Ben's Randomness

Let The Awful Commence

So after sorting out the shit hole that is the attic in my house (One Day I’ll make an entire post about THAT), I unearthed many boxes of old cassette tapes; some of which were mine, some of my Brother’s and a few of my Dad’s. They probably range from late 70s to late 90s, and even some as late as 2003 (Done for the car most likely). Now after discovering these, I only had one way to “play” them; the cassette deck in my car (I’m not THAT old-school, there is a CD changer connected to it :D).

So since this was both impractical (Sitting in my car outside the house looks stupid) and didn’t allow me to save any of it to another format (providing I found anything that was bearable enough to warrant it), I needed to acquire a cheapass Cassette deck.  One visit to eBay later and I’d spent the princely sum of £10 + Shipping for a Technics Deck:

Now to listen through several boxes of:

Joy.

Ben

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9 responses to “Let The Awful Commence”

  1. Sounds like the kind of fun that makes your ears bleed for two days.

    I still have some cassettes in a drawer somewhere. Most of them recorded from records or CD’s… one was actually recorded from the TV by placing the cassette recorder’s microphone close to the TV speaker. Quality is as shitty as you’d expect.

  2. Actually I’m mildly surprised. Some of this stuff sounds pretty damn good, especially the stuff pre-recorded or recorded on a decent deck on decent tape in the first place.

    But then again that’s the issue with analogue – you need to spend a lot of cash to get good sound.

  3. You can get some analog stuff really cheap through eBay, craigslist, flea markets, garage sales, etc. It’s usually in shite condition, but if you have the electronics skills necessary, you can repair it for fairly cheap depending on what’s wrong with it.

    Analog, assuming the media is good and intact and that you have decent equipment to play it on, beats the crap out of digital for sound quality.

  4. Yeah sure NOW you can get the stuff cheap, but back in the day it was near impossible, hence why when digital came along it took off so fast (amongs other things), as for sound quality – I’m still undecided, I think you could spend hours upon hours trying to find the difference, only to encounter the placebo affect time and time again.

    It really is down to the medium – a shit master on a digital source will sound shit. A good master on analogue will sound good. There really isn’t much in it IMO.

    However, recent albums sound like ass anyway due to shitty mastering techniques employed.

    And as far as shitty recordings go, here’s some awful stuff from one of the tapes I found:

    http://www.benodell.co.uk/lol/awful.mp3

    That’s an Ozzy song recorded off a music channel by sitting the recorder next to the TV. But by the sounds of it, only one speaker :\

  5. You’re probably right about the placebo effect. I’d be interested in experimenting with that. Have someone play a digital source and an analog source and see if I could hear the difference (obviously, without knowing which was which).

    Assuming the sound system used was the same, I don’t think I’d hear a difference between a FLAC and a reel-to-reel.

  6. You end up entering into shaky ground with that though, If the original source was a digital recording, you might actually be degrading the quality from an analogue recording if the sample rate was too low, or if it was an analogue recording in the first place, a copy of it from analogue is going to incur generation loss.

    IMO it’s almost as pointless argument between the two as it is; they both have advantages/disadvantages.

  7. Yeah I don’t see any way around that. You’d just have to make it as close to the original as you can.

    But digital recording would have loss regardless, I think. It’s not as though the bands are playing in digital (let’s not even get into the whole synth stuff).