Cassettes - better than you don't remember

this video is about the cassette tape from the mid 80s through to the early 90s throughout my teenage years into my early twenties this was the way that I used to listen to most of my music however recently I've heard people are a lot younger than me people who probably couldn't even remember listening to a cassette tape talking about it when they do it pretty much always goes like this yeah of course I remember take drugs together tape and you'd pull it out of the machine on a tape would be stuck inside and they'd up and wind it back in with a big and then you put it back in the machine takes those things were terrible were they no they're not in fact they can be pretty good now this business about the getting stuck inside machines I've still got all two hundred and odd cassettes I bought in the 80s and 90s they've all survived this long without getting stuck in any piece of equipment I've ever owned now I'm not saying other people haven't had cassettes get stuck inside machines I think it was most common in a car stereo on a hot day a sticky pinch roller that hadn't been cleaned for ages could pull a tape inside a machine but it's not something that I've experienced now this business about them sounding bad cassettes can actually sound remarkably good how good well that's what I'm going to try and find out in this video I'm going to get some new equipment try different noise reduction techniques different types of tapes and see if you can really get a tape sounding almost as good as a CD so let's get on with the rest of the video first off let's make no bones about it the reason that most people bought cassettes as opposed to CDs is because they were a heck of a lot cheaper almost half the price in most places I know that's the reason that I bought mine but however cheap something is people won't go back and buy it again unless they're happy with it and obviously they were happy with cassettes because it was the best-selling format for the best part of ten years however because most of the people buying cassettes were on a restricted budget they were also listening to them on it's equipment and therefore never hearing the best that you could get out of a cassette now if they were recording anything they're probably recording off the radio and if they were doing it more than likely they weren't using decent quality tapes let's just have a look at the boots catalog and see how much tapes cost back in 1985 well you can see why someone had used the cheap stuff if you look at the boots pack of ferric 60 minutes a three pack for $1.99 or TDK d 90's for 349 for a three pack compare that so the top of the range metal tape here the TDK metal ma are 90 $5.99 for a single tape let's put that in the inflation calculator and see whether that's worth nowadays 17 pounds 22 for a single tape you can see why not many people were using those back in the day but that segues us neatly into talking about tape types let's have a look at the four different kinds of blank cassette you could buy starting with the cheapest and worst on the Left working up to the best on the right so got a Faro a chrome a Faro Chrome and a metal convenient enough those are labelled types one two three and four now you won't see many type three tapes around this was a bit of a failed experiment Ferro chromium type ones Ferro and type twos chrome so you mix those together and you get Ferro chromium the idea was it was the best of both of those two that one had good bass response that had good treble response so add those two together yet Ferro chromium bit of a failed experiment never took off you won't see those for sale at all nowadays it was only a couple of years that those were on sale so let's take that one out of the equation so you've really got three different kinds of blank cassette you can find type 1 type 2 and type 4 now its easiest to go off the numbers because the manufacturers like to play around a little bit with the names of these you'll notice these say normal position on them but also low noise and dynamic as well so you can get a little bit confused with them so just stick to the numbers type 2 chrome also known as high position and if we look at site for well that just says metal class so just stick to the numbers type fours are pretty expensive but we'll talk more about that later on now I'm keeping this thing very basic there'll be people out there that'll argue with me and say you can get better type ones and you can get type two sometimes if you get a good make etc etc yes there are always exceptions I'm just keeping things very simple here so if we put these that on their ends you'll notice something about the tops of them they've got different holes in them we'll get that one out of the way it's a bit see-through a bit hard to see we'll pull this other type one tape in so I got type one on the front type four on the back notice you've got the little things that you pick out if you want to write protect them but also next to those on the type two you've got a hole and on the type four you're going to hold X to those and two holes in the middle some cassette decks use these holes to identify what kind of cassette you've put in them because they need to know because you need to provide a metal tape with more power than you do a Ferro tape to record onto it and there are some machines won't have those sensors but you'll find a switch on them and of course you've got to switch it to the right one so that it gives enough boost to the sound so it records it onto the tape as I say metal requires a greater stronger signal to record on to than a Ferro tape or than a chrome tape now as far as pre-recorded albums go they generally either put them out on type 1 or type 2 tape Farrow or chrome one of these is one and ones that other let's see if we can figure it out looking at the side of the box there's no immediate indicators other than the Dalby symbol there so we'll get the cassette out of the box and see if we can figure out if this one is on chrome or arm type one well nothing on the cassette itself just the Dolby symbol again so let's have a look at this other one and there you go there's the symbol chrome now they'll always put this on but that one tells us this one should be on a chrome tape and of course we on the Dolby symbol as well now just imagine you found these cassettes without their boxes there's no symbol on the cassette themselves to tell you whether or not it's type 1 or type 2 tape you think well look at the top of the tape doesn't work they're both in type 1 type cases you see you only really need those notches when it comes to recording on the tape when you get to playback it doesn't make too much difference you can always flip the switch if you want but it won't make a massive load of difference between type 1 and type 2 you can tell which is which though if you wind them on if you just wind it into the bit of tape pass the header you'll see straightaway there's a difference in color between the two tapes so you can see the tape at the bottom is recorded on Pharaoh tape type 1 and the type 2 chrome tape is the darker tape that's op now let's move away from tape types and talk about that Dolby symbol the back-to-back double D that you'll see on the boxes and on the cassettes themselves of course it's noise reduction now there