Cassette lovers; why?

Bob Boyer

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#81
Just airing some not unrelated thoughts ... Forget precise Dolby compatibilty of course - that's another subject, which just happens to bring me to the Music Cassette. How many in here have noticed that the PB of some of these tapes with 'Dolby' marked on is a hit-and-miss affair!? Yes, I'm aware that high frequencies are somewhat partially attenuated with time, but some of these manufactured 'Dolby' tapes are way off.
Somehow I don't think Dolby and high speed duplication are any kind of a match. I have a couple and yes, they're best played without Dolby and with the 70 ms eq.
 

ButchJames

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#82
Somehow I don't think Dolby and high speed duplication are any kind of a match. I have a couple and yes, they're best played without Dolby and with the 70 ms eq.
Which is exactly what I do.

BTW, my interest in R2R and cassette goes back to possibly the late 1960s, and cassette in particular from about 1973 when Dad bought me the Sanyo M2000 mono cassette player. Back then I would send off for brochures from Sony/TEAC/TDK etc - it fuelled my imagination and fascination with the format. That said, there is an amount low level standardisational (spelling?) chaos regarding tape machines, not surprising when we think about it as tape technologies evolved.

I still have my father's Sanyo M2000 and a few brochures, although I wish I had kept them all.
 
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Bob Boyer

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#83
I went R2R first as a result of working radio from 1973 - 1978. Had to have something with 10" reels and that something at the time was a Pioneer RT-1011, the least expensive of that line. After all, I was making $80/week plus all the records I could eat and had to fund an MGB daily driver. That Pioneer was stolen (probably by the movers) when we moved down to work in Alabama, which led to my first cassette deck, a low - mid range Pioneer. Can't recall which one but it had piano key controls, not relays/solenoids, so not overly expensive. When TVA moved me back to Chattanooga, a friend in Decatur bought my entire system, which led to a new system with a Nakamichi BX-1. Excellent deck, better than the rest of the system. After that, I acquired a Tascam 133 for the A/V production business but dropped cassette and went back to reels (or no tape at all) from the mid-90s to 2017, when I got this deck.
 

Makymak

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#84
I don't think Philips created a standard for that (but I could be wrong)
If I remember well, Philips let the format free as long as the other companies didn't made any alterations. Of course the limits between alteration and improvement are quite vogue. And definitely there was a huge improvement through the years following.

Listening in the car to a TDK SA I recorded on sub-par equipment in 1985 or so, and it still sounds good.
I have some "lower" TDK Ds and Sony HFs and Denon DX1s and Fuji DRs recorded back in the '80s that my parents played them back maybe a thousand times each and still sound like they were recorded yesterday.
 
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