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Comment by massagedpelican | Hacker News Reader

How would one go about determining what effect to add for each cassette type? I don't know much about cassettes, I'm curious if this was something that could be done by ear or if these are commonly held opinions about the sound of each tape.

Again knowing nothing about tape, if I were tasked with this I would probably try to record the same audio to each of the tapes and then compare it with the original.

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Similar to how the different film stocks affected the look of the image, the different tape formats would effect the sound similarly. Crudely explained, the more light brown the tape, the more noisy it would be. The darker the tape, the cleaner it could be. If you like the sound of someone standing behind you constantly saying shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, then choose a brown tape.

By now, the audiophiles have lots of profiles of what the various tape formats would sound like. It's been ages since I've looked at audio plugins, but I would be shocked if there's not presets to make your pristine audio sound like a Maxell cassette that's been played hundreds of times.

There's great VST plugins like "Sketch Cassette 2" that will do hiss, flutter, all of that, along with some great presets. That one's less about creating authentic sound profiles, more like creating lo-fi tracks and instruments for music production.

Wavesfactory Cassette does exactly that for several well-known models.

This is my go to for making things sound "worse" :)

https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...

Yeah

Tape hiss comes from the particle size on the tape and the amplifier "playing" that random natural orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_hiss

(I though it was more due to the amplifier but decided to look up first)

I was too young to do much with this information, but I not-so-vaguely recall my father cared deeply about getting metal-tapes. Not the music, but the material. I don't know if they lasted longer or sounded better (and now I would suspect: maybe have a sound profile he liked, rather than have high fidelity), but it was important to him.

Metal tape (the dark black tape) sounded much better but only if you had high end equipment. Pure metal tape was rare outside japan and contributed to japan's 80s status as a mecca for consumer electronics.

I think he only had Japanese equipment (Awai, TDK) and mostly TDK tapes.

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