I can amplify on that comment. I worked with the late Doug Sax (RIP) back when The Mastering Lab was on Hollywood Blvd., and we performed comparisons of various media in his suite. As a caveat I'll say time can cause memory to be defective, on the other hand my ears were much better when I was 30...anyway, we listened to several masters he had in the Lab from lacquer masters, CDs and cassettes we had made at high speed from our digital process encoded with Dolby B. The purpose of the exercise was to show Doug that there was plenty of oxide on a 0.6 mm track width running at 4.76 cm/s to obtain high fidelity.
My recollection is they all sounded excellent, with each having some aspect in which they excelled. The vinyl had noticeably more dynamic peaks than either the CD or cassette and sounded quite "live", but it had the 2nd highest noise floor and highest low-frequency noise (rumble). The CD and cassette sounded just about identical, with the CD having the lowest noise floor and the cassette having the highest noise floor which was still only audible between tracks. None of the three had any objectionable sound issues.
Of course the cassette was playing back on a Nak 1000ZXL which I had tweaked for azimuth/height/zenith/level & eq, whereas the vinyl and CD didn't require any playback adjustments. The outcome of that afternoon and evening of testing (after dinner and wine at a great steak house down the street) was my company being licensed to release Sheffield Lab titles on cassette. We were the sole licensee for years until Sheffield Labs stopped cassette sales. The effort required to properly record and reproduce cassette, or just its sonic potential is often blamed for it's demise but that is not the reason: by the early 1990s CDs were less expensive to manufacture than cassettes, and THAT sealed cassette's fate, just as happened with LPs and CDs a decade earlier.
As I have beaten the drum here many times: how media is mastered, and from what source makes more difference to the final potential playback fidelity than any other factor. The reason it is seldom discussed is because it is not under end user control and it is devilishly difficult to trace the lineage of a recording... Sure, an average CD in an average playback environment can give reliably more consistent performance than either average LPs or cassettes, but in a carefully set up system under optimum playback conditions, a well recorded LP or even cassette can excel or even surpass that average CD. Ask me about the first-gen Led Zeppelin CDs we manufactured...blecch! The 1630 masters sucked!!!!
Just $0.02 worth from the perspective of an engineer in the media manufacturing industry...
Cheers!
Hi Howard,
The 1000ZXL should have adjusted itself to the optimum head azimuth. That's as long as it was set up correctly. I have repaired and calibrated a few of these. I guess if your unit was set up with the defective azimuth tape that Nakamichi had you would have to twist some pots to get it aligned properly.
I agree with you on the cassette tapes. Albums got too expensive compared to CDs as well. Personally, music on LPs or CDs are fine. Tapes have high maintenance issues compared to anything else. But hearing a cassette on good equipment can be pretty special. I set my home decks and my car cassette (TD-700) with dBx, all aligned perfectly. That was great. Most people couldn't get over the quality. But dBx is so sensitive to calibration! The more effective a noise reduction system is, the more sensitive it will be to calibration errors.
-Chris
The 1000ZXL should have adjusted itself to the optimum head azimuth. That's as long as it was set up correctly. I have repaired and calibrated a few of these. I guess if your unit was set up with the defective azimuth tape that Nakamichi had you would have to twist some pots to get it aligned properly.
I agree with you on the cassette tapes. Albums got too expensive compared to CDs as well. Personally, music on LPs or CDs are fine. Tapes have high maintenance issues compared to anything else. But hearing a cassette on good equipment can be pretty special. I set my home decks and my car cassette (TD-700) with dBx, all aligned perfectly. That was great. Most people couldn't get over the quality. But dBx is so sensitive to calibration! The more effective a noise reduction system is, the more sensitive it will be to calibration errors.
-Chris
If I remember correctly Jack Renner told me the cannon shots on the CD were peak-limited by over 20 dB relative to what was fed the LP lathe in order to keep average levels appropriate on the CD. edit: I also seem to remember they remastered the LP in the second edition to reduce the number of complaints regarding mistracking of the first edition...I can personally vouch that the first edition could throw some otherwise decent the cartridge/tonearms (Linn LP10/Ittok) at the label with some force when encountering the cannon shots!
Howie
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Hi Howie,
I'd be very suprised if that was the case looking at the CD rip I have. February is a short month so I'll be able to sort out finally getting a doohickey to let me rip the vinyl so I can try and compare them.
Which reminds me, I need to do some more research on how Foobar calculates peak levels. The meter goes well over 0dB on the cannon shots which could mean any number of things and not just a sample over.
I'd be very suprised if that was the case looking at the CD rip I have. February is a short month so I'll be able to sort out finally getting a doohickey to let me rip the vinyl so I can try and compare them.
Which reminds me, I need to do some more research on how Foobar calculates peak levels. The meter goes well over 0dB on the cannon shots which could mean any number of things and not just a sample over.
