Blank cassette tape types and how to choose the right one | Hacker News Reader

Blank cassette tape types and how to choose the right one

theaudioowl.com

54 pointsderwiki59 comments

I got into watching techmoan and similar YouTubers who got me interested in vintage audio. I thought seriously about getting into tapes because I have nostalgia for them and saw you could make really great recordings w/ metal tapes and a deck that supports Dolby S…. Decks like that can be had on ebay but the metal tapes are crazy expensive, for what a deck like that costs plus two metal tapes you could probably get two minidisc recorders and 100 discs.

Today the new decks all use a cheap mechanism that is reliable but sounds awful. New tapes are ‘type 0’ frequently. On top of that it is really no fun to rewind so I gave up on getting a cassette deck but who knows, if a really elite deck shows up at the community reuse center I might grab it.

> it is really no fun to rewind

You gotta make a game of it. I crafted a tape rewinder made from an old ballpoint pen and bent paperclip that held the cassette as I whirled it around. Like a '80s fidget spinner.

i use two hands on a pencil and race. have to remember to slow down at the end though.

> it is really no fun to rewind

Does Dolby S have double-sided tapes? For regular cassette tapes I’ve never really had to worry about rewinding because after playing both sides you’re back at the beginning.

Dolby S is a type of noise reduction that’s done in the deck, and actively works on the audio stream as it’s being written to and read from the tape.

It’s best used with a high quality tape, but I believe it can be used with any of the 3 major tape types.

Do you have tips on a good tape deck model, or manufacturer that consistently made high quality decks? A friend gave me his old Sony TC-W365 which worked admirably, until recent mechanical failures.

Nakamichi is widely regarded as the highest quality manufacturer. The decks can be expensive and some of them are extremely complex to service.

/r/cassetteculture is a decent resource for info.

The best ones seemed to use direct drive motors.

In my opinion, the "god-tier" would be Revox B215 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revox_B215) and the Nakamichi Dragon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamichi_Dragon).

I've personally used the Revox in the late 80's and early 90's as a DJ in a college radio station. It was super durable (it had to be, in a punk environment). I don't have any experience with the Dragon but it looks cool and I see it has good performance.

I think anyone who adopts a tape deck these days had better be ready for getting it serviced. Aside from the mechanical stuff that just wears out, the electronics are likely to need work after 30+ years. Capacitors, mainly.

I have a TC-WE525 circa 1999 or 2000 that stopped working - when I would start a tape playing, it would play for a second, then stop, like it got to the end of the tape.

The belts disintegrate over time and must be replaced. I successfully repaired mine from a belt kit I was able to get on Amazon. It's not terribly easy to replace the belts but I did manage to do it.

One handy resource for tape deck belts, aside from the library of service manuals at hifiengine (whose user registration has been "under maintenance" for months, at least), is turntableneedles.com.

Despite the domain name they carry a large variety of belts for things well beyond turntables, and more importantly have a searchable resource to match belts to product models and OEM service manual numbers: https://www.turntableneedles.com/find10.asp

If they don't stock the belt, you can often find the same-sized belt elsewhere. But it helps immensely to know what you're looking for. They also stock tools designed for belt replacements. This helped me replace the belts in my old Realistic/Radio Shack boombox's deck.

Techmoan has fallen back to reviewing new and mostly lame products lately but back in the day he made 25+ videos where he brought some old audio equipment back to life by replacing belts. Sometimes he replaces capacitors but he does very little with electronics, but his mechanical repairs are highly effective.

Here is a generic repair of a very unusual tape deck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntV8gUsbIsk

I would repair the one you have or get a refurbished Sony from ebay like

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185721049456

those Sony(s) do need maintenance more than some decks but they are very available.

You know, there was a time when we used to save our programs on cassette tapes. I don't wanna go back there, but maybe some of the youngsters who are nostalgic for cassettes would like to try that out?

