What's In Your Tape Cassette Deck Tonight?

I missed the memo, too, but if I have a couple of pretty good ones if anyone is interested, send me a PM.

My most recent equipment purchase was a Nakamichi BX-300 deck, mainly to have something decent to play the 50-odd cassettes I made off-air in the Jazz Alive series during the late 1970s and 1980s. I have been flat-out amazed at the sonic quality of these things via the Nak deck.

Then I picked up some commercial cassette tapes, knowing how throughly they were dismissed at the time, and found some of them t as good as the better-sounding LPs and CDs. Couple of examples: "Oracle" by Michael Hedges, "Times Like These" by a Gary Burton group with Michael Brecker and John Scofield.

Back in the 70's and 80's, you would make cassette versions of your LPs to listen to as you had to preserve your LPs for special listening occasions. US LP production quality had become very mediocre. Extremely warped records with noisy surfaces were just so prevalent. It is not like pre-recorded cassettes were much better quality wise ... cheap, glued poorly made products with the noisiest type of tape available. When you purchased blank cassettes, you would seek out the chrome tape cassettes held together with screws that could handle Type II bias.

With all this though, cassettes were a good thing ... it made being an audiophile more of a real hobby, as opposed to listening in the digital age where it is just a pastime. I don't miss cassettes at all, but I do miss the hours I spent making mix tapes for my walkman, thinking about what songs flowed well together. Every weekend was a deep dive into the music. Trashed the tape deck about 15 years ago. Can't be bothered putting together a mix playlist for my iPod.

Rich

When I got back into vinyl, I was surprised how few pops and clicks got through to the speakers with a good turntable,arm and phono amp. Having given away my 1000 or so cassettes to Good Will, because I could not handle tape hiss and the wobble in sound, Are these areas which drove me crazy handled better today, or just tolerated better by others?

I did keep my Yamaha CK 720 deck. So if there is a resurgence I will sell it, so someone else can enjoy.