tape

As far as I'm concerned, we have a global musical crisis on our hands.

The cassette tape was the dominant music format through most of my childhood. The first read-along books I had as a kid were on cassette tape. The first time I ever bought music with my own money, it was on a cassette tape (which, by the way, I'm proud to say was Run DMC's "Raising Hell"). The first time my band ever released a demo, it was a demo tape.

For independent musicians of the '80s and '90s, cassette tapes offered … Read more

While the LP revival is still in full swing you rarely hear about the other 12-inch, grooved vinyl record format, the RCA VideoDisc.

It was a grooved, carbon-loaded PVC disc. The grooves were 48 times smaller than an LP groove, but they were still tracked with a diamond "needle"! That was possible because unlike an LP's zigzag grooves the CED's grooves were hills and dales. That difference also minimized groove wear, so the discs could be played hundreds of times. VHS and Beta tapes would wear out faster than that. The VideoDisc also had stereo soundtracks.… Read more

You'll never find a comparably equipped 1980 Corvette outperforming a 2011 'Vette, or a 1980 TV or computer blowing away a '11 model. Audio is a different matter; a lot of decades-old gear really does sound better than its 2011 equivalents. That's especially true when comparing 1970s and 1980s receivers with today's models. I covered why that is so in last weekend's "How can 30-year-old receivers sound better than new ones?" blog.

I chatted with Innovative Audio's Gordon Sauck to learn more about buying old hi-fi. Sauck started designing home theater installations in … Read more

It's hard enough to keep up with a digital music collection spanning thousands of tunes over gigabytes of disk space, but what do you do if you have LP records, cassette tapes, Edison wax cylinders, and other musical media? Duck Software's Album Tracker can help music lovers get a handle on their ever-expanding libraries. It's a highly customizable music database that lets you organize your music by genre as well as title, artist, and other typical categories. It's not a music or media player and doesn't try to reorganize or convert your library; it simply … Read more

Nostalgia can be a powerful thing, and few things quite pluck at the heartstrings like the compact cassette--if you were born before the 1990s, of course. For those who like collecting bits of tech history, this novel idea for a chair would fit right into the collection.

A designer from quirky design house OOO My Design took a simple wooden chair frame, patiently fastened a bunch of old cassettes to it, and aptly named it the Nostalgic Chair. To top that off, she attached an actual Sony Walkman and a pair of headphones for the ultimate blast from the past.

Though we wouldn't recommend buying this chair for sitting, this piece of retro art can be yours for a relatively reasonable 140 euros ($198). … Read more

I devoured Tape Op magazine's interview with Jack White III (the White Stripes), mostly because the man is as obsessed with sound quality as I am. The interview was conducted by Tape Op's editor, Larry Crane, but it sounds more like a freewheeling conversation than an interview. Crane founded the magazine 15 years ago, and it now has a circulation of 55,000 print copies.

White never takes the easy way with his music and recording, and prefers analog tape machines, "I like the constriction of 8-track. I like knowing in the back of my head that … Read more

The Eight Track Museum opens on Monday in the Deep Ellum arts district of Dallas. If you're under 40 you may have never seen or heard an 8-track audio tape. The 5.25x4x.8 inch plastic tape cartridge was big and bulky, but it became wildly popular in cars in the 1960s. An 8-track cartridge contains a continuous loop of quarter-inch tape. The ends of the tape are linked by a metal foil splice, and the tape is divided along its length into 8 channels, or tracks (hence the name).

Bucks Burnett, 52, is the force behind the creation … Read more

I was never a fan of cassettes; they were the MP3s of their time. Neither format ever sounded good to me.

Prerecorded tapes from the record companies were the lowest of the low. True, they were less expensive than LPs in the '70s and '80s, but you could make much better-sounding cassettes yourself by dubbing LPs to cassette.

Cassettes were only slightly more durable than LPs and were definitely subject to wear. Also, while the cassette you made might sound decent enough on YOUR cassette deck, there was no guarantee it would sound OK on anybody else's machine (tape … Read more

Digital audio won the popularity contest years ago, and nowadays almost every sound you hear coming out of a speaker is digitally encoded. Sound is always digital, whether it's on your phone, computer, radio, TV, home theater, or in a concert hall. I'd go so far as to say most people never hear analog recordings anymore. Unless you're a musician, or live with one, virtually all the music you hear live or recorded is digital.

Digital audio eliminated all of analog audio's distortions and noise-related problems. In that sense digital is "perfect." When analog … Read more