited format as consumer audio cassette tape was remarkable.  Millard must have been reading Jimmy's interviews when it came to good mic placement and proper saturation of magnetic tape because he did a pretty good job given the obvious limitations of the tape format he used.

[jabe]

Oh they are still around and some edit facilities still used them up to a few years ago for mastering of animated features before HD became the standard. Now they are pretty much just considered a legacy format used to for transferring old content to file based content like Prores 422 HQ and JPEG-2000 for archiving.  I just thought I would include the photos because they are 'cassette based' tapes as opposed to open reel tape formats like 2in.

I'm sure it has been discussed here someplace but the Zep bootlegger Mike Millard used a high quality cassette machine to nick a few concerts in his day. What Millard achieved with such a limited format as consumer audio cassette tape was remarkable.  Millard must have been reading Jimmy's interviews when it came to good mic placement and proper saturation of magnetic tape because he did a pretty good job given the obvious limitations of the tape format he used.

Hypothetically, could this machine if provided cassette copies from original cassette source tapes of say, 5/18/77, produce an outcome better to tweak, than say, original source tapes directly transferred to CD?
Hypothetically, of course.

[LIVIN]

Hypothetically, could this machine if provided cassette copies from original cassette source tapes of say, 5/18/77, produce an outcome better to tweak, than say, original source tapes directly transferred to CD?Hypothetically, of course.

Well the tape machine I was showing is a video tape machine and only 4 channel AES audio.

I'm not a sound engineer but I believe that the answer in general is that just like film photography the quality of the "image/recording" depends mostly on the best capture of the content with the technology limitations of the 'recording device' used to their best capability.  The information on the tape usually isn't improved much beyond what you have; however with modern digital technology some enhancements are possible. For example a mono recording can be processed in order to simulate the sound separation perceived in a stereo recording. There are also ways to attempt to process out and isolate "noise" but that too has limits. For example: the drum peddle squeak heard on the studio recording of SIBLY is basically (to my understanding) part of that recording and unable to be isolated out of the other tracks as the other parts were mixed into the drum track-- but I may be wrong and I'm sure SAJ may have that answer.

Like I said, I'm not a sound engineer, but the answer is yes and no.  Yes you can transfer a sound image to another format that has more ways to process that information, but in the end it is still the information you are stuck with from the original master that you have to work with. 

 

 

Edited November 25, 2015 by LIVIN

[jabe]

Nutrocker vastly improved the content of the discs I sent him. These were direct transfers from the original tapes to disc Nutrocker worked with
Probably the quality of the boot is at its peak.

[LIVIN]

Nutrocker vastly improved the content of the discs I sent him. These were direct transfers from the original tapes to disc Nutrocker worked with
Probably the quality of the boot is at its peak.

Yeah it's like passing through an EQ and pushing some of harmonics in such a way to 'brighten' the audio and roll off some of the noise as you spit the native track through different channels. But like I said, with a mono cassette or even one from a stereo recorder with mic placement being what it is, there are limits to the output. For example: when taking a mono track and simulating stereo all you are doing is splitting to two channels and then shifting the phase in order to simulate the aural perspective you hear with stereo. 

[chef free]

I still have my Nak and about 200 cassettes, I had over 500 at one time, all bootlegs.  I don't play them much, most shows have been replaced by upgrades on CD, DVD or FLACs.  

 

Anybody ever use Sony Super Beta Hi-Fi tapes for audio recording?  They made great, low noise recordings!  I have hours of Greg Stone's Stone Trek progressive rock radio on Beta.

 

[luvlz2]

Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Audio Cassette, Dies at 94

The Dutch engineer credited with inventing the audio cassette has died. Lou Ottens was 94.

As head of product development for Philips in 1960, he led a team that developed the initial portable tape recorder; he then introduced the first cassette tape at a Berlin electronics fair three years later. The slogan back then: "Smaller than a pack of cigarettes!"

This portable tape quickly overtook cumbersome reel-to-reel recording methods that had long been the standard. Home decks gave way to boomboxes and in-dash car models - bringing music to the masses.

That was, in fact, the goal: Ottens decided early on that he wanted a tape that would fit into his jacket pocket, even making a wooden model to determine the exact size specifications. "I got annoyed with the clunky, user-unfriendly reel-to-reel system," Ottens later told the Dutch News. "It's that simple."

"Compact Cassette" was trademarked a year later. Ottens' design eventually became the standard for cassettes worldwide after a deal was struck with Sony. More than 100 million have since been sold, many of them during an unlikely more recent boom.

Sales in the U.S. were up more than 100 percent midway through 2020, as analysts called cassettes the "unlikely comeback kid of music formats." Meanwhile, the BBC reported that cassette sales doubled last year in the U.K., as consumers snapped up the highest number of tapes since 2003.

And this is no one-off boomlet. Sales in the U.S. grew 23 percent in 2018, and by 35 percent in 2017, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"There are a number of people who are still using it," Ottens marveled in 2016's Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. "We expected that it would be a success, but not a revolution."

