Wanted : Your Experiences With Analog Tape

[garyb]

you're a sharp guy....

[Eanna]

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.c ... -recovery/

Fixed link, sorry about that..

There's alot of hits in Google for "bring back cassette"!
The hipster generation are growing up...

[tlaskows]

Hi,

The link does not open on a MacBook Pro with latest Chrome. Anyone else have this issue?

-Tom

[Eanna]

Sorry dude, fixed the link above..

[garyb]

cassettes were convenient. they traveled well and worked well in cars. they sucked, however. as the article states, there is quite a big difference between 2" tape and a cassette's performance. reel-to-reel tape doesn't usually get caught up in the pinch roller destroying the tape, either. i guess that's because reel-to-reel decks actually get cleaned....

[Eanna]

Ah cassettes...
They may have been cheap and cheerful, but for many of us, our memories of early music purchases are framed in a little folding box that held a cassette.
That, and I'll wager the majority of this community's earliest recordings were to a cassette - be that on a simple ghettoblaster, or on the Tascam four-track that your friend's friend had...

Anyone recall the XDR tone at the start of cassettes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjbhsFbvBUg
On our half-decent Hifi at home, the promise of high fidelity playback was enhanced (in my ten-year-old mind at lease) with the sound of those rising octaves!
Seems it was an EMI technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_(audio)
We got Now That's What I Call Music 2 (UK-centric pop compilation) on cassette in early 1984, had that XDR thing going on... First song on Side Three was Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood... With Trevor Horn's hyper-80's sound, and the Dolby B switch engaged on the tape deck, that first E chord was a real "this is the sound of the future!!" moment for me!

I never even heard of Studers or 2-inch tapes until about 2008/9 when I started into my "music production on a computer" vibe, picking up the odd Future Music mag in the local newsagents in town... I'm sure those machines were great!

I occasionally promise myself, to resurrect the nice Aiwa tape deck in the attic, and run modern synths thru cassette... But, I have never done it.

[Eanna]

Let's not forget Kensuguro's wonderful VHS emulation modular patch!
http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=26172

And Voidar's device wrapping of Ken's patch:
http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=26202

There's even a MaxForLive patch emulating a cassette...
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/devic ... p-cassette

[dante]

Well, theres always an app for that...

Cassette app

cassette_app.jpg (30.08 KiB) Viewed 1613 times

Many - in - fact - Some even with moving spools !!

[Eanna]

Ha! When I saw that pic, I thought - my, that's a wide cassette!

While some kids have attempted to put iPhones into cassette decks on older cars (http://boingboing.net/2015/09/03/car-ca ... n-for.html) - if you handed this iPhone to me Dante, I'd probably have done the same myself