Why Cassettes?
write.hamster.dance
write.hamster.dance
At the same time her friend bought her a little Jensen walkman with a copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix on it. She loves it! So I bought her some blank cassettes and now she makes mixtapes by playing off the HomePod into the Jensen's microphone. Quality is shit but she's young and nobody will be more pleased than me (among other things, a semi-pro audio engineer) when she complains and asks for something better. At that point I'll figure out some unholy solution involving a computer and a headphone cable and a tape deck. So much more complicated! So much for progress.
It really is an ideal format. Cassette is perfect. Siri most assuredly is not.
Actually... as I write this, I realize you're hinting at something I think exists, in a form: a digital voice recorder. (Aka Dictaphone, since we're in the nostalgia thread.)
Edit: And right in front of me is a Tascam DR-40, which is a handheld recorder which takes stereo in (or internal mic) onto SD card. Very un kid friendly but simpler devices must surely exist.
And probably because of DRM/intellectual property/anti-piracy lockdown of consumer computing devices. The success of the iTunes ecosystem was because Napster was the statistically likely alternative future for the intellectual property industries.
Stereo recording and playback, SD card, only one giant "rec" button on the front panel, about three adjusting buttons (mp3 vs wav selection for recording, etc) on the back panel, and some on the sides. Naturally, it also has line/mic-in. Notably, it also works as a USB microphone; and I used mine as the audio interface for an old Thinkpad T42 with great success.
The sound quality is considered very good for its price.
Only thing that annoyed me was the slowness of forward and rewind. Also, as with all SD-card devices, there's still a lag when you switch from one file to another. Compared to the instant-on playback from a cassette, it does feel cumbersome.
I miss cassettes, too, even if I don't remember being really thrilled about all that ff-ing or rew-ing in the 90s.
I still use my Sandisk Sansa Clip bought in 2008 for podcasts and music. Use it almost every day. 2GB internal storage, no SD card. Sturdy, simple unit, great sound quality. Works flawlessly after all these years.
The Zoom H1’s run about $125 new.
A cassette recorder is $25 new despite all the additional material and logistics costs.
I was surprised that there is nothing in that price range.
I wound up buying a Tascam DR 05. It was about $125 at the time. eBay’d a year later. I just couldn’t commit to its interface abstractions and workflow.
It lived in the space where the software was motivated toward making design and manufacture easier rather than the use pleasurable.
If I have to menu dive every time I use it, why not just use my phone? Or tape since I can use a pen to name things…not scroll through 128 options one letter at a time.
And to be clear, not using my phone (or laptop) is why I buy hardware.
But playing music in public versus over headphones is more musical...it's not just what live musicians do, DJ'ing is also a thing.
As is audio engineering, which requires the willingness to do more work than seems reasonable to others to get the sound you want. And her workflow certainly looks a lot like that.
Run with --extract-audio to make that a single step? Could script it, too, maybe even including copying to the SD card.
I installed it on both my Sansa Clip Zip players, and kept it until the day the last one of them died. Unfortunately I couldn't find a new device for installing it and had to settle for a cheap player with surprisingly good hardware, but also the crappiest firmware I have ever seen.
> I installed it on both my Sansa Clip Zip players, and kept it until the day the last one of them died. Unfortunately I couldn't find a new device for installing it and had to settle for a cheap player with surprisingly good hardware, but also the crappiest firmware I have ever seen.
I still have some Sansa player with rockbox, used it for podcast and helped developing such functionality (podcasts/player support) in one media player app. But then I switched to Spotify, and lost interest in helping.
The other I could find was a dirt cheap USB 1.1 mini (not even micro) USB connector with bad battery life and almost no controls, no shuffle, no memory of where it last stopped playing etc.
I was blown away at how great it was for my kids. Just a simple player that mounts over USB as an SD card, you drag in music and bob's your uncle. I wanted to buy like 5 more but they were sold out.
Right.
A guy at the pizza place I worked at handed me a cassette called "Reckoning" for a band called R.E.M. Literally changed my life.
I'm sure a lot of others have stories like that.
Same guy asked to borrow a cassette of mine one day — said he wanted to dupe it. It was well known then that the only thing worse than a cassette was a cassette copy of a cassette so I made some sort of comment to that effect. "It will sound better than your original," he said smuggly. "My tape recorder has dbx."
Okay.
My one rule. Do not burn full albums!
This way it's more about sharing and promotion and less about stealing.
