Tapes

Cassettes were great for making compilations and mixtapes.

Whenever I bought a new album (on vinyl) I would record it onto a blank cassette for playing on my Walkman.

I hardly ever bought albums on cassette though - maybe 10 in my lifetime.

Cassettes did serious damage to vinyl sales from 1983 onwards though - that's one thing I really resent about them - as they're much inferior to either vinyl or CD as a listening format.

In 1988, four out of every six new albums sold was on cassette. Shocking.

While cassettes are noisy and wear. They actually like vinyl have a decent dynamic range. When we first had CD's they were clipped so badly that I preferred the cassette. The CDs sounded lifeless in comparison. Now so bands have gone back and remastered their CDs, those new versions of CDs sound amazing.

I digitized my own cassettes to high bitrate MP3s before dumping them. What I noticed though on some cassettes the pitch was off, because of wear on the cassette but also the belts on my cassette player needed replacing. I had to readjust to the correct pitch on remastered CDs. Played havoc tuning the guitar to it.

Funny - I have the opposite view re CDs.

I love the sound of early CDs (1983-1993 or so) as many of them were flat transfers / quiet pressings with plenty dynamic range.

The loudness wars saw some terrible remasters in the 1990s and 2000s. Really compressed and brickwalled.

Early MP3 sounded awful, like music played through a metal pipe.

CDs have a vastly higher dynamic range than both vinyl and tape. 50dB for tape, 60dB for vinyl, 96dB for CD. dB is logarithmic, 3dB is double.

As mentioned above, you may have your timings backwards and be remembering the loudness wars crap CDs of the early 00s, two decades after CDs first came out. 1980s CDs did not clip; but some people found the undistorted audio lifeless versus the various, potentially pleasing, distortions on vinyl or less often tape.

As for tapes - any new issues are inherently crap cause Dolby is dead. Can't licence the encoding for new recordings, and you can't get new kit that encodes or decodes it cause Dolby pulled licencing over a decade ago. To even get the best out of older tapes (which could be very, very good if recorded on good kit with good tape) you would want a late 90s deck, with new tapes and possibly new capacitors - a lot of money, time and effort.

There were even 120 and 150 minute tapes. They snapped. A lot.

Putting the labels on the edge of the case or doing your own cassette art.

Then one would break and you'd cello-tape it back together and record it tape to tape to another. Double speed recording. Then those cases with the plastic trays.

MiniDisc and HiMD had the same buzz.

I found my old walkman last week. It’s 25 years old….. and dusty.

I found my collection of 204 tapes… dusty too. stuck a couple of batteries in and found all the radio presets were the French stations I was listening to over there. Sound is as impressively crystal clear as I remember….

I used to have an amazing Aiwa walkman, made from titanium. It broke at some stage, and I kept it in a drawer for a few years, but I really regret throwing it out in a clear out.

I still have all my tapes, boxed away in my dads attic room.

Mine will just end up in the bin, after I die. 😂

I was in town the other day and spotted something odd as I passed by a car! On the dashboard was one of those yokes that you could keep tapes in and there were about five or six tapes in it.

Some awful quality recording quality. Lot of live recording.

I think some of those concerts were recorded with a tape recorder outside because the sound was so muffled you barely make out which song it was on a couple I bought .

I like a good quality CD. But I do like the analogue quality of tapes and vinyl. CDs and Vinyl just not as portable as tapes.

Favourite format was mini disc and HiMD.