This engenders the same feelings and “desire to return to a more authentic time” in me.
After a cool little two-seater that was an automatic, I started searching online for a car with “MANUAL TRANSMISSION” as part of the search. It worked!
And then I got a turntable, and pulled all my old vinyl out of the basement!
That’s kind of funny. Bluetooth is always lossy, so you may as well just stream it.
I bought quite a few vinyl LPs in the early 80s, and had the same experience: the vinyl was very thin, and some had pops & hiss right from the get-go. And some new records were slightly warped.
My stepfather has a collection of LPs he bought in the early to late 1960s. The vinyl is thicker and feels much more substantial.
Pre-DOLBY™ studio recordings?
Given that “Dolby A,” the noise reduction system which Ray Dolby invented for use in recording studios, was only invented in 1965 (and started out in the UK), it wouldn’t surprise me at all if artists who recorded in the US in the mid-to-late 60s, like the Airplane, didn’t use it (and may not have even had access to it).
The quality of vinyl varied considerably. Hell, entire labels had reputations for higher or lower quality. Recording studios varied from cheap rooms with egg cartons and carpet tacked to the walls and you could hear the rumble of traffic going by to symphony halls. Recoding tape as a mastering medium could be extraordinarily finicky.
FWIW, the super-thin vinyl discs that were introduced in the 70s were thought to be an advantage over the thicker, heavier discs. The newer discs were supposedly better able to withstand the bumps, jostling and general punishment that records were put through. Whether they actually did that is open for debate.
I have an acquaintance that said, in total seriousness, that pre-recorded cassette can sound as good as vinyl. You have to be pretty far around the retro bend to say something like that. Many pre-recorded tapes didn’t even us Dolby, and none were on metal tape.They were likely manufactured at high speed as well.
Not to mention, the song order was usually shifted around.
I asked him if he’d like to borrow my 8-track player.
I used to prefer cassettes in my car. The shells were more durable than CD.
Cassettes could fall off the seat and live on the floor for days. Get kicked around by people’s feet. They’d still play.
CD’s scratch so easily and they fail more quickly when left in the sun.
I still have my record collection. It’s stored in a cabinet in my den.
Well, this thread is timely for me, because I just bought my first turntable in 30 years. I had been carting a bunch of albums around for all that time, and now I’m enjoying listening to them again. Many of them are available via streaming, but quite a few are not – some simply were never made available via stream, and others are bootlegs/foreign releases. Some of those not available to stream are chopped up into individual songs on YouTube, but that’s a horrible way to listen to music.
Today I’ve been listening to a live double album from Blondie, circa 1979, and really enjoying it. The sound quality is surprisingly terrific, and some of the songs weren’t yet released at that time.
All of which is to say, vinyl does have a place.
This is unforgivably nerdy, but when I first read Thudlow’s post, I thought he was talking about Morse code. An even older version of ‘manual transmission’, certainly superseded, but definitely not obsolete.
I dunno about the cassette tape shells being that durable, I recall in the early 1980s (probably earlier as well) it was not uncommon at all to see a shattered cassette shell in the street, with a long tail of brown/black tape streaming along the gutter. Admittedly by the late 1980s you would also see an occasional CD in a broken case in the road along with the former tape cassettes (not that many CDs though, as they were expensive at that time). I might have encountered a few records (likely the cheapest post-fuel crisis 45rpms of the era), but those would be rare as found street media.
Speaking of the 70s and records, as a meddling kid of the era, one time at a family visit at my cousin’s house (also a meddling kid) while the adult folk talked upstairs. we were down stairs playing with his minimalist model railroad (well, glorified train set level) when he noticed a box of old records with band names we never heard of, for the very good reason they were old (the 1930s maybe?) and so were made of shellac I believe, as they made a pleasing crack and broke into nice shards as we frisbeed them against the cellar wall. The adults caught on and stopped the fun after maybe 2 dozen records were sacrificed to the cause. I got a bit of a talking to (not too severe, those weren’t my parents records we destroyed), and my cousin…no idea but he seemed in one piece the next time we visited months later.
Cassettes fail in the sun and /or heat. The cases can distort, but more likely the tape will stretch. And of course, print thru is more common at higher temperatures.
And cold is no better. The tape can get brittle.
But sure, let’s all take an ever bigger step backwards. Prerecorded cassettes get probably 12K max frequency response with a S/N around 60db w/o Dubbly. Wow and flutter are probably terrible, but that can vary. Dynamic range is probably less than 60db. Party on!
For comparison, the values for vinyl are roughly 20K response, S/N 70db+, dynamic range ~70db.
CD values are 20K, S/N approaching 100db and dynamic range >90db.
As a child of the 80s, I want to make a defense of cassettes here - no one was listening to them because of high quality audio, we were all listening to them because you could make your own mix tapes, as well as record off the radio (!) and . . . well, honestly, plenty of us were early pirates where we’d copy friends mixes/purchases.
Although I was really happy to move to the CD era later on, because the number of times I used a pencil to roll tape back into a much loved cassette should count off of my time in purgatory. Dear lord was that a freaking pain. And I eventually ended up losing the stereos of my first three cars due to stock cassettes, so that’s another point no one will ever miss.
For the record, I was born mid-70s, and I did have a few LPs that I loved, but my parents moved frequently, and each move destroyed (via damage or overheating) at least one of the LPs. In terms of the OP, I know that when I got to use my parents turntable, the LPs sounded better than any cassette I ever owned, but that was in part due to the fact that they had full size dedicated speakers, and I only had the crappy ones on my mini-boombox or headphones. So part of our assumptions of quality almost certainly have to do with the output investment.
I was watching a mini-documentary on YouTube the other day, a 20-year follow-up to the Seattle music documentary Hype!, and there’s a bit with Mark Arm (singer of Mudhoney) saying: “actually, there’s been a cassette revival of sorts … which is also even weirder to me. The sound quality is … terrible laugh I don’t get it.”
Sums it up for me, too:
And, it, along with the 8-track, was the one way that you could listen to the music of your choosing in the car.
I found my box of 8 tracks after cleaning out my parents home.
I had some great music. Most of it was purchased again on CD.
I remember having to slide a knife under the tape of the player in my car. That would get it aligned to play correctly.
So, you were an asshole kid who had no respect for others’ property. How does that contribute to this thread?
Hey, congratulations! I just did the same, decades after being the last person in the world to give up vinyl for CDs (I still remember trying in vain to find LPs in record stores in the late 80s).
But I did love the superior sound of the CD… Signal to Noise ratio, lack of hiss and pops, resistance to warping (or even melting). And they took up less space!
But I always missed listening to my boxes of “basement records”. So finally, after giving up on trying to fix my old vintage AR, I paid $250 for a new turntable. Nothing fancy (a totally manual Music Hall), but it’s so much less finicky. And a whole different experience than streaming… much more “in the moment” (Millennial kid calls it more intentional), and not just background music.
So my latest new music has all been vinyl; used copies of a lot of “oldies” (Booker T, Sir Duke, Tull, Hendrix). But I just had to pay full price* for a couple of new LPs: Abbey Road and Charlie Brown’s Christmas.
.
*Through the nose! How much disposable income do kids these days have?
I remember holding up my cassette recorder to the TV speaker to record songs off MTV. Of course that led to occasionally hearing my family in the background when playing them back.
Yes, yes, yes. A bunch of songs with the first bars cut off.
I have many tapes I played in the 1970s that are still playable, with great songs. They will always be in that order.