obsessed with cassettes

[washabear]

fonografmaniac, it's obvious that you like cassettes! I do, too. I have a little Tascam 4-track cassette recorder to put down my own music. It works pretty well. I just have a Technics cassette component unit to play them back on. It's from the early '90s but it works OK.

Whirlcool, that's nice to have a cassette player in your car! I know they are hard to come by these days.

 

[selectomatic]

I don't remember seeing the RCA tape cartridge before,

I was looking for something to watch while I ate dinner this evening, and this thread prompted me to type "Tape Recorder" into Archive.org's search bar.

One of the first results was a 1958 Jam Handy short subject about the RCA cartridge. The first half of the program is a Living Stereo Album promotion, the second half touts the many virtues of RCA Tape Cartridges.

They had a lot of modern features in these machines, considering the time when they were introduced.

-kevin

 

[sudsmaster]

Sleeper

One of my favorite scenes in the movie "Sleeper" is where Woody Allen and Diane Keatton are supposed to be taking care of a huge reel-to-reel tape deck mounted vertically on a wall. Needless to say, the tape comes undone and all balled up.

 

[red_october]

Interesting things I have encountered...

I once came upon a tiny little thing that looked like an 8-track in miniature, and it was that essentially, had 4 mono songs on a cartridge barely bigger than a matchbook.

I have a couple cassette decks I'd part with if you're interested; a BIC T1 two speed and a big Sony that's seemingly built on the same chassis they made the big Elcaset decks on, though it's regular compact cassette. I'm drowning in cassette decks (Have a Marantz double, a Pioneer double, an Akai, and several others. Both the BIC and the Sony need belts, but I haven't bothered as I have all the others.

 

[jasonl]

I don't own the first cassette :-( .

But at the flea market I was listening to Loretta Lynn on a 70s 8 track player :-D .

 

[whirlcool]

Anyone remember the Playtape machines? The tapes were about the size of a deck of cards and contained 6 songs or so. You see these on Ebay now and then. Several auto manufacturers offered these around 1970 or so.....

Pardon Our Interruption...

 

[bundtboy]

1971 Advent 201 cassette deck

I have an excellent example of the very first deck ever to use Dolby. It's a 1971 Advent, and it still works like the day it left the factory, and sounds more natural than any other cassette deck I've ever owned. It's an amazing piece.

I have attached a photo of it that I found on the internet, and here's the link to the page where I found it also.

advent

 

[Cybrvanr]

Anybody know if any of the high performance metal alloy cassette tapes can be found anywhere? It's even hard to find the high bias chromium tapes nowadays. I've got a fancy Tascam 112 studio grade cassette deck that sounds really nice with those high-end cassette tapes!

 

[Cybrvanr]

Totally neat cassette decks guys! Many of those older cassette decks were really made nice. I'm always fascinated by those rare portable reel to reel decks. Here's a picture of my "ultimate" mother of all cassette decks...the Tascam 112!

 

[Cybrvanr]

The media

Here's my collection of cassette tapes. Each bin holds 100 tapes, so that's a lot of tapes. These are all high bias and metal bias TDK tapes. They contain copies from my record album collection. In my van, I have a fancy cassette player that will play back Dolby C and dbx encoded tapes, so I'll record my record albums with these noise reduction modes. Most people cannot tell the difference, and when I tell them they are listening to a tape copy of a record album, they don't believe me!

 

[Cybrvanr]

OOPS, picture didn't post!

 

[gocartwasher]

cassettes

they gave me better service than anny CD-R`s have I had many new CD-R`s not work right when new ,I never had a single new cassete not work,I guess CD-r recording is fairly new technology ,so it still has bugs in it,however factory made CD`s have been a really reliable format,hope someday the home burnt CD-R`s will work as good
Below is all the music formats I own

 

[gocartwasher]

reliability of formats

as you can see tapes are relaiable especially the maxell brand I still use cassetes for masters on many recordings ,I have been using them since 1973!!
cassettes rule!!!!!

 

[fonografmaniac]

welcome to the world before tapes!

 

[jasonl]

Selectomatic!

Here's the player for that Norelco cartridge