Maybe GitHub could have a 'save to cassette' button on repos and then make money by sending you the cassette? ("Only $9.95 + shipping & handling")

GitHub has some old software-on-cassette already. The best part is you don't need a cassette player to use it, just connect the headphone jack of your cellphone (if the manufacturer wasn't courageous enough to remove it) to the casette-in port of your favorite 8-bit machine and hit play on the WAV file from GitHub.

https://github.com/sonic2000gr/TI99

You can build a device to do this yourself over a serial port.

https://maker.pro/pcb/projects/make-uart-cassette-tape-inter...

I do this with an old TRS-80 and a digital voice recorder. I just made up a cable to hook them up.

I had the cassette drive for my C64, and I remember just how amazingly long it took to load and save even the most trivial things.

As a youngster, I did not enjoy aligning the cassette tape drive heads.

If you still have a working Acorn Electron or BBC Micro computer you can load software into it directly from a web page using only an audio cable with PlayUEF:

https://www.8bitkick.cc/playuef.html

New production, Type II cassette tapes are available from ATR Magnetics, e.g.: https://www.atrtape.com/products/atr-magnetics-colbalt-silve...

Back in the record days, I would record the first play of the record to tape, and then listen to the tape so that the record stayed in good condition.

Some of this article is just complete nonsense:

> Originally developed for studio and live applications, [metal] tapes will produce a low noise recording

No one ever used 2- or 4-track cassette recorders in a recording studio. They were used in basements and garages to make home recordings of amateur bands. And those 4-track recorders pre-dated metal tapes anyway. This guy is just making shit up as he goes along.

> metal tapes sound closest to a digital recording.

No, they don’t. They don’t sound anything like digital recordings and never did.

When music started being published on CD in the 80s, no one lamented cassettes going the way of the dinosaur. No one (records, yes). Now there’s a revival, fine. But admit that it’s nostalgia and different than digital, not better.

I regret I have only one upvote to give you.

I'm 52. I had lots of musician pals in the late 80s, 90s, and early 21st century (still do!). In that era no piece of kit was more coveted by those folks than the 4-track recorders from Tascam or Teac or whatever that worked with regular cassettes. They were game-changers for amateur and aspiring musicians!

But then digital audio happened, and real quick anybody with a decent laptop suddenly had access to recording capabilities that only a few years before were only available in professional studios. Shit, Apple even started shipping, for free, a home recording tool that opened the door for a lot of people.

Nobody who lived the cassette era, though, misses using them for playback or mixing down to them for demos. Everything about music recording and playback is astoundingly better now than it ever was back then. The level of sonic fidelity you can have in your living room for a couple hundred bucks today is staggering. Hell, the audio quality you get out of a basic iPhone and the earbuds it ships with is stunning vs. what we had access to in 1985 or 1995.

The struggle was real before digital. I always tried to use Type IV Metal tapes and type C NR when supported.

The entire line of Metal tapes by TDK were awesome.

Then there was the mythical MA-XG which retailed for something like $20/tape in the 1990's. They go for $120 on eBay today https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313... I did eventually buy two of them. I tested one (it lived up to the hype) and the other might still be unopened.

Can I get a DSP filter or something to simulate tape and skip the tape :-)

It seems like everything about records and tape is not really technically superior and the sound signature could be emulated.

Yeah, I really don't get the nostalgia, but maybe it's because I lived much of my life in the vinyl and then cassette tape eras. There are so many downsides to both. Vinyl records take up a lot of space and they degrade just a little bit every time you play them unless you have a very expensive laser player and even then...). Cassettes also degrade quite quickly and the sound was never that great with cassettes. Of the two, though, vinyl nostalgia is a bit more understandable because you can watch the record rotate and the theory of operation is quite simple.

Yes, there is some great tape emulation out there (uHe's Satin is killer https://u-he.com/products/satin/), but tape machines aren't desirable for the sound alone - they can be instruments in their own right. Allesandro Cortini from NiN is an artist that uses tape very effectively in his live performances for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdbgEHsPkes).

See also DJing (TJing?) tapes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urGmmkUDi20

How do you figure? An analog impression directly mirrors reality, digital is just an approximation. So digital seems inherently inferior.

