Cassettes still rock!

?  I guess i believed an earlier poster who said he had retired.  I just fired off an email to him.

I'm sorry to hear you lost your LP collection.  I have 100s of excellent/superb jazz CDs mastered in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.  About two dozen were done in Japan.  Many are Contemporary/Fantasy label.  Many are VSOP mastered by Bones Howe and the stereo CD versions were pressed on really bad vinyl in the early 60s.  Actually, most VSOPs sound better on CD than on the VSOP LPs, why I don't know.  Even classical 1980s CDs can sound better mastered (or just copied LP mastering) than the remasters in the past 10 years (the RCA opera series mono reissues a few years ago were TERRIBLE with boosted mids, chopped off highs, minimal bass and compressed sound).  This is not generally the case but it was then.  I have found 1980s Decca operas to sound inferior to the LPs.  So, depending on the genre and mastering, CDs can sound really bad or terrific from it's early manufacturing period.  

The Everest/Vanguard Ultra Analog classical issues of the 1994 that were 20 bit masterings sound slightly better than the 2008 24 bit remasterings.  Both are superb and faithful to the original silver/black LPs.

thanks for the tips on what to look for--back then i was just trying to replace mostly rock/folk albums and most of the CDs were awful (not all).  Interestingly the flood did not touch my classical music LPs--made me wonder if there was a message there.

I just had a client contact me to let me know that y'all think I'm "GONE".  I can assure you I'm still very much here and repairing Nakamichi cassette decks.  With my current backlog I hardly have time to follow these forums but have read a bit of this thread.  My two cents for sound quality:  If you haven't heard a Nakamichi cassette deck properly calibrated you haven't really experienced what the cassette format is capable of.  Having  been a servicer and retailer when all these decks were new I can assure you that all the claims by non-Nakamichi dealers that the deck they were trying to sell you was a "Nakamichi killer" are false.  Back then the Nakamichi franchise was highly sought after and difficult to get.  If you didn't have it you had to do anything you could to sell the products you could.  Recently I rebuilt a Dragon for a client who also owned an Akai R-R deck.  After listening to his Dragon he's selling the Akai because the Nakamichi out performed it so dramatically.  I'm not saying that the cassette format is superior to R-R.  If you have a really good quality R-R (Revox, Tandberg or the like) the benefits of higher tape speed and greater track width show through.  Mid line Japanese consumer R-R decks just generally don't sound very good.