First I would like to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome, and Nando for inviting me to join your website.
A little bit of background on me, I've been seriously listening to music since hmm... since I first put record on my parents console stereo around 1970. In 1969 I was in early grade school and like every classroom across the globe we were following the Apollo mission that landed on the moon. My mom bought me a record about the size of a 45, but I believe it played at 33 RPM of the transmission of the Apollo landing. I misplaced that and years later I acquired it again and I still have it. Skip ahead a few years, and I'm a taper from way back, and when I mean a taper I mean a cheapo radio and setting up cheap cassette player next to it and making mixtapes at 10 or 11 years old. The best or worst part of that depending on how you look at it is I thought they haha... when they probably sounded like nails on a chalkboard. So time passes, I get a decent cassette deck and start doing some good recordings, and then one day this shiny little disk comes along and ruins everything… yep the CD. Don't get me wrong I still spin some CDs, and digital music gets a bad rap for the most part in my opinion.
So I forgot about cassette tapes for over 30 years, and here I am a few months after getting back into it, with three cassette decks, two Walkman pros so I can play my cassettes in the car and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.
So much has changed, and I was never this serious about my recordings but there's a couple things I've noticed about the few different kinds of metal tapes that I've used. They are unique to record on and can be a challenge to bias correctly, and today I got a little more serious and zeroed in on what I believe was a very good recording. But then it dawned on me... maybe I've been listening to my metal tape recordings wrong. I've used Maxell and Sony metal tapes for the most part, maybe a TDK or two, and then I thought today wow they just sound so different. There's no hiss, the noise floor is lower, and it just sounds more natural. Not that the other two types of tape can't or don't sound good because they do, just that in my short travels back to cassette tapes, there is a warm analog feeling I get that I don't get from the other two types of tapes.
Has anybody else experienced this, is it my bias because it's metal?
A little bit of background on me, I've been seriously listening to music since hmm... since I first put record on my parents console stereo around 1970. In 1969 I was in early grade school and like every classroom across the globe we were following the Apollo mission that landed on the moon. My mom bought me a record about the size of a 45, but I believe it played at 33 RPM of the transmission of the Apollo landing. I misplaced that and years later I acquired it again and I still have it. Skip ahead a few years, and I'm a taper from way back, and when I mean a taper I mean a cheapo radio and setting up cheap cassette player next to it and making mixtapes at 10 or 11 years old. The best or worst part of that depending on how you look at it is I thought they haha... when they probably sounded like nails on a chalkboard. So time passes, I get a decent cassette deck and start doing some good recordings, and then one day this shiny little disk comes along and ruins everything… yep the CD. Don't get me wrong I still spin some CDs, and digital music gets a bad rap for the most part in my opinion.
So I forgot about cassette tapes for over 30 years, and here I am a few months after getting back into it, with three cassette decks, two Walkman pros so I can play my cassettes in the car and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.
So much has changed, and I was never this serious about my recordings but there's a couple things I've noticed about the few different kinds of metal tapes that I've used. They are unique to record on and can be a challenge to bias correctly, and today I got a little more serious and zeroed in on what I believe was a very good recording. But then it dawned on me... maybe I've been listening to my metal tape recordings wrong. I've used Maxell and Sony metal tapes for the most part, maybe a TDK or two, and then I thought today wow they just sound so different. There's no hiss, the noise floor is lower, and it just sounds more natural. Not that the other two types of tape can't or don't sound good because they do, just that in my short travels back to cassette tapes, there is a warm analog feeling I get that I don't get from the other two types of tapes.
Has anybody else experienced this, is it my bias because it's metal?
Last edited: