I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.
I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.
But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)
Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.
We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.
The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)
Instant, infinite choice = permanent anxiety. The most relaxed I've been in decades was being stuck in an airport overnight, with a broken phone, and a book that was not as good as the show. No where to go, no one expecting anything from me, no notifications, no choice, no anxiety. Finite is fine by me.
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette
It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:
The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.
Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.
The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.
My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.
Edit: according to gemini AI:
* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)
* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)
So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
The measurements you are linking to are showing the level of distortion (HD3 v level) not dynamic range! The Y-axis on the graphs is showing the 3rd harmonic in dB in relation to the mV given in on the x-axis. This has absolutely nothing to do with dynamic range and it is also not the signal-to-noise-ratio. The fundamental frequency in those measurements was at 315 Hz. HD3 refers to Harmonic Distortion at 3rd level.
It's just annoying to post unverifiable numbers without a credible source and expect others to do the hard work of verifying it (or just take you at face value, probably). It has nothing to do with AI except insofar as your own feelings on AI convinced you this is a reasonable method of communication.
Recording with Dolby-B on a Sony consumer level integrated Hi-Fi produced pretty solid sounding cassettes back in the day, given you have used TDK's chrome or metal blanks.
Some gotchas:
- Loudness wars were just beginning.
- Many CDs had some analog stages in its recording/mastering stages, so none of them was sounding "razor sharp" anyway.
Yesterday, I have listened Depeche Mode's Best of album on an Mechen M-30 with a good but not exquisite pair of Philips neck headphones, encoded as FLAC, and it sound superbly enjoyable. While I love vinyl, no, I won't return back to cassette (even though I have a nice deck), thank you.
I just produced an album release on Type I cassette. High quality Type I (ferro oxid) is almost comparable to Type II, but you need the correct bias settings while recording. Practically the 8bits/50db is non-sense. Really. Maybe on a very bad tape deck you have a signal-noise-ratio of 8bit from silence to the first noticeable noise? But the actual music you are playing has much more dynamic range possibilities. Tbh my recordings on tape sound more dynamic then on Spotify.
Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)
CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.
Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D
About 5 years ago or so I was able to collect my Dad's C64 collection from my Mom's house, buy some new cables and an official C64 monitor off of eBay, and gift him his old computer back for Christmas.
I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...
I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.
The point about fidelity/quality is moot anyway when most people are listening to overcompressed[1] music on crappy bluetooth speakers and/or in a noisy environment.
It is not necessarily a protocol/technology issue, more a cultural one. Most people are just not looking at quality first and will buy whatever is cheap, loud and has the form factor they want. Music is so compressed nowadays that they don't even hear a difference between crappy and better quality speakers.
> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium
So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity
It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.
>but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.
> Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me,
> There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing.
I had this conversation with someone at the weekend. It's hard to find new music on Spotify because it's too easy to find stuff you already like.
I'm in my early 50s. I grew up in the 80s, in a fairly rural part of the UK with basically one music shop nearby and the next nearest a good four hours each way on the bus.
In 1988 when I was 15, a load of awesome albums came out that I really wanted and mostly couldn't afford. I bought Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, Iron Maiden - Seventh Son, 808 State - Newbuild, and probably a couple of others. I'm sure I got into FLA and and The Pixies round about then too.
These tapes were about a tenner each and I had to repair quite a lot of Amstrad satellite receiver power supplies in my weekend job, and if I spent it all on tapes I'd have no money left for beer.
An awful lot of my tapes were pirate copies from friends, which we swapped at school. To this day I'm convinced that Appetite For Destruction was mixed to sound "right" when copied onto a battered old TDK D90 that's been rattling around in your schoolbag for a month by your mate's big brother who bought the CD because he's got a good job earning nearly £5/hr working on a fishing boat and has a really nice stereo.
The upshot of this is that I listened to a lot of things that I simply did not like very much, because it was new and I hadn't listened to it a million times. That being said, I don't think there was much I heard and thought "yeah I don't care for this at all", but there were definitely tapes I listened to that I wouldn't have picked out by myself.
I wouldn't have listened to 10,000 Maniacs if someone my dad worked with hadn't put it on in the car, and gave me his copy of the tape. I might not have listened to Dire Straits so much if another of my dad's friends hadn't given me a handful of bootlegs of their concerts and a copy of Making Movies, and one of the bigger kids in high school (hi Aaron, hope you're doing well) hadn't given me a pirate copy of Brothers in Arms.
I've since bought all of these on at least one other format.
I wouldn't have listened to Suzanne Vega I don't think, if my aunt hadn't given me a copy of her eponymous first album for Christmas when I was about 12 or 13 (it hadn't been out long in the UK), and I absolutely love Suzanne Vega. Loved her stuff from the first note of "Cracking". Have you ever listened to or watched something that you wanted to play at ten times speed just so you could put it into your head faster, then play it again at one tenth speed so you could pick up all the details?
This doesn't even touch on mixtapes, where someone else puts the effort in to curate a collection of things they think you will like, that represents who you are to them. Mixtapes were beautiful.
Now, with any luck, people will get into media they can hold in their hand. Even just things like MP3s on an SD card in some homebrew Arduino blob of a player.
There's more to music than just the noise it makes.
Also, if you bought an album, that meant getting some tracks you liked, and some you did not. Oddly enough I bought Suzanne Vega's self-titled album with 'Cracked' on it (off a guy in a stall off Brick Lane, only a fiver), and some of them are fantastic some slightly less so. Some albums I own I turn off one or two of the tracks as they are rubbish, but that was slightly more difficult if you had to fast-forward past them on a tape.
That said I listen to a lot of music on youtube, and it's a rare case where the dreaded 'algorithm' actually works to recommend things I had not heard before. I'm pretty sure that's where I learned of Unkle (UNKLE?) - who I _should_ have heard back in the day, but somehow never did.
(Incidentally, I found 'Daughter' recently, a UK band that is similar in tone to Suzanne Vega. Possibly also Heather Nova, although a bit more dreamy.)
I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online.
DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes.
I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.
I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.
But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)
Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.
We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.