The fun bygone days of making your own cassettes

[quigatolah]

My first business was a record store circa 1980.
My primary motivation was to obtain Beatle bootlegs at wholesale price.

My second business was (still is) car stereo.
Similar motivation. I like stereo equipment.

I had a customer who was a psychiatrist, so you would think he had money,
but apparently he did not, as evidenced by the story I am about to relate.
He had an old car, and he wanted me to set him up with a cassette player.
Sounds pretty basic, right?
Here are his specs:
I had to find him a cassette player that had DBX noise reduction on board.
It was pretty hard to find as this wasn't a common feature. I think I found an Alpine deck for him with DBX.
But wait - there's more!
He wanted this sophisticated audiophile cassette deck so he could play tapes he recorded himself containing
oldies (50's - early 6o's) all of which were low fidelity mono. And he used cheap no-name cassettes.
That's not all.
He had me hook up an A/B switch to his speakers.
Why? (here's where it gets good)
He wanted to be able to play first the left channel of the tape through both his left and right speaker,
and then play the tape again on the right channel of the tape through both speakers.
Each channel contained different recordings.
Yes, he wanted to get his money's worth out of his crumby 50 cents cassettes by using only 1 channel at a time,
since they were mono recordings! So the tape could play twice as long.
He had already gone to the trouble (and expense) of buying a home cassette recorder with DBX and recording all his music
that way, and he wanted to have the same pleasure in his car.

He was a good guy, and I liked him, and I do love the madness of it all,
but for the life me can't figure out why he insisted on DBX when the source material was so poor.
Kind of like getting a $5k pair of speakers and a $3k amp to play a 64 kbps mp3 source. (like SiriusXM)

[Egg_Crisis]

I don't miss cassettes.

I'd spend ages collecting various bands non-album b-sides, tracking down 12" versions at record fairs because they contained a song not on any other version. Then when I had most of them I'd compile them chronologically onto a cassette. Each tape side had to be recorded in one sitting because I had to press the pause button between songs. Pressing stop left a horrible click and then later if you tried to continue where you left off it wasn't perfect. Also when you played the record you had to unpause the tape before the music started but you didn't want to unpause too soon because you didn't want too much silence.

So then you had your b-sides and non-album tracks compilation, it was as complete as you could make it but not fully complete because there were always songs you couldn't find. Then later you found one more track... BUT... now you had to make the compilation all over again to add the one new track chronologically in its proper place. And you couldn't just recopy the whole tape and insert the new track because the quality of the copy wouldn't be as good. You had to get the records out again and re-do the whole thing. And it was never complete because there were records you'd never ever find.

F*** that sh**!

Nowadays you just throw the file into the folder and as long as the files are numbered correctly it's easy to add the new track.

Occasionally I'll remember something I used to collect, and the songs I could never find, and for old times sake I'll go onto youtube and grab those songs I could never find just so the collection is now complete.

And yes fast forwarding and rewinding to find something was a monumental pain in the ass!

[mojofilter]

I'll admit that I'm another one of the people who doesn't miss the cassette format. I made the unfortunate discovery that virtually no two tape decks (that you have available to you) run at exactly the same speed, and their record/play head is pretty much guaranteed to be out of alignment with any other tape deck. So you carefully compile your tape and it sounds fine on your deck. But you play it back on somebody else's, and the azimuth is off, and the speed is off. Boy, what a pain in the ass that was! If I recall correctly, the Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck had a feature that would read the azimuth of your tape and auto-adjust the head to be dead on center. But who could afford one of those? I could only see them in a few stereo shops, and try not to drool on them.

I was never so happy as when I could finally make CD-Rs from records and other tape recorder sources, correct the phase and pitch, and have them in the best condition I was able to get, and have them always sound that good - unless the CD-R went bad over time, and I've only lost four or five of them.

[Lord Reith]

Lots of interesting stories here! It is funny how we all went through much the same thing independently of one another. Just like the collecting of vinyl boots.

There was nothing like opening a three pack of “Concertape” cassettes from Radio Shack…or Tandy…as LR reminded us of…We had a few home decks that were capable of some pretty decent edits and many unique versions and recreations of singles were made of various Beatle related things. I still own my pre-recorded tape collection as well as a good number of homemade compilation tapes..TDK made decent blanks in the 90’s..and I always liked the term “CrO2”..which was “high bias”..which was high end at the time…and there was “Metal” which was supposedly the best but I never really noticed that much of a difference.

I remember "Concertape" now! Ha! I can also remember - being a cash strapped schoolboy - buying some really cheap and nasty brands. Rainbow i think were absolute bottom of the barrel. You could buy a pack of six for the price of one TDK (was "D" the cheapest TDK? They all had letters) but the number of dropouts beggared belief. However I did use them on occasion when I had literalkly no money and had to record something important. I also remember being amused by the labelling of BASF as "stereo cassettes"... as if there were mono cassettes! Then there was "G-Tape"... not sure if that was a thing elsewhere but they were halfway in price between Rainbow and TDK and weren't too bad.

Then there was cassette length. All you ever heard in the 80s was "Don't use C-120 tapes! They are too thin and will snap!" but i sure never had a problem with them. C-120s were essential if you were trying to record BBC radio specials that invariably went for an hour. It was either that or use a C-90 and run the risk of missing something when turning the tape over (which invariably would be the most rare song or interview).

