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The Compact Cassette Turns 50...

While the article was interesting, it seems odd to declare a "birthday" for someone/thing that is dead. I guess they could call it an "anniversary. This is mot so true of the LP thread, given that some people still like and play LPs, and there's still a market for record turntables. LP sound is rich and full...some still find them superior to digital (CDs, MP3s, and so forth). The only downside for LPs were the inevitable popping sounds you'd hear as your records aged and got scractched.

Not true of cassettes - I guess they were handy forvoice recording purposes - dictation, and so forth, and they were compact - hence the first Walkman. But they really sucked for music - the fidelity was never great, and the noise (hissing) was worse. No amount of Dolby noise reduction technology seemed to help very much. I was personally glad when CDs killed cassettes.
 
I'll admit that cassettes weren't the greatest sound wise compared to LPs or CDs, but they did provide the best way to take music in your car until CDs came along. I still have boxes of cassettes of my albums that I recorded to take in my car. They've been dead for new album releases for quite a while now, but people still use them for personal recording purposes enough that you can still find recorders and tapes in stores, although the selection might not be as big as in the past.

Would the RCA version that was shown have been the same or similar to what was known as the Elcaset, a larger cassette format that flopped in the 80s?
 
For "personal recording purposes" - they're really dinosaurs there, too. I used to do Labor discipline hearings in my work. Until about 2009, we used old micro-cassette recorders. They were OK, but the downside is that you would run out of the damn cassettes from time to time, and have a make a rush trip to the store. Also, they were easy to lose.

In 2009, at my urging, we switching to digital recorders. No expense for buying cassettes, no chance of losing the recording (unless you lose the entire device), and you store the recordings on your computer.
 
I work in the legal industry and I see no demand for digital voice recorders. The old-timers who started their career back when only secretaries did any typing are still using microcassette recorders for dictation, and the attorneys under age 45 or so are of the computer age and just do the typing by themselves. We tried giving a few of the old-timers digital voice recorders, and they were resoundingly rejected as being too complex and confusing to use, both by the attorneys and by the legal assistants who do the transcribing.
 
Where I work, the recording of meetings become legal documents. We record them digitally on a Marantz recorder and on a Marantz two-speed audio cassette recorder (as a back-up). We've had the misfortune of having the digital file become corrupted and were sure glad that we had a back up.
 
I have used cassettes for personal original music recordings, and they served their purpose, and still sometimes do.

They don't sound bad -- usually if you're serious about your music you're going to be processing it on a computer anyway. The new digital recorders are pretty nice, but difficult to pitch shift when needed. For years, compact cassettes was all the musician with modest means had to do multitrack recordings, and all the consumer had to make 'mix tapes'.

I worked in a law office for a while, and the only recording I worked with was a transcription to CD. I don't know how it was originally recorded.
 
Cassettes served a purpose, and still sometimes do. For multitrack recording, they can be useful. A 4 track machine can pitch shift when needed, and cassettes sound o.k., usually you process the results on a computer afterwards anyway.

I used to work in the legal industry, and the only recording I encountered during that time was on CDR. I don't know how it was originally recorded.
 
In High School, in the early 70's, I got my first car, which was nothing fancy. It came std with an AM radio. My first upgrade purchase, was an underdash Realistic FM Auto-Reverse Cassette player. I bypassed 8-track and went straight to cassette. Customizing cassettes for car use was enjoyable endeavour during HS and college. The unit was around $100. The few other after-market cassette players with FM that I knew about, were very expensive, around $300.

That said, recording onto CD is a much nicer and easier task.

But, back in the early 70's, you really had good Rock music being aired on FM stations. Now, almost all FM rock is commerical rock hits - Only. But back in the day, having great FM and custom cassettes meant I always had the best of both worlds.
 
Cassettes still serve a musical purpose believe it or not. Deadheads (now Phish/Furthur fans) still swear by them and it's not unusual to go to some parts of Asia and STILL find pre-recorded cassette tapes of NEWER music. (I once saw a cassette copy of Lady Gaga's The Fame from India. And it didn't look like some pirated copy either!)

And many indie/underground bands still release cassettes. And I still occasionally get asked to make cassette transfers from other people's CD/MP3 collections for people with recently bought used cars who don't feel like upgrading the AM/FM cassette deck already installed. Or for someone who just bought a vintage '80s ghetto blaster or Walkman for nostalgic reasons. And they're still excellent for airchecking.

Finding quality blank cassettes however is getting hard. Most eBay sellers want a fortune for new old stock blanks - and that's just normal bias. Chrome tapes can go for as high as $20 and Metals can fetch $50 - EACH!

Elcasets (mentioned earlier) were actually a product of the late '70s and does anyone remember the DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) of the '90s?
 
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Yes - I used to do custom recordings with cassettes, because that's all there was. Nowadays it's done on recordable CDs, and people call them "mix CDs." For awhile in the mid 70s, I had a roommate that worked at a record store. One of her few perks was being allowed to bring records home, which we would record on cassette. But the downside was the infernal noise and hiss. To me, they never sounded even close to LPs in fidelity.

As to the legal community not liking digital recorders because they're too complicated - not really. People just don't like change. I learned to use mine in about 20 minutes. I didn't bother to learn all the high-tech intricacies, but just enough to know how to turn it on, record, hit play and stop, and how to play back recordings...all the basic things you need to know to use any recording device.

Transferring the recordings to either my laptop or desktop was a breeze - I didn't even have to teach myself how to do it - it was totally intuitive the first time.

The only drawback was that the memory would fill up after a few days if you forgot to transfer the files to the computer. But that just involved a quick hook-up to my laptop...many less negative consequences than losing one of those damn micro-cassettes, which I managed to do a few times.
 
I still use cassettes. I have hundreds of them and I use a line in to record stations on my Internet radio. It's old school,but it still works for me.
 
Bongwater said:
Cassettes still serve a musical purpose believe it or not. Deadheads (now Phish/Furthur fans) still swear by them and it's not unusual to go to some parts of Asia and STILL find pre-recorded cassette tapes of NEWER music. (I once saw a cassette copy of Lady Gaga's The Fame from India. And it didn't look like some pirated copy either!)

And many indie/underground bands still release cassettes. And I still occasionally get asked to make cassette transfers from other people's CD/MP3 collections for people with recently bought used cars who don't feel like upgrading the AM/FM cassette deck already installed. Or for someone who just bought a vintage '80s ghetto blaster or Walkman for nostalgic reasons. And they're still excellent for airchecking.

Finding quality blank cassettes however is getting hard. Most eBay sellers want a fortune for new old stock blanks - and that's just normal bias. Chrome tapes can go for as high as $20 and Metals can fetch $50 - EACH!

Elcasets (mentioned earlier) were actually a product of the late '70s and does anyone remember the DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) of the '90s?
Click to expand...

I'm not surprised to hear that about Dead Heads - many of them must be long-in-the-tooth by now. And some people don't like change, and don't care about sound fidelity, or picture quality on TV.

My grown daughter is a good example - she's never cared about that, and will listen to tinny sounding stereos (or monaural, is fine too), and prefers VHS to DVD to this day. If her car had a cassette player, she'd probably "burn" music on compact cassettes.

At age 30, she's like a throw-back to the year she was born - 1983. I'm certainly not an expert audiophile or technician either, but I know what sounds good, and 1080p when I see it.
 
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