are other kinds of noise reductions that were implemented such as DB X but by far the most popular of these was Dolby so we're going to talk about that Dolby noise reduction was first invented in the mid sixties and was for professional recording studios only however in 1968 a home version appeared which was called Dolby be followed quite a few years later by Dolby C and then finally by Dolby S which was right at the end of the home cassette boom on the high-end machines only each version of Dolby was better than the one that came previously so what does Dolby do and how does it work well I'll try give the briefest possible explanation I can but if you really want to know about it properly then look at the Wikipedia article the idea is you want to reduce the hiss or remove it if possible that's on a tape now you can do that by buying a metal tape as opposed to a ferric because that has a lot less hiss on it but the idea we dole bit is it will reduce hiss irrespective what type of tape you've bought now the way you get rid of here just to strip it off you'd lose some of the sound with it because there are high frequency low volume sounds that would get removed along with the hiss if you just a filter that part of the sound ow so what Dolby does you record with it switched on it boosts up those parts of the sound that would have got lost the high frequency low volume sounds it boosts those and then when you play it back you also have Dolby switched on and it brings them back down to where they should be but also strips off the hiss off the bottom at least that's the idea of course it's three different types of Dolby B C and s that you might have you've got to use the same version to play it back as you did to record it if you don't things all sound wrong if you were to play back a Dolby recording that was done in say Dolby B without pressing the Dolby B button it would sound too tinnie too bright equally if you weren't recording Dolby but then you press the Dolby button on playback things that sound - muffled and of course if you recording Dolby s playback using Dolby s etc now if you've got a pre-recorded album it's just got a Dolby logo on it that'll be Dolby B they always tend to be Dolby B occasionally you'll see things that say Dolby bhx Pro don't worry about the HX Pro there's nothing that you have to do about that it just means Headroom extension it was a Bang & Olufsen technology that Dolby licensed which just makes recording sound better there's nothing that you have to do on the playback end now if you're looking to buy a machine and you want to know what kind of Dolby noise reduction it can handle it'll use it have it written on the front if it doesn't have a look for the switch way you can select it and if the switch only shows Dolby noise reduction on and off that means it's Dolby B it's just when that machine came out they didn't know there was going to be a Dolby C in a Dolby S so they just thought it was called Dolby noise reduction now I'll quickly show you my main machine it's an absolute monster is the pioneers CTF 1250 but I'll be completely honest the main reason I bought this specific machine is because I think it looks absolutely amazing I think it's probably in need of a service to bring up to its full strength but it still sounds pretty damn good back in his day it was a pretty expensive machine in fact it's still a pretty expensive machine but it isn't exactly fully featured it's only got standard Dolby noise reduction doesn't do it all BC or anything because it hadn't come out then however it does have three heads why are three heads better than one well looking at this reel-to-reel it's easy to explain notice we've got arrays on the Left record in the middle and playback on the right the idea is with three heads as well as separating the MER which is supposed to be better you can listen to what you've just recorded because the tape goes across the record head and then across the play head so you can monitor live how the recordings are sounding and adjust things appropriately now before the comments blow up with very opinionated people telling me what I should do such as bio Nakamichi dragon I'm not going to go down that route I want to try something very specific I've never heard a dull bs recording and that's something I want to change looking at the adverts and things from the early 90s 92 here they were making some very bold claims for Dolby s they were saying that it made things almost CD quality well that's something that I really wanted to try out for myself so I looked on eBay to see if I could find a deck with Dolby s on it unfortunately they're very expensive you see Dolby s came right at the end of the heyday of the cassette recorder it was only put on high-end machines at the time and though still command a big premium so I had to think a little bit outside of the box and I managed to find eventually this it's this Sony TC s1 it's a MIDI deck which was part of a hi-fi system you could buy it separately that'll work on its own and you can pick these up for as you can see here's 60 odd quid apparently back in the day this was a really high-end set up for a MIDI system anyway and it went quite a few Awards in 1995 including one in what - a couple here as well so I picked up one of these decks of course as you can see it's really nice-looking machine very importantly Dolby s it's got a few nice features on it as well especially noticed up here it's got an auto calibration feature that's something I haven't had before that should enable the deck to record on the cassettes to the optimum quality if we look around the back of the machine you'll see it's a very simple set that we're going to line in and align our that bus thing is to connect it to the other components in the range so you can control them all up remote control and handily it's got an additional socket on the banishment I can plug other devices in my hi-fi into this which means it won't take up an additional plug socket now whilst it might be a bit of a bargain compared to those full-size decks of course it isn't as fully SPECT whilst it does have Dolby BCS eight chokes Pro tracks Kip and also reverse it is only a two head mechanism there was one other thing I found on eBay and it was a pre-recorded cassettes that used Dolby s noise reduction there was an intention to release pre-recorded cassettes with Dolby s however this is just a promo of high fidelity magazine all be it is on kro tape so it shouldn't sound all that bad so I gave it a quick go of course whenever you buy something off eBay you really do hope it works but you're never too sure however this was working fine now once you get it into the right Dolby version didn't sound bad at all however one thing I did notice got some scratches on the front of this which is a bit of a shame it does spoil the look a little bit however I do have a solution for that and it's brass oh now most people will probably know this trick but if you don't brass oh is a great way of getting rid of scratches off plastic like on the front of this cassette recorder just have to rub it quite hard it's abrasive so it takes the top off it a little bit but as you can see there the scratches are now hardly noticeable now before I go and add it to the hi-fi system I think we better have a look inside it just to check everything checks out