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Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

They probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection.

To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.

A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good, but nobody wants to sink the money into doing it, when they can just sell crappy Type I tapes at hipster prices.

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>A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good

We had one of those 3 head tape decks growing up. The one we had a yamaha with dolby hx-pro,b,c and dbx. We used to tape cds and try to a/b compare them.

The 3 heads were erase, record and play, which meant you could monitor the recording as it was happening and adjust levels and such. (and results in the weird behavior of the "tape monitor" button on amplifiers).

With Cr2 tapes (not as good as metal, better than normal) and dbx noise reduction it was really hard to tell the difference between cds and tapes.

The quiet parts on tape clearly had hiss without the noise reduction and the dbx noise reduction made the tape sound like crap in your walkman, so we just used dolby C most of the time. The walkman was always the weak link, without cleaning those rubber rollers you could get some weird speed ups and slow downs on playback ("tilt a whirl effect").

DBX was really cool, there were also DBX-encoded LPs available for a while. Unfortunately it also made the recordings sound absolutely horrible if your player didn't support DBX (as you noticed), so it was a massive failure.

The days of physical media for music are generally over, but I just feel cassette tapes could have been so much better than they ended up being.

DBX records.. interesting.

Its hard because once a format is entrenched, unless its backward compatible with the previous media...

The market did try to make a better cassette in the late 1980s/early 1990s.. The "Digital Compact Cassette". they competed with Sony's "DAT" (Digital Audio Tape).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape

You are right though, at this point digital is king. Its weird thinking back to a time when music was physical, took up space and you had to think about what to play next (and have it with you). You were sort of stuck with the music you brought with.

The main thing I miss is the tactile feedback of seeking through tracks and DJ sets with a walkman. If I held the buttons down only halfway pressed, the output would remain patched in to the headphones and I could hear the pitched up scrubbing sound. Also - when the batteries were dying, it would still play for about an hour, but progressively slower until it finally stopped.

I'm bringing this back to the web for sure.

Vinyl's alive and growing every day. Lots of artists release on vinyl at the demand of their fans and there are plenty of thriving record stores with recent releases.

It's still a vanishingly tiny part of the overall music market, and most people buy them as decoration, rather than to play them.

I do have a turntable myself, a very interesting early/mid 70s direct drive table made by CEC in Japan and sold as a Visonik in Germany. But I primarily collect old albums that were released on vinyl as their primary format, I don't care much for new releases on vinyl.

I still maintain that the vinyl boom is a dad.

I think of all the music that is lost because it isn't digital.

My friend growing up had a huge jazz record collection. He once pointed out that only a small number of them got converted to CD format.

People still buying cassettes are doing it for the LoFi sound anyways. They know their market.

People who will spend $500 on a mediocre tape deck?

It looks fancy enough and you can show your friends how retro you are. Sure a CD player would be better in every way, but everyone has those. Sound is really secondary here.

you can show your friends how retro you are.

My hobbies and the things I spend my discretionary money on are superior to other people’s hobbies and the things they spend their discretionary money on.

Why not just get an actual 70s/80s vintage tape deck instead?

Because they're i) mechanical and often need to be repaired and ii) shit. Seriously, tape is fucking awful for all use cases except "no other formats exist at this point in time", and that was true in 1982, but not today.

Tapes were pretty durable. Degraded tapes at least played, unlike scratched CDs which could be be effectively ruined pretty easily. Plus portable tape players could be jostled around during playback with effecting anything, while cheap portable CD players would cut out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA - "better than you don't remember". This is an interesting watch if you've got the time.

I use the tape deck in my car more than the CD player, and almost as much as I use the radio.

Granted, that's mostly because I have one of those tape-to-3.5mm adapters, but even the actual tapes I pop in every once in awhile are more convenient than CDs, not to mention more space-efficient.

People still have CD players?

I just picked up an SCPH-1001 (original PS1) on eBay for 25 bucks. With the multi A/V out into a tube stereo, CDs sound fantastic. Not very convenient but a nice option.

The PlayStation really isn't a very good CD player. Its controls are clunky, and it has uneven frequency response and high distortion. But I guess it's less relevant, since you're feeding it to a tube amp anyway ;-)

Well it's piped through a mixer first, and cmon, it was 25 bucks :)

Yea it hasn't been long enough for them to be thrown out yet. Most cars still have them too.

People are still selling top-end cassette decks for $2000+ https://www.ebay.com/b/Nakamichi-Dragon/71574/bn_59488707

The tape deck manufacturers today know what's up. Nobody is trying to get serious hi-fi out of tapes anymore. There are cheaper and more effective ways of doing that today.

People using tapes are looking specifically for the imperfections of the medium. Trying to get perfect reproduction out of one would be like selling a synthesizer that only produces the most perfect, clean sine wave. Nobody wants that. The distortion is the instrument.

No of course not, it would be a waste of money to force cassette tapes into having decent sound quality. Anyone who cares about that is going to be using either lossless files or a good modern lossy codec.

What people want is the shitty version of cassette tape, the one they grew up listening to on their birthday present portable tape players. Probably tapes recorded on a middling-quality player from an LP.

And I get it. If I were to buy a classic car of some sort, you can absolutely bet it would have a tape deck, and I would gladly use it.

> the one they grew up listening

The biggest market for cassettes today is for people who never experienced them before.

Well said. E.g. - There’s a lotta love out there for DACs with limited bits (e.g. - 10 bit digital to analog converters in low end 80s synths)

FM8 doesn’t sound quite like a DX100, and all that...

Not out of cassette tapes maybe, but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHSz9Gi-II

All I want is speed control on a cassette player. It'd be great for sampling for lo-fi music.

Check out Amulets (a great musician) who once sold a variable speed tape player in his shop [1]

There's also the fascinating OM-1 Cassette Tape synthesizer [2] -- it varies the pitch of the tape to produce different sounds.

[1] https://amulets.bandcamp.com/merch/modified-variable-speed-t...

[2] https://ask.audio/articles/om-1-cassette-tape-synthesizer-is...

Quality/higher-end cassette players for playing generally lo-fi music? Something's wrong here.

I mean, in the article one guy says that he managed to compress and put 3 songs onto 1 floppy and was satisfied with the listenable end result.

Maybe it was all 8-bit?

Dithered 8-bit is approximately the same / slightly better noise floor as a cassette anyway, so if that's the market they're trying to compare to it's "reasonable". (Still silly as hell IMHO, but whatever makes people happy!)

Do tapes recorded with all those features gracefully degrade to be playable on regular tape-decks, or do you need a decoder module for them?

If you do need a decoder, why not just use the tape as a digital backup tape, and write a high-bitrate FLAC file to it? A decoder is a decoder.

HX-Pro is a system to automatically adjust the bias level when recording, in order to increase headroom. It is only needed on the recording device, and improves playback quality on all tape decks.

Dolby B/C/S is needed on both the recording and playback decks, as it changes the frequency response to boost high-frequency sound quality.

Nobody buys a cassette today because they are looking for the highest quality possible, the most pristine reproduction.

I would even venture to say that a distinctive low quality sound would be preferable, if it sounds like a digital it's not so fun anymore.

If you dont care about quality, why would you spend $500

For the same reasons people spend $10k on a mechanical watch with much worse performance than a $10 quartz.

> if it sounds like a digital it's not so fun anymore

There's a DSP for that. Or ten.

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