News Possible Cassette tape comeback.

[PennyBlack]

I had to buy Elite (for the BBC Model B) twice because the game tape was eaten alive by a stiff roller. I remember my best music being warped by mild sun while I forward wound to a single track on another tape cassette. Watch those numbers rolling now... stop, no, alittle more, ARGHhhh no my tapes chew'd up...

Imagine winXP Pro on tape... Where would I put the skip when I wanted to update my OS. :blink:

 

[Cras]

Would it be possible to do a digital cassette? Not that mini-crap from sony, but perhaps run a standard audio cassette at higher speed and do everything digitally? You would get cd quality sound that way.

Um.....tape IS digital. All tape is digital. Film and vinyl, those are analog.

And it seems right now vinyl has more of a future than film.

 

[orb]

All tape is digital.

Tape is magnetic and analog. Whether the level of changing electrical signal created from the changing magnetic field of the tape is used for storing digital or analog content only depends on presence of ADC/DAC in the tape recorder, or somewhere later on the line.

 

[Ghostrider]

I had to buy Elite (for the BBC Model B) twice because the game tape was eaten alive by a stiff roller.

Ah, Elite... I remember the 45 minutes loading time to play "Snowball" or "Lords of Midnight". Not to mention the hacking required to shove them onto floppy disk as soon as I got a 1541 drive. Today they would send a Death Commando after me for even thinking about doing such a thing.

 

[wehaveaproblem]

Today they would send a Death Commando after me for even thinking about doing such a thing.

Aye, remember the days when "making backups" was considered wise practice...

On topic, no thanks. Inventions which serve a specific purpose stay in use or return to use. But I honestly can't think of a tape's USP...

 

[csanders]

It's a drummer deformation, I guess. People think drummers care about the encoding quality the least, but that's rarely true, because the first thing that suffers are the cymbals. If a drummer used some great cymbals worth several thousand dollars in the recording, I want to hear every penny of them... :lol:

I can vouch for that. Cymbals often sound atrocious with MP3 compression.

I highly disagree with your "good old analogue, because, like with photographs, that's still the best quality you can technically get."

Today's SLR's far exceed 35mm film in quality.

---------- Post added at 09:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:14 PM ----------

Um.....tape IS digital. All tape is digital. Film and vinyl, those are analog.

And it seems right now vinyl has more of a future than film.

the old cassette tapes that were popular in the 80s were analog.

 

[N_Molson]

I try to use 320k as much as possible. Best size/quality compromise for me. At 192k, I already have a strong "lo-fi" feeling, and 128k is like only to have a preview.

I don't believe in a cassette comeback. Those things were just messy, and now you can use your mobile phone as a decent quality dictaphone. I can't even imagine the numbers of "mechanical" bugs using tapes for computers were causing. I didn't knew that era, I began using computers when 5'1/4 were genocidated by 3'1/2.

 

[4throck]

Tape ? Well, I have (although not used for about 10 years) a proper Hi-Fi cassette deck with fancy Dolby Noise reduction and such. It sounded good, although it had much less high frequency response than CDs and the sound was not that detailed.

Vinil is different. It does sound "better", specially for rock.
But is has to do more with the mastering than with the medium.
Most music today is mastered for maximum LOUDNESS! So there's no dynamic. Specially on the bass frequencies. Classic vinyl mastering has the sound unconstrained, and it simply sounds natural.
Listen to Iron Maiden's Powerslave album in vinyl... that drum is defined as a pixel :thumbup:

Now what works is to sample the vinyl and convert it to MP3.
But it must be done at 48K and at 320kb. Don't use any noise reduction of processing, other than a filter at 50hz if there's electrical noise there and a general normalization.
It will sound good, be portable and have all the advantages of MP3.

 

[Andy44]

Um.....tape IS digital. All tape is digital. Film and vinyl, those are analog.

That is incorrect. Most tape recordings were signals recorded onto tape using an analog magnetic tape head.

You can record digital signals (ie. discrete 1s and 0s) using any analog device, of course. A computer tape drive or floppy disk is an example.

 

[Ghostrider]

Um.....tape IS digital. All tape is digital. Film and vinyl, those are analog.

No, tape is not digital by nature. Audio (and video) used to be stored as an analogue signal, then along came DAT for audio and digital video formats for tape. DV is digital, VHS is analogue. Home computers that used tape as data storage media needed either an audio in/out interface to convert digital data into sounds or had the circuitry built into a specialized tape recorder (like Commodore's Datassette).

 

[jedidia]

Um.....tape IS digital.

It's an analogue storage technique. The nice thing with analog storage, you can still choose whether you want to store the information in a digital or an analog format, but the bad thing, of course, is that even your digital format will deteriorate on an analog medium.

I highly disagree with your "good old analogue, because, like with photographs, that's still the best quality you can technically get."

Today's SLR's far exceed 35mm film in quality.

Not when you compare dpi

I said "technically", because reality often has an annoying habit to disagree with particular details.

 

[Urwumpe]

Not when you compare dpi

That is a pretty poor metric. While the digital sensors have pixel, the analog ones have only pigments, that is true, but: Both densities are now much higher than the angular resolution by the optics. Especially for the analog photography, which had a negative developed to a photograph, again via optics.

