First album you bought.

[Mr Peabody]

Come on, no one really thinks 8-tracks sounded better than cassettes do you? With a high bias cassette recorded on a good deck and good source the sound was pretty good. 8-track never came close to that. Well, just comparing pre-recorded they both pretty much sucked. I can honestly say I never bought a new pre-recorded cassette. Or, 8-track as far as that goes.

There was a difference between decks too. I started with a Technics and replaced it with a Teac, The Teac was quite a bit better. I think the key to good sound from cassettes was head alignment. Something I knew nothing about. I trusted the decks to all be standard. I dropped some tapes I recorded into a Nakamichi deck and they didn't sound as good as they did on my Teac. But the Nak was a better machine and sounded better on standard tapes and tapes rrecorded from it in the first place.

My daughter's boyfriend has an I-pod, one with 80 GB. I asked him to check it out. The first time I actually played with an I-pod. I have a couple small mp3 players but not an Apple product. He was just using the ear buds that came with the I-pod. I plugged my portable Sennheiser's in for him to enlighten him a bit. I was actually impressed by the sound of this I-pod, I mean in comparison to mp3 sound I had heard before. He ripped most of his stuff from I-tunes and I expected it to sound compressed and crappy. His I-pod had a wider sound stage than my Sandisk and more of a high fidelity sound. They must do a good job with AAC. It also had more volume than I could stand. I say this because we criticize kids today for liking mp3 sound but with good headphones it probably sounds better than anything they've heard before unless some one they know has a high end system and that's not a majority. I have to say it's a far cry better than most of the car audio systems these kids think sound good.

[emesbee]

8-track was indeed a continuous loop, but the same thing was not recorded on different tracks. Four two-channel programs were recorded in parallel on the looped tape...thus 8 tracks. Changing from one channel to the next caused the player to move to a different area on the width of the tape.

I stand corrected. So if each pair of tracks contained a different part of an album, skipping tracks would give the illusion of direct access to another part of the recording.

[emesbee]

Mr Peabody, I don't disagree with your comments regarding 8-tracks and cassettes. Towards the end, it certainly was possible to get good sound quality from a cassette. However, that was only after there had been years of development with noise reduction systems, different tape materials, improvements in the design of tape decks, etc, etc. I have a reasonable quality cassette deck myself, and sometimes I am quite surprised at how good it can sound. However, no matter how good the noise reduction, there is always a residual amount of tape hiss present.

I suspect that if the same amount of development effort had been put into 8-track, then it would probably surpass cassette in terms of sound quality, but the medium disappeared before that could happen.

I would think, though, that when the two formats were introduced (I'm not sure which came first) that 8-track probably did sound better then, before the later developments with cassettes.

[Smokey]

I would think, though, that when the two formats were introduced (I'm not sure which came first) that 8-track probably did sound better then, before the later developments with cassettes.

I think 8-track sounded better because its speed was twice cassette tapes. Higher tape speed mean higher bandwidth and lower noise

[elapsed]

Audio cassettes were never intended for hi-fi sound reproduction when they were designed. I think they were meant for things like dictation machines. All the noise reduction methods that came later could never really overcome the inherent limitations of the medium.

Then you've never auditioned a Nakamichi CR-7E, the finest cassette deck ever made. Cost around $2,000 back in 1998, can still blow away many CD players.

http://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/hfw/olde...michicr7e.html

cheers,
elapsed

[02audionoob]

My Sony K909ES cassette deck sounds very nice...perhaps not what some would call high-fidelity...but still good.

[emesbee]

Then you've never auditioned a Nakamichi CR-7E, the finest cassette deck ever made. Cost around $2,000 back in 1998, can still blow away many CD players.

http://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/hfw/olde...michicr7e.html

cheers,
elapsed

I don't disagree. I did listen to a Nakamichi cassette deck around the time you mention (1998), so may well have heard the model you mention. (I wasn't auditioning, it was at a hi-fi show).

