[JackA]

On Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 5:26:38 AM UTC-5, John Williamson wrote:
On 05/02/2015 02:48, JackA wrote:
On Wednesday, February 4, 2015 at 6:03:44 PM UTC-5, John Williamson wrote:
On 04/02/2015 22:39, Scott Dorsey wrote:
God, how I hated cassettes.

Me too. Even 128 kbps mp3 is preferable.

Hated cassettes? Maybe just prerecorded? When I used to rip "vinyl" songs to them, I only used Sony "Metal" cassettes. Very impressive fidelity! Their trick was common shaped particles aligned in such was way to maximize coverage.

When I started using cassettes, I had the choice of BASF ferric or a
different make of ferric cassettes, and C-60 or C-90. They hadn't even
invented the CrO2 version, and as for metal tapes, they had to wait
until the glass heads came along, due to the abrasive nature of the
coating. BASF were the most reliable, and most of those lasted quite
well. In all the time I was using them, the only halfway decent recorder
I found was the Sony Walkman Pro, which still change hands for good
money 20 years after they stopped making them. They gave just about
passable results if you used the specified Sony tape. I still have an
original Philips EL3300 recorder, which still works, just about, if you
clean the head every hour or so.

All through their service history, they were unreliable, either jamming
or snapping if you looked at them wrong, we all learnt how to use a
pencil to pretension them before playing, and I very quickly learnt to
buy only the types that were held together by screws, as once the welded
ones failed, you lost whatever was on the tape, and I learnt to avoid
C-120s like the plague. I had to keep spare shells handy all the time.

And that's before we start talking about the azimuth errors which
changed during playback, the problem of getting the bias set for best
performance, and the other problems which went with a format that was
originally designed to replace a dictaphone which used open reel tape.

We're well rid of them. They were handy, but they were never good
quality. Their only two good points were that they were smaller and
sounded slightly better than 8 track cartridges.

Whoa,we agree!!

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Azimuth errors, eh? Reminds me of the time I purchased a nice Pioneer cassette deck, it was marked down, 1/2 price - factory remanufactured. It didn't take long for me to realize where the engineering and/or manufacturing blunder occurred. They used springs to secure azimuth adjustments. Problem was, the chromed steel post holding the spring was just pressed in to a soft cast piece and vibration from shipping caused the spring to pull the post out!! Remanufactured, huh? Krazy glue fixed her up, I went and bought a companion unit, fixed it, too.

Like Philips!

Jack



--
Tciao for Now!

John.