Archival is another story... which I'm honestly also working on, albeit slowly. Far too many of my songs have been disappeared.
I grew up at a strange intersection between physical media and internet piracy. In Russia. I don't remember anyone swapping music on physical media often (we did swap computer games on CDs tho, that's how I first experienced GTA Vice City), but in high school we had a better thing for music: VKontakte. It's the Russian Facebook, except it had, and to some extent still has, an enormous catalog of streamable MP3s. You have your personal playlist on your profile where you add music you find in the search or upload your own files. You can also post music to people's walls. As VKontakte was such an enormous part of everyone's life back then, everyone you knew IRL was on your friends list, and then some. And you could flip through their music (subject to privacy settings, but most had it open for everyone or for friends) and discover something amazing. People would often point to their VK playlist when asked "what kinds of music do you listen"; I still do sometimes. Ah, and of course the human-ness of all that — some people would edit the title and artist fields of their uploaded tracks to say something personal. This one is mostly gone though because VK started doing talking to recording companies a while ago and replaced all mp3s for which there is a licensed version with one.
IIRC Spotify has a somewhat similar feature where anyone can create a public playlist. You can even follow people. It does have some of the same properties, but it's not quite the same thing because it's a separate app. The social features in Spotify feel like an afterthought. The separate social graph doesn't help either.
> The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear.
This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video.
The largest groove deviation on vinyl - nominal 0dB - is around 23um. To add 60dB you have to multiply by 1000, which gets you 23mm. And increase the thickness correspondingly.
This has has tragic consequences for the size and weight of the disk.
Although it wouldn't be playable because the stylus would be pulling hundreds of Gs. For the short period for which it survived it would be hot enough to melt the vinyl. (Actually it would probably catch fire.)
You can imagine an optical reader - the've been built for for vinyl, but for some reason they never caught on - but if you're going to do that you may as well have a sub-micron digital data stream in a much smaller disk.
There were some ultrasonics technologies that were aborted when Phillips introduced the CD
While many time-machine inventors would go back and kill Hitler, I wouldn't. I would find the first person to draw a "digital sine wave" and handle that problem.
The "16-bit is enough" line is absolutely wrong, because quantisation noise has a very uneven spectrum which is nothing like white noise. It has peaks at certain subdivisions of the sample rate which are quite a way above inaudibility. Which is why dither was invented - to smooth out those peaks.
The "44.1kHz is enough" line is also wrong because there's no such thing as a perfect reconstruction filter. (It's mathematically impossible to build a perfect brick wall filter that works in real time.) Real reconstruction filters have trade-offs and the distortions always become more audible and obvious around Nyquist. They're less obvious at higher sample rates.
There are also inter-sample peaks which can clip in the reconstruction filter and which are easier to avoid at higher sample rates.
Digital also suffers from clock jitter. Early converters were just plain nasty, but these days jitter is barely a problem on cheap converters and not audible at all on pro-grade hardware.
None of this is to suggest that digital sampling is stepped and analog sampling is smooth. That's just nonsense and always has been.
If the rise time is way faster then sample period it looks like a "stair step" though. Most audio chips do some fancy interpolation on the other hand.
Does the video only consider sampling and reconstruction from the samples, or does he talk about quantization noise?
That I can perfectly reconstruct a band limited signal from samples taken above the nyquist limit is basic signal math. But any ADC is limited to a finite bit depth and this does introduce errors.
Not a signals guy, but I guess this is what the bandwidth theorem is about (snr vs signal power ratio or something).
Anyway, Im sure 16bit from my CD is perfect enough for anyone's ears and (obviously?) better than vinyl or cassette. But dammit I like analog music for the same reason I like my mechanical watch - I can really understand the full stack wholly.
Approaching the sample frequency the signal gets quite ugly to watch in an oscilloscope. 22050 Hz is just a triangle wave. Dunno if you can hear signal ugliness though.
As a form factor, they are quite nice, and have a comforting rattle. As a medium, they suck arse.
Almost all domestic analogue audio recording media suck. No amount of waffling about "warmth" or authenticity is convincing. People like it because it reminds them of their youth, or a specific timeframe.
vinyl? great cover art, finicky, fragile, terrible dynamic range.
8 track? infinite loop, great. I hope you have a stable winding head.
Cassette? shite.