> An analog impression directly mirrors reality

A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably.

Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape.

Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically)

--------

In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out.

Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them.

Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.

They’re both approximations. In this case and most cases, the digital approximation is much closer to the original than the analog approximation.

Depends on how you think about it. From a data perspective, digital definitely captures less information than analog. We’re talking about the difference between discrete (digital) and contiguous (analog) data.

I agree with saying that digital more accurately reproduces that data, because of the playback technology used.

Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal. In other terms, it is random noise applied to the digital data stream to “smooth out” the discrete differences between one sample to the next.

The thing people find pleasing about analog is the inaccuracies in the playback, in the form of harmonic distortion.

I like that harmonic distortion btw, but love digital for clarity.

Digital does not definitely capture less information that analog. It depends on the exact parameters of the digital and analog channels being compared.

We have the math which tells you, for a given set of analog channel parameters, how much information it can carry (bits per second) as a theoretical maximum. If you pick a digital channel which exceeds that bits per second value, it is better than that analog one.

> Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal.

It is in fact magnetic tape audio recording that adds jitter, in the form of the bias signal: a high frequency signal mixed with the recorded material, which degausses the tape so that it gets magnetized in a linear way, proportional to the signal. Without the degaussing jitter of the bias signal, the quality will be very poor due to hysteresis.

What you're referring to is dither. I don't think it's required when the A/D conversion has a resolution that is better than the noise floor of the signal being sampled. I suspect it's beneficial in crude applications like eight bit telephony.

> digital definitely captures less information than analog

If your sampling frequency is high enough, digital captures the signal perfectly. Analog captures less of that signal, and a bunch of noise.

Neither is true. Whether a digital or analog channel carries more information and less noise depends entirely on the channel parameters.

An ideal analog channel is noise-free and has infinite frequency response. An ideal digital channel carries infinite bits per second (and can be carried by the former analog channel).

All digital communications is ultimately carried in an analog medium: e.g. twisted pair ethernet cable or what have you. The performance of that communication is within the limits established by the analog container.

The simple analog coding techniques, though, are inflexible with regard to reallocating noise. E.g. an analog channel is noisy, we can use it to transmit digital information that is noise free, such as UTF-8 text. We reallocate the noise into a bandwidth limitation.

An analog signal recorded to tape is subject to all manner of distortions that don't apply to digital recordings, including frequency-dependent phase shift, crosstalk between tracks, print-through, tape hiss, and saturation.

I can never buy the argument that analog recordings are better _because_ they are more faithful. I do think they can sound very beautiful and be aesthetically pleasing, however.

The two analog mediums I mentioned are both pretty flawed and difficult to get clean sound out of.

Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest.

Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.

One of the non-obvious reasons vinyl albums often sound better than their digital counterparts is that the mastering process for cutting vinyl is extremely “hands on” and is typically performed by senior mastering engineers working with top of the line equipment. The very act of having an old set of ears listening critically to each track, and making subtle changes like shelving equalization, surgical multiband compression, and stereo width reduction in the low end (to keep the needle from bouncing), will often improve the sound of an album before it’s even sent to the vinyl cutting machine.

This is underacknowledged.

A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback.

Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.

Great digital is absolutely best approach if you want great sound.

You CAN get really lovely sound out of an analog (vinyl) setup, for sure. But it's going to be expensive and fiddly, whereas the digital shit tends to just work.

And nobody can reliably differentiate between high-bitrate streamed digital and CD source. It can't be done.

Not trolling, but can you elaborate on vinyl's flaws? My understanding is that the width of the groove corresponds directly to the frequency. Issues of dust etc are just implementation problems, which can be resolved by placing a small vacuum near the stylus (for example). But maybe I don't fully understand how it works.

Off the top of my head:

For the disks: Vinyl can get permanently scratched. The disks can get warped. The playback needle can put too much force on the groove and damage it.

