Sixty Years Ago Today!

[erroneousblack]

That tape cassettes first became available. Probably still a deck in most theatres, but rarely used. Had afew nightmares with them over the years, usually at kids dance shows with angry parents claiming it was our sound system that was the problem, not their tape. Had one particular irate Mother having a go, and I turned to one of my staff and asked what year she was born, she replied 1982. So I pointed out to thr Parent that tape she was using was older than a member of my staff!

[bruce]

Sixty? I thought they were developed in early 60s, which would make it 50 years?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette says:

 

"In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reversible, reel-to-reel RCA tape cartridge"

 

"In 1962 Philips invented the compact audio cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe in August 1963 "

[kerry davies]

Who cares, I am still searching for; "You know the one, that Flower Song, it is somewhere on side two."

 

I gave up trying to locate the "Pibroch and Reel, but I can't remember which tape it's on."

[timtheenchanteruk]

ah yes, dance school tapes, I miss them (not) edited and copied to within and inch of its life, now more hiss than audio...

now its just MP3 muck...

 

I remember parents being irritated, I used to do sound for a choreography competition for a dance school, strict instructions, tape to be reay in position, preferably one track, beginning of the tape.

Had a fair few that didn't bother, so I press play, music starts 1/2 way through the track, of course its my fault though

[erroneousblack]

Sixty? I thought they were developed in early 60s, which would make it 50 years?

 

 

Something heard on radio this morning so may have misheard it, they were making a deal of it as it's the 20th anniversary of the first text message.

[ojc123]

I hated the Dance festivals with twenty or so tapes. mp3 muck is a huge improvement. I now get irritated by "It's on my phone."

[erroneousblack]

I now get irritated by "It's on my phone."

 

Used to get that a lot off cabarets on ship, then they moan that it doesn't sound as good as their home system!

[Bobbsy]

It was in the mid-1960s that my father won a portable cassette deck in some kind of raffle and gave it to me (as a teenager) because "cassettes will never be good enough quality for music".

 

Even thought events overtook my dad's prediction, I'm not sure he was actually wrong!

[laolu]

In the eighties I still copied CDs of a friend to tape, because I didn't own a CD player, but a good tape deck. Used Metal Type IV and CrO2 and what not, with Dolby. Results were pretty good. A few months ago, I reversed the process, copied the tapes to CDs and the results are still pretty good. Better than some sh***y MP3 muck, compressed to death. After I did the copies, I still sold (!) the tapes to a HiFi freak.

That's how good cassette tapes where. :)

Norbert

[Tezzachs]

I hated the Dance festivals with twenty or so tapes. mp3 muck is a huge improvement. I now get irritated by "It's on my phone."

 

Ah that excuse. I now adopt the point blank policy of 'A phone is NOT a profesional format for a backing track, CD, Mini disc or Digital format only, if you havent got it in one of those formats and its not in our archive then you will sing what I play for you or not sing at all' and aparently im unreasonable for that...

 

Saying that, Ive got a rehersal for a Christmas show next wed. evening, wonder how many phones ill be presented with

[Solstace]

Indeed, cassette quality could be very good, especially compared with recompressed lossy digital formats, MD, MP3 and AAC included.

 

I recall being something of a tape nut in my early days. <rosetint>I've many happy memories of optimising bias settings on an Aiwa hifi deck for various flavours of THATS (from Richer Sounds) and TDK (everywhere else) cassettes and getting remarkably good results. Metal tapes were excellent, though arguably TDK SA (80's vintage) and SA-X (90's vintage) seemed to offer similar performance at lower cost and wider deck compatibility both for recording and playback. I was amazed at what a good deck could punch to and from even cheap TDK FE-90's for day-to-day listening.</rosetint>

 

Better still, especially for 2-track recording of long events, was the hifi stereo audio track available on VHS, if the deck didn't mangle the tape or the audio on its way through. Even used one to receive stereo stems (with a timing signal at the start of each) from a studio project I was working on so that I could work on it on the computer at home. Streamed the audio to a stereo in, bit of cut/paste action in Cubase, and ended up with perfectly-synced (at least by analogue standards) audio tracks ready to rock. Even the sequenced synth parts stayed in time over the 6-min piece. Shame I lost that project to a hard-drive crash about 3 years ago - the tape and deck are long-gone!

[Bazz339]

Interesting hearing other peoples experience of cassette and MP3.

 

I well remember the stress of trying of trying to find particular tracks on cassette tape just brought in from someone's car during a live show and the delight of MP3 copied from heaven knows what source played through a large sound system.

 

Suggesting to the production company that they source their music from CD was not well received. Copying tape to tape was not so easy to do so generally people doing it had some understanding and realised that the more generations away from the original the worse the quality. With digital I think (correct me if I am wrong) you can copy a file to another device or location and it is a clone of the original file, however the same is not true when changing formats and some of the resulting files are poor.

[timtheenchanteruk]

I remember tapes mostly from dance schools etc using the edit music by cassette method, ie pause the recording deck whilst the master still plays, if you were lucky you just got the reduction in quality, otherwise it was a click, or in some cases a speaker killing thump as the tape was paused/unpaused.

Most those I worked with never bothered with decent cassettes either just the cheapest they could find, and it had usually been used for 5 years at festivals.

[Rob_P]

Ah yes - the delights of transcoding digital files. Even if they sounded OK when they were first compressed, by the time they have gone from m4a to AAC to mp3 so much data has been lost that they sound terrible.

When presented with something wierd I generally use the NCH sound converter to change it to WAV. Even CDs get ripped onto the laptop for playback, and the originals kept until the end of the show for disaster recovery! I do keep an iPod to RCA cable in my bodgit box, because trying to use the headphone output of somebody's iPod is asking for trouble.

I haven't run a theatrical show off tapes since I was at school, and to be honest can't even remember how I did it! Good riddance as far as I am concerned. I still have a by if a soft spot for MD though.

[cedd]

An ex girlfriend from a few years ago used to be a synchronised swimmer. I remember sitting through many of her competitions wincing at the appalling cuts and edits on the tapes. Like most dance schools, it seems that sound quality was the last thing on their mind, which to me beggars belief. If something forms such a key part of your performance then surely it should be done right. Of course, the acoustics of the swimming pool didn't help matters that much, and their underwater monitoring methods were pretty basic - sink a speaker in a waterproof box on the end of a wire. I reasoned with her that if she turned up with a properly produced and edited track, she'd probably blow them all away just with the sheer refreshing difference to the usual assault on the ears. Sadly it wasn't long after then that she decided one boyfriend wasn't enough and she needed to have some fun with another bloke, so she never did get her nicely mixed backing track! :-)