Its the equivalent of shooting everything with high contrast, pushed ilford black and white film (think super grainy press pictures) or overly green/red saturation of kodachrome. Its great for a specific type of music, but sucks as a general medium
* ubiquity: everyone had a tape player at home. The cool kids had portable players
* uniqueness: people did not have _your mixtape_ unless you gave it to them. You wrote/drew on the inlay to personalize it and make it yours
* contemplation: you couldn't just seek straight to particular tracks, you'd typically listen to the whole thing, give it your full attention
* peer-to-peer: no third parties involved
* cost: tapes were cheap enough that you wouldn't be ruined if someone didn't give a tape back
* the object itself: they're a nice size and shape so they don't easily get lost. You need to handle them to play the music. They remind you they're there, they remind you of the person who gave them to you
This continued in the 1990s/2000s with CD-Rs, but the flatness of them and that you generally dumped the audio off the CD-R onto your hard drive meant that they ended up in piles and you forgot about them. Unless people went to extra effort to burn a single-track mix, you just ripped them and merged them into your own collection and the attribution that your friend gave you it was lost. You didn't have to listen to the whole thing at once, you paid less attention to it.
Nowadays, you're screwed. You could put files on a flash drive, but those are easily lost and always expensive. You _will_ miss them when they're lent out, and most I've ever lent out have never come back. They're only ever a conduit for files, good luck writing a tracklisting on the side of them. If you're just hosting the files on the internet, there's no physical object to remind people any more.
That said, it is still nice for people to upload things for each other to a shared dropbox, and people still appreciate a "DJ mix" you've made with as a single file with its own artwork, but I'd say that requires a bit more effort than putting mixtapes together did.
I have a single 16GB thumb drive in my car with an absurd amount of music in it. It would take hundreds of tapes to store the same amount of music. Plus, mp3 files can store metadata for the songs: author, artist, year, etc.
Unfortunately portable tape players are becoming quite hard to find: Stranger Things and Guardians of the Galaxy have create a huge demand for some Sony walkmans, whose prices are now in the triple-digits.
Quick search shows a dozen on Amazon for $20bucks on average.
BUT... I can readily believe they are crap. I don't know how one can find/identify a GOOD player (ideally new).
Not "you". Not most. None.
Nyquist-Shannon means a 44.1kHz-sampled signal can perfectly capture an reconstruct a signal up to 22.5kHz freqs, and it's not like it's a flat cut off after that.
> The commonly stated range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz.[5][6][note 1] Under ideal laboratory conditions, humans can hear sound as low as 12 Hz[7] and as high as 28 kHz, though the threshold increases sharply at 15 kHz in adults, corresponding to the last auditory channel of the cochlea.
So yeah, some rare specific humans can perceive a single isolated sine at up to 28kHz in a an anechoic chamber. That's completely different from listening to actual music.
> Our gradually degrading analog audio media may not sound “better” than digital, but they do sound different, and for some they can sound different in a way that's preferable to digital perfection.
That, is totally on point though. Beauty is as much in the ear of the listener as in the eye of the beholder.
For all the human ear can hear, though, this can be implemented with a digital "nostalgia filter".
For the rest I agree with all you said, except a lingering feeling that there is one exception:
In the end audio is analog. Yes, the digital version literally perfectly contains the analog perfection that's hearable. But that assumes a perfect digital to analog conversion.
In theory a 192kHz digital signal, with a DAC that understands it, may create distortions that add in a subjective pleasant way within the hearable spectrum, whereas a 44.1kHz signal may, in DAC, cables, or headphones, create a different set of distortions.
For high end amp and speaker/headphones this should matter less.
Which you then put into a 32kHz 12-bit ear.
This of it as constructive/destructive interference. The 192kHz master has imperfections, and the DAC and headphones have different (and possibly major) imperfections, creating something that sounds subjectively better.
Obviously it would be better to have a perfectly mastered 44.1kHz source and audiophile headphones, but at least in theory you can get this distortion interference add up to something better.
Just like how maybe you like the classic sound of a worn vinyl. It was not recorded with that distortion, but you like it. In theory the artist intended that sound. But digital obviously they could have just mixed it in manually.
Additionally, most have got rid of or never owned a good amp and a good set of speakers or headphones. So the music sounds much worse that it ought to and the listeners are frequently completely unaware. Also, that bluetooth speaker that they're using sounds awful and even if it supports LDAC and APTx-HD, because they're likely not sending the data from their streaming device to it using those technologies.