You could now of course claim, having 20 pixels for the blop of light that the optics produce is still worse than having 5000 pigments. But I don't see it.

 

[Notebook]

I used to work with people who had "Golden Ears", odd thing is they are mostly deaf now....

N.

 

[Andy44]

Today's SLR's far exceed 35mm film in quality.

Since "quality" cannot be objectively described, this statement is meanlingless. If you want to measure it in terms of resolution, digital has pretty much caught up to chemical photography in most cases, but there is more to it then that.

I personally still prefer to use black and white chemical photography, since the use and manipulation of silver halides can produce a very pleasing grain to the image, which can be controlled. The tones produced by the process also look different depending on which paper, film, and developer chemicals you choose.

You can, of course, replicate much of this with software now, but I prefer making my photos with my own hands, not faking it with software written by some guy in Seattle or Tokyo. Likewise, I get more enjoyment out of watching Alex Lifeson play his guitar on a stage in front of me than I do hearing him play it on a recording, even though it "sounds better" to some people.

 

[Washingtonian]

Compact Cassette/Audio Tape:

A tape smaller than the VHS. Music is stored on the magnetic tape that can be turned in a certain direction by two small spools. You can reverse and quicken the speed of the tape, but is often calibrated by the factory and not the users. The encoding of the sound is analog. So, it is not digital.

You could not go to a certain track so you had to rewind or fast forward the tape until you reach the certain track. Also, the tape tends to be damaged easy and could degrade overtime, but not as much as the early 8-track. Cars in the 80s and 90s have players embedded in the dashboard to play tapes.

Commodore 64s could play audio cassettes and the data in the magnetic tape can be loaded and you can play games with it, but it takes a long time to load.

CD:

A plastic disc/optical disc that stores audio data/any type of data in bumps/pits that have the size of micron. In order to read data, a laser moves and hits bumps, and plays sounds. It has a sampling rate of 44.100 khz, and is digitally encoded. Certain CDs can be record-able and often bought for cheap, just like an empty and record-able Compact Cassette.

It can be scratched easily and oil from fingerprints etc. can make the CD dirty and make some few skips, but can take more damage than a vinyl disc. CDs can also be loaded up on the computer. The PlayStation had CDs as a medium to play games. Sega modified the CD, made the GD-ROM for their short-lived Dreamcast system. They also used CDs for their Sega Saturn system.

Anyway, there is one thing and that CD is better than Compact Cassette, nuff said. It can store more data (700 MB maximum), has better sound quality due to sampling rate, and is more tolerant to damage, and can be used for other purposes than for just listening to music.

 

[jedidia]

Anyway, there is one thing and that CD is better than Compact Cassette, nuff said. It can store more data (700 MB maximum),

Ever heard of a 120 minutes tape?

has better sound quality due to sampling rate,

It has usually better sound quality due to no degradation. Being an analogue medium, the tape beats the crap out of the CD where sampling rate is concerned, on the virtue of not needing a sampling rate by being analogue. That's what analogue is all about.

and can be used for other purposes than for just listening to music.

So can a tape.

Now don't get me wrong, I'll take a CD over a tape any day, but that's mostly got to do with matters of conveiniance. No degradation, and no winding back and forth to find a certain title. However, most of the points you wrote there are just not true, and I felt compelled to correct them.

That is a pretty poor metric.

It sure is, I was mostly just teasing.

 

[Urwumpe]

It has usually better sound quality due to no degradation. Being an analogue medium, the tape beats the crap out of the CD where sampling rate is concerned, on the virtue of not needing a sampling rate by being analogue. That's what analogue is all about.

That is nostalgia, not science. Magnetic tapes also have no perfect memory of the original sound. The distortions and filtering by them are actually worse than what you get by a properly written CD.

I remember how tapes had been. And this had been extremely poor before CDs came. The loudness wars lately ruined the CDs a lot, but there you can blame the music industry for. A 44 KHz sampling rate and 16 bit samples are easily wasted, if you constantly have a nice overdrive effect because the samples are clipped at peak amplitude.

 

[jedidia]

That is nostalgia, not science. Magnetic tapes also have no perfect memory of the original sound. The distortions and filtering by them are actually worse than what you get by a properly written CD.

I think that is what I wrote, but probably it was misunderstandable. The sentence should go something like "The CD usually has better sound quality because it doesn't suffer degradation (physical degradation to the medium, or procedural degradation by suboptimal reading equipment), not because it has a higher sample rate than a tape, as was suggested".

 

[Urwumpe]

I think that is what I wrote, but probably it was misunderstandable. The sentence should go something like "The CD usually has better sound quality because it doesn't suffer degradation (physical degradation to the medium, or procedural degradation by suboptimal reading equipment), not because it has a higher sample rate than a tape, as was suggested".

Yes, that makes more sense. :thumbup:

You have to remember, that the Shannon-Hartly theorem also applies to analog media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon–Hartley_theorem

(That theorem is actually something, that should be mandatory knowledge for people interested in realistic add-on making. It explains why GPS sends only 50 bits per second.)

 

[Notebook]

Yea folk who nearly invented practical machines 50 years ago:

N.