okay so taking the lid off and it looks brand new in here it was actually made as you can see there 23rd of August 1994 so over 21 years ago but looks pretty much as good as new you can see the auto reverse mechanism working here spinning the head around and then playing the tape back in the other direction and if we look at it we can see that it's very clean very well-put-together nicely spaced out components obviously a high-end piece of equipment back from the day anyway put it back together and add it into the hi-fi system so it can do a bit more testing with it now the first thing that I want to do is I can't really play back any pre-recorded music because we're going to fall feral of the usual YouTube copyright stuff however I really would like to show you how the different noise reduction techniques bcos affect the sound so I'm going to do that but with a blank cassette now I've picked this one up that I've found lying around tight one notice it says for CD they always used to do things like this towards the end of the cassette ear try to advertise cassettes that were for recording CD it isn't it's just a normal everyday type one cassette now I'm going to play this tape at full volume but there'll be nothing on it but you'll still hear the hiss that's on the tape on its own and then we're going to try the different noise reduction techniques to see how though affect it so get ready for a loud noise right so that was quite impressive you've got to remember though that this is done it of volume that I would never play anything that it's far beyond what I could listen to but let's try this again with a metal tape if you could hear a bit of a hum there that was just coming from my amplifier not from the cassette deck it's just because I've put it way up to the top and there's a bit of a hum when you get past number nine but I've never listened to this thing beyond about this position here so it's not something that you'd normally hear now because I'm never going to find any pre-recorded metal tapes with a Dolby s noise reduction system on them the only way I'm going to find out how good Dolby s actually is on a good quality tape is to record my own so I put a cassette into the machine I've press the calibrate button now as far as I can tell what this is doing is recording something onto the tape now it's going to listen back to it and that's going to enable it to calibrate itself so it records to its optimum quality on that particular cassette only takes a few seconds and once it's done I can find some suitable high-quality recordings to test out Dolby s so I've got some nice clean acoustic high-res tracks that I can record now if you hear any clicks those are coming from my camera not from the source or from the cassette it's just something that my camera's picking up for some reason now you want to drive metal tapes quite strong so you want to go to the plus numbers a little bit get your record level just right before you start recording make sure it's just going up there into the plus four position and then take the pours off and start the recording so I spent about 20 minutes listening to the music whilst recording it at the same time and then I rewound the cassette it's been so long since I recorded onto tape I forgot how much fun you had while you were doing it anyway listening back to the music I really couldn't tell any difference initially IRA sat there I was amazed at how good it sounded and I'm sure anyone would have been impressed if someone had come in and as I've said you're listening to a lossless recording and a believe me it sounded brilliant but of course a recording can't really sound as good as the original especially on a tape so I tried jumping back and forth between the source and the tape and sure enough guess that was a bit of a difference the original lossless file of course did sound better but it was only when I compared them side by side I could actually tell the difference it just shows you how good you can get recordings on cassette now I embrace technology new and old and I wouldn't want to give away my digital music files and go back to having everything on analog tape however that said if technology hadn't advanced beyond the metal tape and Dolby s noise reduction I would be more than happy with the quality of the music that cassette tapes can produce now I know there's going to be so many people out there that are watching this and they're thinking what's the point in recording onto a cassette nowadays anyway well as far as I can make out there is no point it's just something to do for a bit of fun much like owning a model train set or going fishing there's no real point behind it you're just doing it because it's something you enjoy not everything has to have a purpose now if you think you'd enjoy messing around with compact cassettes and you don't have a machine at the moment if you look up in the video description you'll find I've got some links to the sections on eBay where I go looking for the different models I bought now you can get two ways with this you can go vintage get something from the 70s and 80s which looks beautiful but might need quite a bit of work doing on it before it works properly or I'd recommend if you're starting out go to something from the very end of the format's life something in the nineteen nineties if you look for something there that has Dolby s on it you'll also know that that was a top-of-the-range machine back in the day and some of those as we saw can be picked up at pretty good prices and of course if it has Dolby s on it it's going to have all the other bells and whistles as well now if you're buying cassettes don't get those off eBay because metal tapes are ridiculously priced on their their fur collectors or something what I would recommend I've got a company that I bought these from unbranded but wound with TDK metal tape to a certain length whatever length you choose at a very reasonable price that I've got to link to that company in the description as well that based in the UK you might find somewhere similar if you're living in a different country locally like that but whatever you do don't get them off eBay you'll just be ripping yourself off anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching sorry I'm not a muppet well maybe I am but not in that sense or something I just forgot to mention whenever I mentioned cassettes in a video there's always 5060 people linked me to the same video about this company that's still making cassettes and going on about the fact that cassettes an air selling more than they have for years please don't do that I've seen that video enough times they're after the people that made the guardians of the galaxy also mix vol 1 that was something I picked up it's a limited edition cassette which obviously after the film which is a nice little thing but they would have company that put this together strangely enough did it on there as far as I can tell type 1 tape which we've already discussed isn't the best way to do it which is a bit disappointing but nice packaging all the same anyway that's all I want to say don't want to linking me to it however you know what I'll do I'll put a link in the video description and then you can watch that video if you're one of the no 1 to 10 people on the planet that haven't seen it yet anyway that's it sorry bye