Indeed a friend of mine has a superb high quality audiophile setup. Playing vinyls sounds absolutely glorious. Playing WAV and CD sounds equally glorious. Yet for some reason playing AAC, and, more surprisingly, FLAC and ALAC, sounds terrible, which makes no sense, unless the decoders are borked.
Maybe not "none", but certainly it's only the very, very rare individual. And likely those aren't in the set of people that care about these things. And the intersection set are people who don't even care so much about the music as they do the sound.
I'm older now so I just mentally roll my eyes at these folks, but I used to rage at the people who insisted on 320bps MP3's or would faux outrage at any non-lossy media, then play it in their car.
Maybe not none, but to my knowledge we have not found one single individual is the world who actually have these "golden ears".
At some point absense of evidence is actually evidence of absense.
> I used to rage at the people who insisted on 320bps MP3's
bps and compression is a separate issue. Lossy formats don't represent the audible spectrum (up to 22050Hz or 24kHz) literally 100% accurately, but non-lossy do.
Edit:
Oh, and keep in mind that now that you (as you say) are older, not only are you maybe less passionate about the issue, but also your ears aren't what they used to be.
Why though? Was storage a concern?
Try running that by a Gen-X music enthusiast, though, and watch them make a Wojak face and cry "NOOOOOO! Digital can't possibly capture the warm guitars and fat synths of my analog-mastered vinyl Zeppelin album! It HAS to be 100% analog from the studio to my earholes!"
> Drop down fifty decibels for a quiet section and there's really not much dynamic range left.
yeah "just" like 45dB of dynamic range left. Also nobody would master a 16 bit file like that in the first place.
Not sure what you mean by "it's not like it's a flat cut off after that". Any spectral content above 22.05 kHz is aliased to frequencies below 22.05 kHz -- that is mathematically inescapable.
Maybe you're referring to the low-pass filters used to prevent this aliasing and for reconstruction -- these do have gradual rolloffs, but their center frequency is necessarily chosen to be somewhat below the Nyquist point, to ensure there is no noticeable spectral content above the Nyquist point.
Notably, because it's much cheaper implement filters with steep rolloff in the digital domain, ADCs and DACs often operate at much higher bitrates (e.g. 384 kHz) to allow for simple analog filters for antialiasing/reconstruction, and then digital filters are used for down/upsampling to/from 48 kHz or what-have-you.
But even in the digital domain, 20--22.05 kHz (or actually, 20--24.1 kHz) is a very tight transition band. 20--24 kHz (actually, 20--28 kHz) provided by 48 kHz sampling allows a much less complex filter to be used. And remember that the cutoff point for filters, 20 kHz in this case, is already at -3 dB (typically), meaning it's lost some fidelity.
Yes, that's what I mean. If you encode a 23kHz sound you don't get a flat signal as you'd get with a (-inf low pass filter) but an aliased one approximating the original; and as freq goes up, the errors introduced by aliasing (kind of) increase. You are also correct about mentioning the reconstruction filters and internal oversampling.
In practice these errors don't matter, as we humans are, at the very best, barely able to hear anything up there (as in, is there a 23kHz sine vs is there nothing at all), let alone discern any difference between two different sounds (as in, is the sound emitted a 23kHz square or a 23kHz sine or a 23.5kHz sine), and even less when drowned by any signal in the human ear highly sensitive range.
(Not even mentioning that getting into these areas start needing so much pressure to be perceived that it can become painful/damaging)
So theory is all fun and games, because I guess ultimately my point is that in practice anything above 22kHz flat out doesn't matter. Admittedly I'm taking many many shortcuts and possible lies here and there, but I don't thing going "why doesn't Feynman fall through his chair" really helps.
Let's all get out and enjoy some love and music already.
After that you get aliasing artifacts so generally having any input above that frequency to ADC will cause some problems.
Similarly with DAC, to get that 20kHz you need to have nice sharp filter cutting any higher frequencies off.
...which leads to one actual benefit of higher sample rate for ADC/DAC, it's easier to design filters because with say 96k you don't need that sharp of a cut to still not get artifact coz you're "safe" all the way to 48k
The first, which at this point is insignificant, is when they were period-accurate, and I didn't have a frame of reference. They were pretty good then.