Can you just imagine the sound quality of a 30ips full track almost 0.25" or 16 times faster and many times wider track than a cassette? Azimuth and other problems are reduced to almost nothing, S/N increased greatly, and with good design, the frequency response can be 10Hz-40KHz with good square wave response up through 10KHz. Then you have a true recorded reference. The next best is a Sheffield direct disc, in my opinion. Crystal Clear direct disc records can be excellent in some areas as well.
Are-we living in the same world ?
I stopped to read there. It is just like to pretend a photo from a pro full frame camera and one from a smartphone look the same.
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> It is just like to pretend a photo from a pro full frame camera
> and one from a smartphone looks the same.
You must be psykic 🙂
> and one from a smartphone looks the same.
You must be psykic 🙂
Could be room acoutic and/or associated equipment rather than planet of residence.😀
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One of the 'things' I noticed back then was the Dolby IC was a limiting factor to the sound with its 741-like internal amp circuitry. You would have a great discrete circuit and after signal went thru the Dolby IC - sounded like any other brand/product which was going thru a Dolby IC. Going thru the Dolby chip tended to make all the brands sound similar.
And, didn't the NAK also use 741?
I agree with JC about a R2R at 30ips etc.... sounds WAY better than LP, Casette or CD of that era.
THx-RNMarsh
And, didn't the NAK also use 741?
I agree with JC about a R2R at 30ips etc.... sounds WAY better than LP, Casette or CD of that era.
THx-RNMarsh
Actually the Nak 1000ZXL is the one deck which did what all cassette decks should have done: incorporate fixed play azimuth and auto-record azimuth to correct for shell steering on a side by side basis. This would have made tapes which played everywhere with low azimuth error. We were playing back tapes recorded at high-speed so we manually adjusted azimuth.
Totally agree with you Chris! As a fellow cassette aficionado and someone who made my living as a magnetic recording engineer, the satisfaction when using a correctly aligned Nak cassette playback system was really great! I also had first the TD1200 auto-az deck which was problematic, and then the TD700 which was very good, I enjoyed that quality in the car as well. I will say I preferred spectral NR (Dolby) over multi-band DBX. I didn't care for the pumping which was seemingly unavoidable with DBX, but all of this is just a tale from the archives at this point, eh?
I say that, but since I am currently archiving radio sets for several radio stations, so I have been transferring literally hundreds of cassettes to files, and giving my ITA '94 Reference Dragon a workout. I tried letting those people do it themselves, even wrote a manual a few years ago:
(https://proaudioeng.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/A-Guide-to-Cassette-Transfers.pdf), but apparently there are few people left who want to do it correctly.
Cheers!
Howie
Hi John!
Yes, having modded and maintained many Studer and Otari decks over the years, I do really appreciate how excellent they can sound. However, as you likely know the wider the track the greater the issues controlling azimuth and errors due to small azimuth perturbations. Cassettes azimuth errors were due almost entirely to shell steering. Nakamichi's asymmetrical resonance dual capstan system coupled with the tape pad lifter gave extremely consistent azimuth stability...for a cassette. Sony recognized the shell steering issue as is evidenced in the tape-out-of-shell design of their Elcaset system. Ahh the bad old days...
Cheers!
Howie
Hi Howard,
Just skimmed your paper. I think one critical component which I haven't seen you mention yet was the capstan bearing(s). These are critical to the tape path of any machine, and especially for cassette decks due to the smaller contact area and higher wear as a result. Nakamichi had replaceable capstan bearings and reran production on those parts (and others) enabling these machines to be kept in top condition. The Revox and Studer machines had a massive bearing that was replaceable also. Too bad Revox didn't push that pressure pad away as well!
I've also worked on the TD-1200 and TD-1200II decks for cars. There isn't a better transport out there for car use than one of these. The TD-700 also had replaceable capstan bearings like the TD1200/1200II. I rebuilt mine (and my BX-300) just before I sold my shop in 1998 and stored them.
I've said it before, can you imagine what an open reel Nakamichi would have been like? Studer was king (and rightly so), but a Nakamichi multi-track would have been amazing!
-Chris
Just skimmed your paper. I think one critical component which I haven't seen you mention yet was the capstan bearing(s). These are critical to the tape path of any machine, and especially for cassette decks due to the smaller contact area and higher wear as a result. Nakamichi had replaceable capstan bearings and reran production on those parts (and others) enabling these machines to be kept in top condition. The Revox and Studer machines had a massive bearing that was replaceable also. Too bad Revox didn't push that pressure pad away as well!
I've also worked on the TD-1200 and TD-1200II decks for cars. There isn't a better transport out there for car use than one of these. The TD-700 also had replaceable capstan bearings like the TD1200/1200II. I rebuilt mine (and my BX-300) just before I sold my shop in 1998 and stored them.
I've said it before, can you imagine what an open reel Nakamichi would have been like? Studer was king (and rightly so), but a Nakamichi multi-track would have been amazing!
