OT: Now we're terrified of nice weather!

Metal tapes were even better.

I bought a beautiful TEAC deck for £10 on Facebook Marketplace. Hardly anyone wants them any more. I suspect a lot are going into landfill.

...and reel-to-reel decks. ;-(

Ever been in NYC (never mind Minnesota) in December or January? ;-)

For once, we can agree.

We continue to exit the Little Ice Age.

Soon we'll be able to grow red wine again.

I have read that, we're half way between ice ages and can expect temperatures to rise, plateau then start to drop. Have you seen any commentary on it? I find it very hard to accept that a couple of thousand years deforestation and a hundred and ten years of cars can have that much effect on a planet that's what, about 3,500 million years old?

yup. The amount of ground that is now covered in concrete is way higher in proportion than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

There is a weather station on a rock in the Atlantic somewhere that stubbornly refuses to see any climate change at all.

It's not a possibility, it's a certainty in many cases. It explains the discrepancies (in part) between IR satellite measurements and the ground weather stations.

Ahem. They claim to have appropriate fiddle-factors which take those changes into account, where they're deciding whether to claim the warming trends are real and deny any other explanations.

The 'science' in reality is not what he thinks it is. The real science throws the whole climate change narrative up in the air and at the very least shows that CO2 is not the only issue, and may very well not be the dominant issue, which makes all the climate hysteria simply that - hysteria created for commercial and political reasons. It is a most convenient lie, really.

It was crap. Sorry. I was there, I made the measurement and did the back to back tests.

Something is always happening.

You don't read enough history...

Over the last 2000 years its certainly been wetter, colder, hotter, and drier than it is now. At various times.

Go back 10,000 years and we are in an ice age. That ended abruptly with massive warming and no change in CO2 whatsoever.

Go back just before the Black Death and we had a 'year without summer'. That killed millions.

Contrast the mediaeval and Roman warm periods that saw huge expansions of populations.

Anyone who examines the historical evidence will shake their heads in wonderment at the fuss being created today.

We are running out of cheap fossil fuel, CO2 emissions will peak and start to fall without government or UN intervention, and any modest uptick in temperature would open up vast areas of Siberian tundra and Canadian tundra for food production.

Its all bollocks.

I had an (expensive) deck where there was a bias control which was meant to be used to optimise the tape type. I seem to recall that you recorded some white noise? (or maybe just the normal tape hiss) on the tape noting the time you changed the bias setting between minimum and maximum in steps. On playback you had to find the minium volume of this noise and the time it occurred to determine the optimum bias setting. Probably just a snake oil gimmick because it couldn't be performed on a recorded tape without erasing some of it's content. After recording on the tape it normally went to the in car player of dubious quality where with the road noise any subtle differences in sound quality would be unheard.

This deck failed with the belts perishing and the rubber pinch wheels getting sticky although by this time I already had changed to CD at home and in the car.

There have been publications in the last decade or so suggesting that we're about to start sliding into another 'Maunder Minimum'. The last one of these caused the 'little ice age' 1400 - 1800 AD.

As an aside, the UK produces only 1% of global CO2 emissions. We could stop emitting CO2 completely and it would make precious little difference to anything!

yup

In my case I recorded actual tones at high frequencies.

The problem I had was that whilst bias did affect HF performance, it did so differently to each channel of the stereo machine. Changing head azimuth likewise was impossible to optimise for two channels on that Nakamichi.

Now lets look at Dolby.

In order for Dolby to work your tape machines must be calibrated to use an exactly known recording level, with an exactly known frequency response, and that means that they will work for one tape type only, which is why recording studios using Dolby calibrated their reel to reels at leats weekly, and never changed their tape type.

CDs are about 90dB S/N. Vinyl discs are around 60dB, but a cassette deck barely manages 50dB even with Dolby

Cassettes decks are a tribute - as is MP3 encoding - to the flexibility of the human ear.

Anyone who has been to a live classical concert will understand why a cassette recording if it is utter crap.

Guess why CD? No more rubber belts - variable speed motors that played at whatever speed was necessary to make the come out at the right speed, and the data de jittered in digital delay lines. So no wow or flutter

Plus massively improved signal to noise ratio, no scratches or surface noise, no mechanical feedback, and a flat frequency response up to about

No wonder cloth eared people prefer vinyl...or cassette tapes....

I think the most depressing thing is that the next little ice age will probably coincide with the decline of fossil fuel usage due to lack of easily accessible resources,

And all the fake climate scientists will say 'look: told you so'. The ones that aren't dead of cold, or starvation, anyway.

Having shared an office with proper (PhD+) environmental scientists for 15 years, scanned the peer review literature, and watched the pick of the pundits and shoddy popular media, I know who I'd rather believe.

What I don't understand is why you maintain your 'truth'. I can guess - paranoid delusion, rail against the crowd-type 'rebel'?

It is categorically not rooted in sound science. Every source you have given has either been a right wing blog, some off with the fairies disenfrachised academic, or a personal and fanciful cod theory you've compiled from selective and context-free 'data'.

That is absolutely key. We can't expect the world to cooperate, the west had its turn with cheap coal and, frankly, we can't really expect the Chinese (for example) not to.

I've bought a couple of mid-range cassette decks for buttons off ebay and replaced the belts to get them working again. It is fiddly and the circlips are the biggest problem (for me), but quite enjoyable if you like that type of thing.

Except that you did get to hear all the deficiencies from the master recording.

I can remember on one CD hearing tape hiss during the quiet passages and on another at the start what appeared to be the needle being lowered on to the vinyl LP and the scratchiness that you often got before the music started