Ottens also led a team that developed the compact disc in 1979 at Philips, selling billions more copies. He retired in 1986, giving full credit for this musical revolution to those around him. "We were little boys who had fun playing," he once said. "We didn't feel like we were doing anything big. It was a kind of sport."

In the end, Ottens only admitted one big regret: Sony developed the first Walkman, "the ideal application for the cassette," instead of Philips. "It still hurts that we didn't have one."

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/lou-ottens-dies/

 

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by luvlz2

[kipper]

21 hours ago, luvlz2 said:

Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Audio Cassette, Dies at 94

The Dutch engineer credited with inventing the audio cassette has died. Lou Ottens was 94.

As head of product development for Philips in 1960, he led a team that developed the initial portable tape recorder; he then introduced the first cassette tape at a Berlin electronics fair three years later. The slogan back then: "Smaller than a pack of cigarettes!"

This portable tape quickly overtook cumbersome reel-to-reel recording methods that had long been the standard. Home decks gave way to boomboxes and in-dash car models - bringing music to the masses.

That was, in fact, the goal: Ottens decided early on that he wanted a tape that would fit into his jacket pocket, even making a wooden model to determine the exact size specifications. "I got annoyed with the clunky, user-unfriendly reel-to-reel system," Ottens later told the Dutch News. "It's that simple."

"Compact Cassette" was trademarked a year later. Ottens' design eventually became the standard for cassettes worldwide after a deal was struck with Sony. More than 100 million have since been sold, many of them during an unlikely more recent boom.

Sales in the U.S. were up more than 100 percent midway through 2020, as analysts called cassettes the "unlikely comeback kid of music formats." Meanwhile, the BBC reported that cassette sales doubled last year in the U.K., as consumers snapped up the highest number of tapes since 2003.

And this is no one-off boomlet. Sales in the U.S. grew 23 percent in 2018, and by 35 percent in 2017, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"There are a number of people who are still using it," Ottens marveled in 2016's Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. "We expected that it would be a success, but not a revolution."

Ottens also led a team that developed the compact disc in 1979 at Philips, selling billions more copies. He retired in 1986, giving full credit for this musical revolution to those around him. "We were little boys who had fun playing," he once said. "We didn't feel like we were doing anything big. It was a kind of sport."

In the end, Ottens only admitted one big regret: Sony developed the first Walkman, "the ideal application for the cassette," instead of Philips. "It still hurts that we didn't have one."

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/lou-ottens-dies/

 

I remember when cassette finally hit the consumer market, and what a vast improvement it was over 8 track tape. Besides the fact you didn't have to deal with that "clunk-clunk" as the 8 track switched channels, there was so much better sound quality from a cassette tape; the actual tape generally not recorded inside the tape case as with 8 track. So, much less 'wow & flutter' during playback.    Better still was recording your own cassette mix tapes from vinyl off of a quality turntable and stylus on better tape stock..

I kept one 8 track tape just for nostalgia...(Bad Company).   All the rest happily went to the landfill.

 

[redrum]

Too bad the machine eats them. I'll take Jimmy's 2 inch tapes if you please. 

[LedZeppfan1977]

I cannot say I miss them and I actually would prefer 8 tracks to cassettes if I hd to chose.  CD's are far better.  We are never going back there.  Too may times they would get caught and unraveled. 8 tracks too.   Miss neither but with 8 tracks i liked how the album cover was part of the 8 track.  With CD's I made the mistake very early of putting them in one of those jacket cases.  Then not keeping the original case it came in.  Big mistake. I thought they were far more durable.  Now I keep them in the sleeve they are bought in.  I have the entire Led Zeppelin collection with several copies of some albums like IV and PG.  Have Pink Floyd,  Bowie, Eagles, and have a new copy of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar.  Cassettes certainly served their purpose. I had plenty.  

[redrum]

 

[chef free]

Several hundred tapes of mostly bootleg 70's concerts, lots of Zeppelin, Allmans, Stones, Dead, Yes, Rush, etc...

[1975NQ]

I think I still have about 3 or 4 cases of cassette Zep boots from the late 80s, mostly Maxxell MX 90. Back then, I never paid for boots - just plugged into the underground network and traded tapes for tapes (through the mail). I never had good boots to trade with others, I just sent people blank tapes as a form of payment.

[Electrophile]

I have a couple of shoe boxes full of cassette tapes. Some are cassette singles, but most are blank cassette tapes that I used to tape songs off the radio. Talk about the good old days. I'm probably younger than most people here (I'm 39), but back in my day, we didn't have iTunes and Spotify and Google Play and YouTube to listen to our favorite songs whenever and wherever we wanted to. We had to get creative! I even have a few mixtapes people made for me that I enjoy listening to now and then.

*sigh*

I'd love to be a teenager again, just for a little while.