The second time was around 2009, when I bought my first car, and the steering wheel had buttons that could control (pause / seek, not just rewind / fast forward) the cassette deck. So I bought a recorder and started moving some music onto it. When I got it into the car, though, I learned about "wow and flutter": the motors in the cassette deck being ten years old, they no longer rotated at a constant speed. Instead, they'd speed up and slow down, sometimes at unpredictable frequencies, so the pitch of the music would be increasing and decreasing all the time. Sort of like a truck horn, constantly going by you.
The third time was just this year, when I had the opportunity to buy an album digitally for $9, or digitally and with a cassette for $10. Naturally, I had to see what I'd get. I put it in a (different) car's cassette deck, and this time was greeted with music that sounded like it was recorded by Alvin and the Chipmunks. This car doesn't get driven much, and when the alternator is charging the battery, 12 volts is more like 15 - and the motors in the cassette deck again care about that.
Digital has its own shortcomings (I own too many devices with horrid DACs), but I vastly prefer being able to listen digitally and get a better-sounding result.
Goal is to give the kids something unconnected to the Internet to play music, and I want them to be able to make mixtapes by recording audio playback from another device. Hence the line-in requirement... preferably I'd buy something mass produced, not spend 400 bucks on ebay on something that might break within weeks ;)
I'm in the same boat. I'd ruled out cassette as unavailable and cumbersome, but my 10 year old took to it instantly when her friend bought her a Jensen walkman. I wrote another comment above on that.
Guess I'll do some more searching tonight!
But I think the easiest way to go is cheap walkman for playback, used full-size deck for proper stereo recording off line-level inputs.
Edit: I said "most of which" didn't I. Oops. I'm sure there's some cognitive bias at work there; what I meant was, the single one I have seen does, but only for certain values of 'does'. Sorry!
A full size deck is a better solution quality wise but I'm adamant at not having a lot of physical stuff around, and it makes it more difficult for the kids than running a 3.5 mm lead from the ipad to this Jensen thing.
Thanks again!!
To be fair tho these probably fall into the "as is without warranty" category, interesting to think of this market segment being uncatered too tho... maybe an Arduino MP3 / SD card shield could be hacked together...
thanks for the inspiration for my next weekend project :)
I'll probably try a Teensy or something that can also emulate a USB sound card to the connected host, so you can "play" anything from a pc/smartphone into the device as if it were a normal speaker and have it recorded onto the SD card. And a passthrough so you can hear what's being recorded... multi-device sound output has always been a nightmare for me on any OS (funny how it's so simple to mirror a screen, but not an audio device?)
you can rewind or skip tracks
you can fit a few of them in your pocket at once and they are better protected from the elements
if the player supports netMD then you can get the songs off it again using something like web miniDisc, which is great when sharing a mix with someone since they have the physical disc but also the option to add it to their digital collection
Now I do really wonder if they really made any substantial difference, at least when played on the average consumer hi-fi stereo system (or even boomboxes!) of the times.
Also, consider how valuable it would have been just this kind of testing/data then: https://audiochrome.blogspot.com/2020/12/index-to-cassette-t...
That's one good example of the "Market for Lemons" theory.
I suspect it played some part in the decision to have a polished steel back on the first iPods.
I had Sony WM-FX261 (with radio) and even that got the shiny parts scratched quickly
* Tape getting caught in cassette players, potentially ruining the recording
* Unspooled tape littering the side of motorways.
* Pitch variations, presumably due to the tape stretching, making songs fairly unlistenable.
I have positive memories of things I listened to on cassette, but I don't really associate them with the format itself.
The music in the part of Home Alone where he ziplines away from the house is permanently incorrectly imprinted in my mind because our VHS copy was worn out and the music distorted.
I suspect that the font (Lora) plays a role, though it doesn't seem to have that specific ligature by default, though I find it in a Mozilla Developer example:
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...>
So one has to hunt down used equipment which comes with its own set of issues (besides exorbitant prices) as there is wear and tear to account for and components that need to be replaced.
You misspelled “exuberant”, but you probably meant to write “exorbitant”.
I researched a similar device some time ago and I only found "We Are Rewind" selling a "modern" tape player but from what I understood the sound quality is not on-par with the best portable tape players from the 90's and such.
Techmoan has been shown that nearly every "new" tape-playing device these days all contain the same lousy mech, some not even capable of stereo playback!
VWestlife covered the "world's first Bluetooth capable portable cassette player" which is a few years old now but also uses a lousy mech (mono!).
Cassette audio today seems to be more about the experience and social aspects of making, trading, and playing tapes ( Ala Guardians of the Galaxy style )rather than getting the best quality audio.