Equally, there are some very fine CD players around, a number of which I am sure would blow away the Nakamichi deck you mention.

[TheRambler]

Some British rock, Uriah Heep albums in early 70's..
Also many 45s, Still remember: The night chicago died, Paper Lace, was it ?

[TheRambler]

After using so many cassette decks (cant remember, around a hundred), top-quality ones including Nak ZX-7 and ZX-9 (Mr Nakamichi's most liked deck), Dragons, RX-505s, Luxman K-05, Sony-777ES, and so many top-end brands I can say one thing. I'm still listening this media in my car only. In terms of analog, as a recorded media I finally reached to Nirvana.. It is DAT..Go for a DAT machine forget anything said on them whether they have limitations with 48khz etc etc, it is non-sense, get recording either from your vinyl or from digital source and get deeply shocked with the sound quality. I do suggest DAT machines as a (still) analog recording media (forget the first letter "D") standing for Digital, as it has nothing to the with digital , get the most still from the analog. Dithering, Super Bit Mapping (SPM) as used by many Sony recording laboratories and as well by Telarc. Second generation dublications are terminated with DAT machines (in digital input/output) as they are really make "clone" recoding, but analog highway still there for those analog music lovers. Stay in peace.

[Mr Peabody]

Ah, Demons & Wizards, I still love that album. Welcome to AR Rambler

[Brick Top]

well....some people may know of Sam The Record Man in Ontario. Back in about 74 they used to give away a certain LP on a Sat morn for 1 penny to the first 50 customers or so. I stood in line real early on a Sat morn in 74 to get a Lighthouse LP. Can't remember the name of it though. But the price was right...for a 14 year old kid...and I didn't even own a Turntable.

Cheers,
BT

[ForeverAutumn]

well....some people may know of Sam The Record Man in Ontario. Back in about 74 they used to give away a certain LP on a Sat morn for 1 penny to the first 50 customers or so. I stood in line real early on a Sat morn in 74 to get a Lighthouse LP. Can't remember the name of it though. But the price was right...for a 14 year old kid...and I didn't even own a Turntable.

Cheers,
BT

Hey Brick Top, where you from? I grew up with Sam the Record Man (not literally with Sam, I'm not that old. lol) and A&A's next door. I remember getting up really early on boxing day, each year, and my Mom would take us downtown to line up in front of Sam's before they opened. We'd stand in line for hours, freezing our noses off. But back in those days the deals were worth it. It was a sad day for me when Sam's closed their doors for good.

[BradH]

You'd have to adjust the matchbook cover, that was stuffed under the tape, to get just the one song to play right.

Omigod, the matchbooks. I'd almost forgotten about that. What a pain. The only saving grace was the matchbook was wedge shaped so you could keep cramming it in there. I remember one cartridge I had where the little metal piece fell off that tells the player to switch tracks so you had to do it manually.

I remember a lot of tape hiss associated with these things, far more than cassettes. Also, with the tape being pulled from the inner pack next to the reel they had to use cheap tapes to keep the cartridge from filling up with ferric oxide dust. They used to jack with the song sequencing too so there would be minimal track switches during a song, remember that? Then there were those really heavy ones made from double albums, they lasted about a week. Man, what a wave of suction those things were. I think half of them were bootlegs anyway judging by the freaky covers. We had receivers that would record to 8-tracks so I ended up with some cool FM stuff like an ad for Genesis on the Lamb tour. In 1989 I tried to transfer them to HiFi VHS using a standalone 8-track player but it ate the damned thing up. That's another memory, pulling wads of tape out of those machines.

[Brick Top]

Hey Brick Top, where you from?

I lived in Hamilton , ON from 74 - 99. We had many good record stores in the old days. Now I live in a cow path in MI...and my best choice for a B&M store for media is Walfart!

I used to love going out on Boxing day and spendin a couple 100 bucks on records. No such fun in this neck of the woods.

Cheers,
BT