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 2,093,380

Rating: 4.9238567 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, cassette, tape, recording, dolby, dolby s, noise reduction, basics, introduction, metal tape, metal, chrome, type iv, type 4, record, into, simple, guide, audio, K7, tapes, sound, quality, hiss, reduction

Id: jVoSQP2yUYA

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/GalacticArachnids]

That was incredibly interesting! That Pioneer tape deck was absolutely gorgeous.

[u/Thirdsun]

Nice - back in the day tapes filled the role of modern Soundcloud. Sharing livesets on Napster wasn't a thing yet. Back then I used to record countless hours of Radio 1's Essential Mix, Paul Van Dyk's Soundgarden (he really used to be good!) on Fritz and so many other live events and sets.

Good times.

[u/John2Nhoj]

That was a fun blast from the past memory jogger :-)

I always liked best and used Denon brand metal tapes I would purchase at a discount through one of the popular Audio\Hi-Fi\Stereo monthly magazines I was subscribed to back in the day. That was long before I ever heard of Denon Audio gear.

[u/[deleted]]

"Will talk for money"

Best way to describe theses wankers

[u/freshtrax]

I have a couple hundred dead shows on Maxell tapes. I recorded them all in the early 90s and they still sound great.

[u/Amsterdom]

That really was great.

Now I need to buy a nice cassette deck, and re-buy everything from my childhood.

EDIT: So I go to find the deck I want.... turns out I need to save a bit more

[u/tubeguy]

As I remember Dolby B was sometimes better sounding than Dolby C. If the Dolby C circuit was not implemented correctly there were playback issues, the program material would "pump" as the circuit would not track the signal properly. In some cases using B to play back a C-encoded tape actually sounded better. The Dolby tech was licensed everywhere but it was up to the manufacturer to actually produce a correct circuit, which didn't happen on cheaper decks. You might get, as far as raw numbers, the right amount of hiss reduction, but if the circuit was cheaply designed it wouldn't track the signal well. Dolby B didn't seem to suffer from that effect, it was more of a brute force system, just boost the highs across the board when recording and EQ them back on playback.