A Primer on Vintage Cassette Decks: How to Find a Good One
27 comments
·October 23, 2024vr46
I still have my Technics 646 I bought new as a student, but do I use it? Barely. Chrome tapes seem to be a thing of the past, forget Type IV, and I don’t think I could spare the time anymore for anything less! Lol.
A lovely medium, but my favourite memory of them isn’t a Nakamichi-scented one. It’s a Sony Walkman-centred world that I miss! If only I still had that Sony DC2, I could retire.
Edit: my mate tells me to STFU, he can bring me some new Type IIs from Greece or Turkey. Result! Back in business!
atoav
I work in an art university and a surprising amount of new (underground/experimental) musicians release their music on casettes.
If you wanna sell music on concerts vinyl is too expensive/you would have to upfront too much money, CDs are dead, casettes however had some sort of revival. Vinyl is still king in those circles, but it requres you to be able to realistically finance and sell a run of 250 pieces to be economical.
I saw people buy casettes (with a download code) while not having a player — it is a neat physical artifact for some.
badgersnake
CDRs just make more sense here in every way. Higher quality, cheaper to produce and les degradation. Fucking hipsters.
aspenmayer
Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.
vr46
Only if you assume people are after the music and not a cool artifact, memento or souvenir.
ttepasse
Frustrating that MiniDisc was always a niche thing - those were cool looking physical artifacts and even practical.
Of course real hipsters do FLAC on Iomega ZIP drives.
0xEF
You can still find some artists on Bandcamp that release on mini disc. Whenever I see them, I buy one to try and help encourage more artists to do this.
And of course, many artists release on cassette. I have an album from Dirty Art Club on it's way to add to my cassette collection as we speak. My collection has grown considerably in the two-ish years I've been using Bandcamp, despite the sad controversy.
vr46
I can understand the attraction of a set of needlessly complicated physical contraptions that outweighs the appeal of the actual outcome - and not talking about making coffee here - so cassettes make a lot of sense, they’re unusual, uncommon, and look better on a shelf :)
roywashere
The world of cassette tape is weird. You can still buy new Maxell UR60/90 type 1 tape but the tape you get in Europe or the US is made in China or Thailand or such and is packaged in red wrappers. The same UR60 if you buy it in Japan is in purple wrappers and in different shells (screws versus glued) and is manufactured in Indonesia and apparently much better quality
zabzonk
I remember back in the 1980s that if you had a cheap microcomputer (I had a Dragon32) you actually needed a cheap, low-quality cassette deck to save/load your code/data successfully - the higher-fi ones would simply not work well, for reasons I never understood but can definitely attest to from experience.
aspenmayer
Site is having Cloudflare SSL handshake errors (Error code 525) for me. Struck out on archive.org and .is, so here's Yandex:
https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=172984247...
d--b
I am all for nostalgia and stuff, but one item I don't miss is the cassette.
These things failed all the time, the tape would get stuck in annoying places, and then you'd end up with 10 meters of tape to try and rewind without tying a knot, and the tape was screwed anyways. Ugh.
terribleperson
It's not really relevant to the article, but I find the orange lighting and brushed finish of a Nakamichi Dragon beautiful.
mjhagen
Nakamichi is what we used in theater tech in the 80s and 90s.
anonzzzies
Oh! Only a few hours ago I was lamenting I never had a cassette deck; I was born in the 70s and went from [0] (like the top picture) straight to cd. So I never had anything for playing or making cassettes like the other kids. I made mix tapes on this enormous thing which no one else could play.
Cthulhu_
I've seen one of those at a music shop once, it seemed to be studio grade equipment. The book it came with had the electrical diagrams of the whole thing, so you could in theory repair / re-engineer its electrical components. That was a rare thing to see.
anonzzzies
Those schematics used to be included with computers too in the 80s. It was normal as far as I know as we had them with anything electronic. At least where I was. Do not remember when it stopped.
imp0cat
I believe including diagrams for the ease of repair was actually quite common back then before all production was heavily automated and moved overseas.
Moru
My dad had something like that too. We got to play a bit with it but mostly used to record conversations with old relatives or musicians in the family. I think it had 4 channels that you could switch between separately. We got normal tape recorders pretty early so it was more a fun thing for us to play with.
I have a Sony similar to the one mentioned at the end of the article (Edit: TC FX 420R https://www.cassettedeck.org/sony/tc-fx420r). It's been a bit of a journey, replacing the power supply so it can run at 230V, replacing belts, and fixing the autoreverse. It is fairly user serviceable but you need to have a degree of knowledge, a steady hand, and a soldering iron and other tools. Also you'll want to check you can download the schematics and service manual before you buy. That was a huge help for this Sony.
Looks really cool when it's running, but not massively practical unless you have lots of tapes that you took good care of.
Edit: And it's going to need recapping one day.
Good quality 1970s/80s cassette decks in working order on eBay are not cheap these days.