Audio Cassette Inventor Passes Away

Craig1 · Guru

Audio Cassette Inventor Passes Away

peter67 · Guru

SO!! that's the person we can all blame for making us buy that outdated expensive stuff years ago?

Craig1 · Guru

Bit harsh Pete, we still play a few of original 1973 cassettes, tried to update to CD, but they change the songs etc. Non stop " Band on the Run " for a day and a half with auto reverse on the banks of the Murray in 1984(in June). Lots of roadside "glitter' when one crashed and someone got the sh.ts and piffed it out the window. I guess he could have gone straight to boring, flat sound and i phone or elevator music. But I almost forgot, "on hold" from tax dept or That Bank.

dorian · Guru

Cassettes were a great technology of their time, but I was forever dealing with chewed tapes, tape hiss, and tape deterioration. Optical discs were great, too, but they had their own problems, eg skipping. Thankfully we now have digital media. Soooo much better.

peter67 · Guru

Fair enough Craig but who could forget the great "eight track" debacle? and people decorating campsite trees with remains of exploded cassettes :)

Dorian I carried a selection of different size pencils for rewinding tapes.

AndyCap100 · Senior Member

Your onto it Peter ref pencils ,i still have quite a collection of tapes ,several dozen, of varying ages ,and also a couple of pencils from then too ,kept all these years just for this purpose . Stick em in the tape player i keep in the greenhouse .
Nostalgea at its best . Going back even further a nice collection of Lp`s too ,(Mc Cartney ,Elton John,Supremes, Quo, Stones,Donna Summer , Barry White and John Denver (yes i know! lol) and a quite a few 45`s too .All in original covers .
Far more enjoyable than just wacking a usb stick in .
Something to be savoured when all the world is caving in . Stay safe people, may your egg allways land sunnyside up . Andy .

Whenarewethere · Guru

If you had a Nakamichi cassette player, Dolby noise reduction and metal tapes, audio was seriously good.

dorian · Guru

Whenarewethere wrote:
If you had a Nakamichi cassette player, Dolby noise reduction and metal tapes, audio was seriously good.

Nowadays a cheap $5 USB stick sounds a lot better and stores your whole music collection. Noise, what's that?

Whenarewethere · Guru

I recently bought a SanDisk high endurance 256GB card $70. How times have changed!

dorian · Guru

The sad irony is that in this era of high fidelity hardware we have low fidelity content.

peter67 · Guru

As the fonz used to say Dorian, correctamoondo!

AndyCap I like your taste in music and the way you play it. In younger party days it was a real challenge, once you got a bit fried, to lower the stylus arm carefully into the outer grooves. It's so tempting to crack the old joke here about what happens when you play a country and western record backwards...:)

Teo · Senior Member

That news has completely spooled my day.
I will just pause, rewind and fast forward with my life.

AndyCap100 · Senior Member

Hey Teo ,steady on the fast forward bit mate ,don`t want to get to the end too early .
Rock on !!

Teo · Senior Member

Thanks Andy for that good advice. Lucky to be able to hit the pause button pretty often now!

Kebbin · Guru

Cassette tapes were a nightmare however they provided hours of fun retrieving them from the player. The much better system was 8 track stereo, it was rare to have a tape eaten and a much better sound.

Teo · Senior Member

My grandkids have discovered these wonderful things called vinyl LPs.It seems the going price for new ones can range from $50 to $90. Remember taking a new LP to a party and bringing it home all scratched or covered in food or something worse!
Thats progress I guess.

Peter_n_Margaret · Guru

I was in Japan and visited the Sony R&D facility in 1982 soon after they released the Walkman.
I bought one, brought it home and played stuff directly through some speakers I had. WOW. It was better than the cassette tapes through the fancy amp by a country mile.
At that time they also showed us prototypes of their video disc (the size of an LP) and a digital SLR camera that recorded 8 pics on a flat piece of magnetic tape.
Cheers,
Peter

EDIT smile

-- Edited by Peter_n_Margaret on Wednesday 17th of March 2021 08:53:52 PM

bilbo · Senior Member

Jeez Peter.....your old? very very very old.

cheers Bilbo

Whenarewethere · Guru

I was in Japan 100 years later in 1982 for a 3 week holiday, & was lucky enough to see the cherry blossom.

Amazing the things they sold which would never see the light of day here.

Some interesting items sold in vending machines in back streets, that was an eye opener!

peter67 · Guru

Kebbin wrote:
Cassette tapes were a nightmare however they provided hours of fun retrieving them from the player. The much better system was 8 track stereo, it was rare to have a tape eaten and a much better sound.

8 track may have been better for most people that did'nt fall madly in love with the eagles album hotel california, I'd just bought a new pioneer 8track box and fitted it to my mazda rx2. I played hotel california for two weeks straight while driving to and fro from the diamond creek pub(royal mail hotel) then the machine ate it. I was heartbroken :)

peter67 · Guru

bilbo wrote:
Jeez Peter.....your old? very very very old.
cheers Bilbo

Either that or it's a new De Lorian in his avatar

-- Edited by peter67 on Wednesday 17th of March 2021 08:46:51 PM

AndyCap100 · Senior Member

Hi Guys ,so whilst we are chatting about old stuff ,lets bring camera`s into the equation ,and NO ,not on phones . Had a quick count yesterday got 7 of the buggers ,differant sorts /makes, even a massive Sony video recorder ,nearly large enough to sit on your shoulder ..
Play safe fellow travellers .