For the playback: It's incredibly difficult to get a motor to spin the disk at a perfectly uniform rate, so you get distortions in the frequencies being played back known as "wow" and "flutter". The groove is not the audio exactly as recorded, but instead equalized to lower bass frequencies so that the needle doesn't skip out of the groove. This RIAA equalization has to be undone for playback, and if it is done with analog components, it's never going to be exact.

I'm desperately trying to find the exact source, but Zappa [allegedly(!)] stated that he preferred his lps to be 18-22 mins due to that being the best audio quality available, given the physical size of a disk versus the size/ quality of the grooves thereon.

Closest I can find so far - https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-al...

Yes (depending on the modulation), just as the bits on a CD corresponds directly to the frequency.

Vinyl records have limitations determined by design decisions and physical properties.

For example deep bass and stereo separation are reduced on vinyl or the stylus would jump out of the groove.

And vinyl records have a lot more noise than good digital formats.

Temperature and Humidity literally warps the Vinyl.

Even if you had perfect humidity control + temperature control vacuum chambers storing these things, they'll still degrade over time due to other aging issues.

It doesn't even take that much time before these older technologies (vinyl, tape, etc. etc.) degrade permanently.

They have inherent noise that you can't escape nor can they faithfully reproduce low frequencies. Variation in all of the mechanical parts affects the sound reproduction and they are damaged on every playback.

I think implementation problems is a good summary of vinyl’s flaws. In theory, it’s great.

For some genres of music, clean sound is not what you want.

True true. I like the sound of music from the early days of recording ... foxtrots, rags, blues ... that only sound right with that pre-tape, pre-mike ambience. A 'cleaned-up' 1909 version of "Shine on harvest moon" is a crime against humanity. (Like colorizing 'Citizen Kane', or Laurel and Hardy.) That's the way people heard it then. And (up until the depression, anyway) they bought it and danced to it by the millions.

Squeaky-clean 'fidelity' can work against good music. It's like purple fluorescent lights ... antiseptic.

You want you music to sound less like what was recorded? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

I think we're talking across purposes, I was referring to recording on tape.

What we need is an audio playback tool allowing you to select VST plugins into the playback chain. We already have VST's mimicking tape playback (and they're good!). We even have VST's mimicking LP vinyl playback - complete with dust and hiss. Plug those into your audio playback app and voila! You can re-create any of the old sounds you want!

Soundsource [0] on macOS can do this! I run Chow Tape [1] and it performs quite admirably. I've never measured the latency but it has never affected me much. I'm certain a similar solution is available on Linux.

To be fair, (quite janky, ime) VST hosts are available for Windows, via the music player (e.g. Musicbee) or system-wide, but those have never been reliable. Your mileage will vary.

[0] https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ [1] https://github.com/jatinchowdhury18/AnalogTapeModel/tree/dev...

Have any VST's to recommend for those things?

Nothing baffles me more than cassette nostalgia. They were such SHIT for fidelity and quality, and so prone to failure!

Digital music on the go is an unalloyed win. With a nice enough rig I guess you MIGHT be able to tell CD source from streamed digital in your living room, but it's unlikely.

Vinyl is legitimately fun to use, and with decent gear you'd be surprised by how good it can sound (way better than cassette), but it's nowhere near CD or digital. It is, however, a bit more visceral and intentional, which is nice.

It's odd to make a guide to objectively choosing the "best" cassette. Someone who has chosen cassette tape as a medium has already transcended objectivity and has motivations that do not lie within the plane of rational discourse. You could choose the Maxell XLII because its flat black finish looks bitchin' and that would be as good a reason as any other.

Pretty nonsensical comment considering this is a common title for the kind of article which says "if you want X, choose A; if you want Y, choose B". And indeed, second paragraph has a summary:

Ferric – Type I – high hiss, good bass response Chrome – Type II – Low hiss, good treble response Ferrichrome – Type III – Low hiss, even bass and treble Metal – Type IV – Low hiss, balanced frequencies

yup, I bought a random cassette deck ebay that I'm sure was worthy in its time, and only use it to listen to vaporwave / synth music

you can't really tell how much wow and flutter it has with that genre

it's almost a feature

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