Recently I was attempting to organise my music collection, beginning with my cassettes. While doing this I picked up a tape at random and put it into my tape deck. It was a home made recording of a John Denver Album.

I did not expect brilliant sound but was amazed by the quality of the sound. More so when closely looking at the cassette, I could see that it only a Type 1 ferric tape, which has several longitudinal creases on the tape. (dirty pinch roller/capstan shaft.)

Remembering the maxim, Rubbish in rubbish out, I had failed to remember just how good compact cassettes could be given a chance.

I was playing the tape on a Pioneer CT-W404R tape deck, via a Playmaster twin 50 watt Mosfet amplifier, feeding Wharfedale bookshelf speakers, 1.5 metres above the floor, in a quiet furnished room.

Now, if the same tape were played back in a cassette equipped car with heaps of ambient noise, then the dynamic range would disappear and one would need to crank it up to 11. (Spinal Tap.)

I was truly impressed. And I did not have to buy that expensive
Nakamichi tape deck that I longed for from my youth.

It does look as though I will be keeping all those 80's tapes after all. It's not as if I will be playing them in my car.

Wayne.

It does look as though I will be keeping all those 80's tapes after all.

No offence but you are welcome to them. I hate audio cassettes with a passion. Back in the day I pulled too many of them out of tape drive mechanisms. Was so glad when CD's arrived. I'm still a big user of CDs.

My self-recorded cassette collection (over 500 tapes) was consigned to the shed years ago, and only needs to be chucked out. Anything of importance was copied to CD. Although I haven't tried, I'd be pretty sure that all the various cassette players around the house will have died.

Recently I pulled out my Kenwood 5-CD player out of storage and amazingly it still works. It hadn't been used for about 15 years.

Makes a change from my usual habit of using a computer to play hours and days worth.

This prompted me to save to the computer the special presentation of the 10th anniversary of the breakup of the Beatles, which I recorded from 2SM on 11th April 1980.

I still have 2 Hifi cassette decks, but of course they hadn't been used for a long time.

The first, a Marantz 5010B has multiple issues and is basically unusable. The other one, a Hitachi D-230 is working well enough to let me do the transfer.

On the computing side, I use Roxio 5 software, which has a thing called Spin Doctor which gets the sound from the Line In and writes a WAV file. This software resides on a pair of Compaq computers running Windows 2000. The first machine couldn't see the input for whatever reason, but the 2nd machine is working fine.

So now I'll spend the afternoon copying these 3 tapes.