Some Thoughts on Cassettes

 

Cassettes have always sounded a bit crap.  CDs can flawlessly reproduce the entire range of human hearing, from about 20 hertz all the way up to 20 kHz. Cassettes roll off everything below about 40 Hz and attenuate everything above about 10 kHz.  The tapes themselves were not always manufactured well. They're notorious for hiss, noise, bleed through, warble, whistle, distortion and a few types of oscillating fade that I don't think even have names. More here and here.

Then the tapes break. Despite the frequent references to their durability I found that both heat and cold cause damage to the audio, that the wheels do jam, the leader tape breaks, the felt pads fall off... Nothing lasts forever. Even if you transplant it into a shiny new shell eventually the coating starts leaving crud on the playback head, or it starts de-laminating or sticking to itself. Yeah you can replace the pads too see Tapeheadcity.com or 8trackavenue.com for supplies. But once the tape itself is wrecked there is no going back. It's as destructive as scratches on records and CDs.

Most articles say that there are four kinds of cassette tape. But they are  more like categories and there are actually 5. Some categories are "mixed" and in truth, every manufacturer: BASF, AMPEX, Maxell, TDK, Sony, Memorex all have some uniqueness to their manufacturing process and coating formulas. Back in 1981 Audio magazine published an article All That Data: Tape Deck Frequency Response and Headroom, one of the more readable articles on the topic. You can read it here [LINK]

• Type 0 - Non-standard
• Type I - Ferro tape
• Type II - Chrome tape or a cobalt doped
• Type III - Dual layer ferro-chrome 
• Type IV - Metal

What it all boils down to is that every tape formulation was a compromise between dynamic range, noise, frequency response, distortion and the tapes physical ability to retain magnetic data. If your design favors the treble, you probably lost something else in trade. I favor Type III as the 'best" but that's probably due to the decks I've used, the music I typically listen to or some other non-empirical personal bias.

Then to compound that problem most cassette players are also a bit crap. All the late era ones were budget brand plastic trash, they squeak, the belts fell apart after a few years and there's a reason they all ended up at Goodwill. Good cassette players are rare, and new good cassette players are quite pricey. I'm looking at you We Are Rewind.  Despite that I have a few. My main cassette deck is a Panasonic RQ-2104. It was made in 1989, and is still on the original belts somehow. It's got one speaker and old duct tape stock to the door I can't get off. I also have a Marantz PMD 221 that needs lube and new belts very badly, but it's VU meter is super cool.  I also have a project deck I got at a flea market. It's a Rolls RS72CD dual cassette deck and It needs multiple kinds of TLC... but it's rack-mountable and that's irrefutably cool. Anyway, the state of the latter two is the reason the Panasonic is my primary deck today.

So why the hell after all that am I still buying tapes?

1. Demo tapes: Many demo tapes have never been released on any other format. It's something true of many formats: 78s, CDs, 45s, 10-inch records, 7-inch records, 8-tracks. Sometimes there's only one release of that thing.

2. Affordability: I can still buy tapes on the cheap. LPs are back in and prices way up, 78s are over-fetishized, and 8-tracks are mostly disco. But tapes are a cost-effective impulse buy. Is the Lyres "Nobody But the Lyres" tape any good?  Yes it is, and it was totally worth 5 bucks and that's a really specific way to try new things that hasn't been possible since CDs filled up miles of used bins.

3. Shoddyness: This is the flip side of affordability. Yes I might have to open the shell and splice that tape. But it might also be moldy, or shedding so hard that it needs to go in the trash. That's OK since I only spent a fiver.

4. Cultishness: The cassette cult hasn't driven up prices like the LP cult. Some more rare objects cost more as always. I saw a used Minutemen tape for $25 at a flea market. But generally used tapes are under 10 buckeroos USD. New tapes seem to be around $15.  

5. Bootlegs, oddities and Mixtapes: Damn these are fun. I buy home recordings, and bootleg live shows when I bump into them. Mixtapes are frequently half-finished for some reason but I found a break-dance mix, a reggae mix, dozens of bootlegs and more recently two utterly inexplicable compilations of professional wrestling promos. [LINK] Just as in cities with cheap real estate, cheap audio formats also attracts the art students, punks and weirdos.

I had thrown out all but my irreplaceable tapes some 20 years ago. The more you move, the more you debate how much you really want to keep things. So the tapes went. Then this year a compadre at the Slingshot Collective sent me a few Plastic Island comps. The year prior, I had discovered the Panasonic tape player in an old band practice space. It was moldering under a pile of microphone cables and a mouse nest. After a lot of clean up, they all made beautiful noise together.