I never realised at the time that Cr02 (Chromium Dioxide) tapes had much less hiss. Later on when it was basically too late I realised that a Cr02 tape with no Dolby was apparently less hissy than a regular tape with Dolby... which leads me on to my next point: Dolby. My first portable cassette player had no Dolby and I had a real inferiority complex about it. In the early 80s Dolby was revered as the saviour of cassette recording and not having it was like not having doors on your car. When my dad did eventually buy us a full-blown hifi system in 1982, I was disconcerted to find that the cassette deck had noise reduction, but it was something called "ANRS". What the hell? It took a trip to the local hifi store to get someone to explain to me that this was JVC's answer to Dolby B. It was supposed to be compatible with Dolby B but didn't sound that way to me. Later on I bought a Realistic cassette deck with Dolby C... which was real Big Time. Dolby C obliterated all the hiss, although sometimes if you played it back on someone else's deck it seemed to obliterate much of the music too. Also you couldn't play back C encoded tapes on a deck which only had B (well, not without it sounding crap. To this day I can still tell the bootlegs that were mastered from a cassette recorded with Dolby C and played back with Dolby B or no Dolby).

I only bought "metal" tapes once: to record The Beatles At The Beeb in 1982. That was a special occasion and I broke the bank. can't remember what they cost but it was at least five times the price of a regular tape. Although it did end up sounding pretty good. I certainly still have THOSE two tapes.

In the 90s I figured out how to attach a speed control to my Denon deck. This was a top drawer machine and drilling a large hole in the front of it was nerve wracking to say the least. But it did work, and from then on I could adjust the speed to make the song in tune with my guitar.

Yes, it was great fun, but nothing compared to burning your own CDs. So much more versatile, clear, and didn't degrade like the tapes!

I bought a Philips CD recorder in 1998. Although at the time I felt like Master Of The Universe armed with this thing, it is also one of the items I regret buying. I didn't realise that CD recorders would only work with "Music" CDRs... read ordinary CDRs with a special code added so only they would work and with the price literally inflated 10x. So each disc cost about a third of the price of a commercial cd release! You wanted to be real careful you didn't screw up during recording, or else it was money down the drain. Stupidly I decided to "save money" by buying a huge lot in bulk, which got me a pathetic 10% discount. It was about a week later that I realised you could use the ordinary computer-store CDRs simply by placing the "music" cd in the recorder, waiting for it to register and for the mechanism to disengage, and then pulling the drawer open with your fingers, replacing the expensive disc with the cheap variety and pushing it shut again. So then I had a gigantic pile of expensive Music cds in the corner to remind me what a fool I'd been. Although with the option of using the cheap discs I did then go on a CRD binge and made hundreds of the buggers... all of which were prtetty much obsolete within 5 years. So, all in all, it was a huge waste of money.

[Rickenbacker325]

The answer to the C-120 being “too thin’ was the 100 minute tape….I had loads and loads of them and still have a bunch to this day

[jgjohnson]

It’s funny that this topic came up as I was in my storage shed a couple of days ago an came across a whole bin of cassette tapes from the 70’s to the 90’s full of everything Beatles related that was circulating at the time. I had several cassette decks and one of them I rigged up so I could control the pitch on playback. Later on, you could buy decks had that. I did that because so much of the bootleg material wasn’t at the right speed. I knew what key the Beatles played a song in, so I would adjust the playback speed I could play along with it on a guitar. I also bought a Sound Shaper 3 equalizer to try and make the music sound better. It was the most elaborate equalizer on the market. That was about all you could do in those days.

[DeeBee]

One of mine from when I was 13.

[Egg_Crisis]

I also heard the thing in the 80's about c120s being too thin and they'd stretch or snap. I did encounter one c120 that was an unknown (crap) make, and after recording on it I played it back and it was almost silent. But a few years later (late 80's, 90's) I had loads of TDK D120s and they were all fine. TDK was king. In transferring a lot of my tapes over the last few years the TDK's have stood up best over everything else.

which leads me on to my next point: Dolby. My first portable cassette player had no Dolby and I had a real inferiority complex about it. In the early 80s Dolby was revered as the saviour of cassette recording and not having it was like not having doors on your car.

I hated dolby!!!! It muted the top end and made everything sound poorer.
I did this test with every new tape deck I ever had and the results were always the same:

I copied some music with dolby on, then copy the same music with dolby off.
I played back the dolbied recording : with dolby on it sounds muted, poorer than the original. With dolby off you can hear that the recording has a lot more hiss compared to the original. All it seemed to be doing was putting on hiss so it could take it (imperfectly) off again.
Then I played back the undolbied recording. It sounded the same as the original.

So all dolby seemed to be doing was adding more hiss. In conclusion, dolby sucks.

I've seen this discussion before on other forums, Hoffman and elsewhere, and it always seems to be divided equally between those who feel as I do and those who don't. I've had it explained to me what dolby is doing by adding that hiss... but at the end of the day it's hiss and my undolbied recordings always sounded better.

[C90]

Yeah, whatever DID happen to TDK? And Maxell, and Memorex, and BASF?
I used them all.
I preferred the TDK AD90s - one up in their range from the D90s. And there was the SA-C90... and the SA-X C90... I think they were 'Chrome' (CrO2) tapes.
And I even had one... ONE... 'metal' format TDK MA-R9 C90, which came in a cool-looking metal alloy shell and weighed a ton. So pricey, I asked for one as a gift one Christmas. It cost about the same as regular LP at the time, I think,
And I still have them all.

Some great browsing here. hxxp://vintagecassettes.com/index.htm

[Onkster II]

Good god, we used to buy 3-pak bags of K-mart cassettes, with that blue-green label on them.

We recorded band practices on them!

We also all chipped in as a group for a "high-end" blank 8-track tape--can't remember the brand--that we also recorded jams on. Oh the fun of fast-forwarding through the whole thing to listen to a playback..."whoops, missed the beginning..."