Whats so special about .......?

Voyager2002

googler wrote: »

Sure, who needs that Mona Lisa and all those big, heavy paintings cluttering up the galleries. Let's photograph them with a compact digi camera, and post 10x8 prints on the walls, then we can throw the paintings out and make the gallery smaller... Nobody will notice the difference, will they?

I would agree if you were talking about vinyl. (My Linn CD player originally sold for two thousand pounds and it sounded pretty good, but the music it provided was really not in the same league as that given by a record and a decent turntable.) However, cassettes are a very poor way of storing music: even at best they lack depth and definition, and there is so much to go wrong!

googler

Voyager2002 wrote: »

I would agree if you were talking about vinyl. (My Linn CD player originally sold for two thousand pounds and it sounded pretty good, but the music it provided was really not in the same league as that given by a record and a decent turntable.) However, cassettes are a very poor way of storing music: even at best they lack depth and definition, and there is so much to go wrong!

I'm talking about the folly of digitising any lossless source onto mp3, with the quality and data loss that entails.

Is there so much more can go wrong with cassettes in comparison to vinyl, or CD? Do tell.

daveyj792

Do you not remember cassettes? When a bit of the tape would get bent for no reason. Or some of it would come slightly out and you would try to put it back in but the whole thing would get mangled out and go all over the place. Having to sit there for hours with a pencil winding it back in again while trying to get your cat to stop attacking the tape. Then there is the whole, having to listen to the album wherever it happened to be wound to at that point instead of being able to play a particular song you liked. Sure, you could spend 5 minutes rewinding to the beginning of the tape, but it could take a lot of fast forwards and rewinds to find the beginning of a particular song you wanted to listen to and you couldn't easily listen to it on repeat.

No, lets be honest. Cassettes were pretty crap.

almillar

googler - a joke, surely? Cassettes are the most fragile way to store music. I certainly wouldn't call them lossless either!
If your tape deck goes wrong, it could shred the tape. If that thin, fragile tape snaps, what do you do? If a magnet gets near them....
Same as VHS - digitising is a far safer way.
MP3 is an old and out of date format these days. AAC is far better. If you're worried about loss, use a lossless digital format like FLAC.

googler

daveyj792 wrote: »

Do you not remember cassettes? When a bit of the tape would get bent for no reason. Or some of it would come slightly out and you would try to put it back in but the whole thing would get mangled out and go all over the place. Having to sit there for hours with a pencil winding it back in again while trying to get your cat to stop attacking the tape. Then there is the whole, having to listen to the album wherever it happened to be wound to at that point instead of being able to play a particular song you liked. Sure, you could spend 5 minutes rewinding to the beginning of the tape, but it could take a lot of fast forwards and rewinds to find the beginning of a particular song you wanted to listen to and you couldn't easily listen to it on repeat.

No, lets be honest. Cassettes were pretty crap.

I'm looking across the room at a stack of 180 of the blighters, and that's before I count those in the garage and the loft. I don't 'remember' them as vintage tech, I still use them day-to-day.

Yes, there have been the occasional one or two that have failed, but out of the thousands that I've used since 1973 or thereabouts, that's hardly a significant failure rate. You sound as though you and your pets were less than careful with them. I have no pets, and keeping clean, well-maintained cassette decks seems to have paid dividends in keeping my failure rate low....

googler

almillar wrote: »

googler - a joke, surely? Cassettes are the most fragile way to store music. I certainly wouldn't call them lossless either!
If your tape deck goes wrong, it could shred the tape. If that thin, fragile tape snaps, what do you do? If a magnet gets near them....
Same as VHS - digitising is a far safer way.
MP3 is an old and out of date format these days. AAC is far better. If you're worried about loss, use a lossless digital format like FLAC.

I'm talking about the folly of converting to mp3 in response to this comment -

malcumms7898 wrote: »

I saw quite a good device recently that converts cassettes to mp3s, so they can't use the excuse that they have a large cassette collection. :P

You don't need to lecture me about whether not FLAC is better than mp3.

As I mentioned in the prev reply, I've used thousands of cassettes since 1973, and I think I can count the failures on the fingers of one or both hands.

Contrast that, where one failure only affects one tape, leaving the rest unharmed, with hard drive failure, which can lose a whole library. Is one inherently worse than the other?

Mp3 is lossy in that it is designed with deliberate data reduction in mind.

Please tell me what deliberate data reduction was designed into the compact cassette system.

almillar

googler - I agree 100% that these vinyl or cassette to MP3 devices are pretty pointless - just connect your own record player/tape deck to the computer through an amp or whatever to 'record'.
Is one worse than the other, yes, cassette is worse than 'digital' (please don't tie me to MP3, I don't use it if I can avoid.
Computers need to be backed up. Hard disk drives, SSDs, memory sticks/cards can ALL fail and if anyone is reading this and doesn't have a backup, go and do it NOW.
MP3 is lossy, and we've already discussed alternative formats.
Compact cassettes of course are not designed to lose quality on purpose. The do inherently have his from the motion of the tape over the head, can suffer from 'wow and flutter' from not going at a 100% constant speed, and can of course fail (like any technology). Something tells me it can't quite reach the fidelity (range from high frequencies to low frequencies) of other fomats too. I'm currently trying to repair a Nakamichi 580 tape deck, so I hope I'm qualified to comment on how good cassette can get!