Memory

I'm afraid i don't follow. Pre-digital recordings of, say, the 60s and

I think you're referring to *using* tape, and not tape per se. In the hands of decent engineers, I'd defy a good number of listeners to able to distinguish between tape and digital.

Not really, you're talking about cassette tape, rather than pro machines. I did have a semi-pro Revox a while back. I couldn't reliably distinguish between a recordings and original CDs. I'm not saying that 'test' is the last word in scientific rigour - simply that tape is far from 'awful'.

What do you mean by 'miracle'? You're just wandering off somewhere!

The story of the demise of LP and cassette is far more complicated than sound quality. It tells me something, but only a fraction of the story.

That people prefer vinyl is not a myth at all.

What a peculiar statement. So it was the best available, at that time. I agree with that, I suppose. But still awful by the standards available today? Given a decent sound engineer, I disagree.

Well, obviously. Massive diminishing returns in audio gear. Speakers possibly excepted.

I would have loved to see that in operation. Hope it found a good home?

BUT the reasons why they do are now not based on any discernibly better sound

There you go. straw manning again.

Its a bit like saying that because Fangio was a brilliant driver the mercedes or whatever it was he drove was a really good car!

IT wasn't. It was terrible. You could probably beat it in a production BMW today.

Tape is awful. Get over it. Just because with a huge amount of calibration and understanding by some really good sound engineers and design engineers it was good ENOUGH doesn't make it great. Just. Barely. Good. ENOUGH.

The biggest advance was to go digital an turn it into a digital recording medium. At a stroke out go wow, flutter, hiss, dropouts, ghosting and companding, and in comes a bit of delay.

With over an hour of music available on a 600MByte device an gigabyte and terabyte discs available why would anyone use tape ?

Urban myth. The max length was defined by the available tapes for the U-Matic recorder. The rather odd time being down to the same tapes being used for PAL and NTSC, but running for a longer time at 25 frames per second. ie, a 60 minute tape at 30 fps becomes 72 at 25. 60 minute tapes were just over 60 minutes long to allow for line up data - it was a pro format. Hence the 74 minutes.

some years ago, I was running sound on production of a Noël Coward play. I called for a member of cast to play the piano. Unfortunately, the actor involved could not do more than pick a tune with one finger, so I made a recording - on tape - at a friend's house (she had a Steinway). Most of the audience thought the music was really coming form the concert grand they saw on stage. Mind you, if I'd used the cassette the director gave me, I don't think anyone would have been fooled.

Most theatres and cinemas had those for arc lamps and projectors, at one time.

I wish people here didn't assume that tape means analogue. There were (even if they don't exist now) quite a few digital tape systems.

Trouble is you don't have one of the major advantages of a digital system

- random access. Having to spool up and down a tape to find something was a real PITA. And they usually could only be copied in real time.

It's origin is more uncertain though there is a lot of association with the 74 minutes and Beethoven's 9th.

Tapes were made of various lengths, not just 60/72 minutes. Where did you get this inference?

I was moderately impressed with how LTO handles this. Lots of linear tracks (2716 in LTO6 according to Wikipedia), but only writing a few at once (16 for LTO6) - though the write bandwidth is still really pretty high (160MB/s uncompressed, ie more than Gb).

It writes forward, back, forward, back, etc for lots of passes. The advantage being that it doesn't take nearly as much winding to get to where your data is - a tape which takes over 4 hours to fill still has an access time of under a minute.

What you seem to have overlooked is the extra 18 minutes of run time compared to a 74 minute CD (C90s were typically 46 minutes or so each way).

Obviously not too well up on electrical theory if it wasn't immediately obvious to him that it was a three phase _fullwave_ rectifier designed for use with bi-phase secondary windings off a three phase transformer. Six phase it wasn't!

indeed. You get over *nearly* all the problems if you go digital.

After all hard disks are 'tape done different' its all spinning or moving rust of one sort or another.

The real breakthrough is in NAND memory like SSD and flash..

But the point remains spinning rust is awful, and analogue spinning rust is the worst off all.

digital technology allows compensation for the worst analogue variabilities by hiding it below the bit level.

No, I didn't. That takes it to 560-odd MB vs 700, ie it's holding 80% of the information. Are cassettes really that good?

No.

the bandwidth is very low. AS is the SNR

Id say you can get about 4Khz bandwidth at about 55dB SNR.

ie about 10 bits deep and 4khz so 40Kbps.

Really the cassette tape has nothing to recommend it anymore at all.

When you can get 8Gbyte on a thumb drive...that costs the same as a few blank cassettes.

I think te final nail in te coffin for me was hen I was looking to backup a wew tens of GB on my home server.

It wpuldnt fit on a DVD. A tape wss around 200 and I would need dozens of tapes to do a 'nightly copy' There would be no guarantee the tape would be usablle anyway..BTDTGTTS

IN the end the thing that did the job of protecting me against hard disk failure was...another hard disk!

cheapests and simplest option.

Th backup drive went earlier this year. In with a new one, and leave it running over the weekend absorbing all the data .

If any of the main ones hop its really just a question of copying all the data back..

Now I am looking at my first SSD/SD machine. NO spinning rust at all.

Another seminal moment..

Indeed. I've just listened to a 1964 (first transmission; they don't say when it was recorded) BBC recording of a song recital given by Benjamin Britten & Peter Pears:

I didn't find the sound quality got in the way of my enjoyment of this performance. I suppose it is possible that the BBC might have cleaned up the original recording in some fashion before making this available on iplayer, but even if that's true it means the original recording was well engineered.

Do the people who think pre-1980s tape is dreadful think this performance is dreadful too?

Our current cassette deck does some faffing about when you tell it to set up a tape for recording - I'm pretty sure it's doing an analysis of the tape to get the exact characteristics. Certainly the blinkenlights suggest it's writing pulses at different volumes; I'll guess the other pass is a frequency sweep.

And yes, we do still have one. It's handy for recording things for the car, and we have a lot of old tapes.

Andy

Surely better than that with a decent machine, and decent quality tape, especially if you use Dolby C (or if you can stand the artefacts) dbx encoding.

Back in the 1980s (I think) I used a Marantz CP430 3-head cassette deck (powered from NiCds) with a pair of Calrec cardioid mics run from a 48 V box of NiCds to make recordings of a choir as we travelled all over Europe, often singing where mains electricity was iffy or non-existent. Provided the recordings were played back on the same unit, the quality was not bad at all. I did however use an external LED peak meter rather than depend only on the machine's mechanical metering.