[apelapan]

Are you collecting pre-recorded tapes or recording your own stuff to them?

After not having actively listened to a tape for twenty years, I was recently exposed and really surprised by how good the sound was. With some half-decent tapes and a half-decent deck, I was struggling to make out the difference between cassette and CD during A/B testing.

[WalterBright]

I could easily tell the difference 20 years ago. Now I can't, but that's due to some hearing loss of mine.

[klodolph]

There was enough variation between different types of tape (type I Fe2O3, type II CrO2, type IV metal) and different tape decks. Is it possible you’re listening to better tapes or on a higher quality deck? Tapes aren’t “CD quality” but they can get pretty dang good. Type I tapes, the cheapest and oldest technology, are noticeably worse than the other types.

[WalterBright]

Oh, I'd buy all sorts of tapes. But still,

   SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

and just the crispness of the sound was gone. I had a reel-to-reel which was indistinguishable from playing the record. But, RtR was just a nuisance. I finally replaced it with a MiniDisc player, which was just as good. Then recordable CDs, and then, finally, mp3.

Interestingly, my old cassettes have not degraded over the decades at all, while the VHS tapes certainly did.

[klodolph]

The "standard" head gap for a tape machine is not great, which limits the bandwidth to about 12 kHz. That would certainly take out the crispness of audio... and you wouldn't be able to hear it if you had hearing damage, but if you had a nicer tape deck with a non-standard, narrower head gap, the bandwidth would be much higher (20 kHz no problem).

There are a lot of reasons why you might hear the hiss in one system and not another... besides different tape types, there are systems like Dolby noise reduction. The noise reduction comes in different varieties and must be paired with the correct decoding circuitry... if the wrong type of noise reduction is selected at playback, it may sound noticeably worse. I'm sure you know this, but plenty of people on HN are too young.

Most compact cassettes used Dolby B. You could use newer systems like Dolby C or Dolby S instead, and it would get rid of most of the hiss. These weren't used much when cassettes were common because tapes made with Dolby C or S sounded horrible without decoding, and Dolby S also came out very late when cassettes were on the way out.

If you combine all of these things... a tape deck with a narrower head gap, with a high-quality CrO2 or metal tape, and Dolby S noise reduction, you will get something that sounds very good, like a CD.

This video has some samples with and without Dolby S, with type I and type II tapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgJFvHPLfc

If you were using compact cassettes for music production, like with a Tascam Portastudio, the situation was even better, since it ran the tapes at a higher speed.

[WalterBright]

I always used Dolby (don't recall which one), and played them back on the machine that recorded them. SSSSSSSS :-( The MiniDisc ended all my interest in cassettes.

Weirdly, I never minded the rumble and crackling of vinyl.

I remember the first time I listened to a CD. The song ended, and there was silence. Dead silence. It was like the song faded away and sucked me in :-)

I'm sorry. I don't doubt you're right, with spending enough money on the cassettes and cassette player you can get decent results, but that just wasn't what mainstream cassettes and players were like. I've long since replaced my cassettes with CDs and threw them out. There's no nostalgia for them for me.

[klodolph]

You were probably using Dolby B, like everyone else.

Not trying to convince anyone to use cassettes, there are enough reasons to avoid them. But it is worth explaining that you can get very high-quality sound from them.

[hbgngkkgk]

If you struggle to tell the difference between cassettes and CDs maybe you should upgrade your headphones/speakers to something worth more than 5 bucks :)

[theklub]

Just pre-recorded, whatever the thrift shop has laying around really.