Not wanting to push my luck, I archived it. On Minidisc.
I have quite a large CD collection. Two albums from the same era are unplayable due to oxidization, same band Banco De Gaia, pressed at the same plant in the UK too.
And surprisingly, the quality is not too bad for my non-audiophile ears. Especially if you go beyond Type-I cassettes
Yea, I use Type II cassettes to record on my Tascam 246. I did an experiment where I recorded a track I made digitally to tape and then back into the DAW. I A/B'd them and struggled to differentiate. That being said, I have used some really poor quality Type II tapes, where the difference was obvious.
It comes in bursts but when he's into it, he has a ton of fun, The manual nature of it is confusing for him (he's used to instant gratification), like waiting a few seconds at the beginning of the tape so he can record, but something about a cassette makes the whole process easier to explain and, I hope, to understand and visualize.
A lot of mixes and singles are unavailable in electronic form. Or maybe they were until they weren’t Anything can disappear in an instant on streaming platforms.
But back to my argument. * M-DISC isn't a regular DVD. * It is expensive and has low capacity in comparison to HDD. * To read it, you need a reader/drive, where HDDs are already the drive in itself.
And yeah, I've produced, mixed and mastered the whole album, so I can say for sure, the cassettes sounds much much better and organic then the _same_ master on Spotify. It's a subtle mixture of tape compression, saturation, hiss, eqing, jitter that makes it somehow lively. And it will sound slightly different on every owns tape player.
At any rate I don't think Master - Tape - Spotify would be likely to sound better than just Master - Spotify.
But the codec used for streaming does some quality degradation that is for sure.
So yeah, it is always better to listen to CD, Tape or what not then to some streaming codec music.
There is something very special, if you put the cassette into _your_ tape deck and run it.
You cannot replace this with something digital/virtual.
I would love to get deeper into large format photography. The few 4x5 negatives I've taken are breathtaking in their detail.
Our main reason is that people want to buy music at gigs and just offering solitary paper sheets with download codes doesn't really work. A tape is tangible and (for our audience) sexier than CDs and with the download code included many buy the tape even without having a suitable playback device as you observed as well.
For musicians tapes have the advantage that you can totally DIY them much easier and with less up-front cost than vinyl. And they rake less space and weigh less.
Vinyl starts to get economic after after 150 or 200 pieces depending on the pressing plant.
If you never saw a smashed cassette on the side of the road with a reel of magnetic ribbon tangled in the weeds and bushes then you wouldn't understand.
But I don't miss wow and flutter, or tape hiss. Or the fragility of the tapes. For years, I had a recording of Joe Jackson in the late '70s, when he played at a local club. A local radio station simulcast the concert, and I was able to record most of it on a C-90 tape. That tape wore out long before I could digitize it into something more permanent.
seductivebarry•5mo ago
wrs•5mo ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•5mo ago
Tapes and floppies are "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about malicious controllers embedded in flash media or hard drives.
Paper is "obsolete" if you don't have to worry about cost per square inch of displaying static information, or about running without batteries.