What's In Your Tape Cassette Deck Tonight?


With cassette tape making a HUGE comeback in todays ultra-lame-digital-world - what's in your cassette decks these days?

Today, cassette tapes that are cool again are:

Oā€‹.ā€‹Lā€‹.ā€‹V. - Old Light Variations by Old Light
Problems by Wooden Indian Burial Ground

Rock on curlycassettes.com! So easily you make us smile
notec
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.
Wow, Rar1, I think we musta been twin sons separated at birth! I used to make some *killer* tapes using the hi-end gear (Tandberg, B&O, Revox, etc.) in the shop I worked for.

If you used a top-quality deck like the B&O 9000 and the very best tapes - TDK, Maxell, or Denon metal - and employed Dolby B HxPro to encode, the resultant sound quality was astonishing. I probably made 200 - 300 tapes back in the day and sure wish I could find them now - many good memories to be found in that 1/4 inch tape....

-RW-

PS: And I, too, cannot be bothered to make up playlists nowadays, don't know why that is...