-Chris
You say that, but have you actually compared a proper cassette recording with a CD? At several AES shows we set up a LEDE listening room which Peter D'Antonio, Alan Parsons and other engineers said was the best sounding at the show. In these rooms we performed (like it or not) ABX comparisons between Sheffield Lab CDs and Dolby S cassettes. We had literally hundreds of noted engineers take the test and none could reliably hear a difference...except for one of our mastering engineers and a Dolby engineer.
We were not insisting the two sounded identical, but merely the cassette medium itself was not a lo-fidelity recording medium. You must remember at the time cassettes were the largest selling pre-recorded media and we were fighting the misconception that there was no way a cassette could sound hi-fi.
As I stated in a previous post, to make this comparison one had to be sure every detail was correct with the cassette recording and playback, yet merely put the CD in a good player to get it to do it's best, and at the time I believe we were using a Sony ES-series CD player and monitoring the E32 flag.
As I previously stated, getting this level of performance from the cassette is not trivial, but the point is the actual record medium is quite capable.
Cheers!
Howie
http://www.stereo2go.com/fileSendAc...00zxl%20%20test%20Audio%28usa%29%206-1981.pdf
Measured data of the better cassette machines of the 70's. CD then were not doing so good then.....
A comparison against todays best technologies would be interesting.
THx- RNMarsh
Measured data of the better cassette machines of the 70's. CD then were not doing so good then.....
A comparison against todays best technologies would be interesting.
THx- RNMarsh
We hear you John it's all about tape speed and I am about to revamp my old Nak deck to the next level with a dentist drill motor running at 500k+++ rpm, this Veyron V16 monster of deck mod is hellbent on outperforming 32/768 DACs leaving 30ips in the dust...
Yes cassette deck recordings can sound pretty good for what it is, some of my old memories back in the very early 90's when having ripped some of my own CD's over to tape and when playing back on tape with friends invited they would ask "is this CD..?" as it was still a bit of a novelty back then maybe that did the trick, the times when warehouses and music shops were still full of vinyl.
Noise is fine with me, and in comparison to other types of distortions I find it quite benign, experimenting with Dolby B or C noise reduction and recording levels was a hit and miss when taking the tape to another deck, B did for the most part ok but C was quite incompatible between different decks, in fact I barely used Dolby at all, there was always something of a thin layer covering the audio, perhaps the added DIL critters did it?
Yes cassette deck recordings can sound pretty good for what it is, some of my old memories back in the very early 90's when having ripped some of my own CD's over to tape and when playing back on tape with friends invited they would ask "is this CD..?" as it was still a bit of a novelty back then maybe that did the trick, the times when warehouses and music shops were still full of vinyl.
Noise is fine with me, and in comparison to other types of distortions I find it quite benign, experimenting with Dolby B or C noise reduction and recording levels was a hit and miss when taking the tape to another deck, B did for the most part ok but C was quite incompatible between different decks, in fact I barely used Dolby at all, there was always something of a thin layer covering the audio, perhaps the added DIL critters did it?
Thanks for the link Richard! The 1000ZXL was a hell of a great machine (I still have two), but we made tapes at high speed that measured and sounded far better than those from that icon of the cassette age.
I'm sure this is boring the hell out of just about everyone, so I'll just get it out of my system:
The situation in the late 1980s was the poor performance of most pre-recorded cassettes had given the format a black eye. I came from the live sound and recording world and was hired to be the magnetic recording engineer on a team at AMI/Concept Design designing the DAAD high speed digital cassette recording system. Working with Dolby we added high-speed HX which we coupled with tape saturation curve aware processing, and TDK metal and FeCo tapes. The net result: at 120 ips in pancake form we were able to reliably record 10 Hz-24 KHz +/- 1 dB at up to -10 dB re:L 250 nWb/M. Our tapes compared very favorably with CDs when played back on a decent deck. We sold many tens of millions of dollars of this technology to every major label, it gave pre-recorded cassettes a shot in the arm, extending it's viability and value.
But as we have discussed there is more than performance to a product's commercial viability. After cassettes, optical discs had their couple decade run thanks to the low cost of injection molding and in-line post processing. Now to the new generation apparently music is worthless, because so many want it for free...quality be damned.
I have to say working to better the state of the art in audio fidelity was an invigorating and worthwhile experience, certainly the most fun I've had for pay! My hat is off to people like John Curl, Scott Wurcer, Jan Didden, Richard Marsh and many others here who are smart enough to continue the good battle. I really appreciate it!
Cheers,
Howie
This one was in many European recording studios. We used-it as a note pad, for demos:
The advantage was we were sure nobody can use those cassettes to make a pirate disk. Not good enough ;-)
In my home i owned those:
TIP: even in my car, I have a radio/CD/cassette. I recently sacrificed one input to add a bluetooth device, in order to play the MP3 and phone calls from my smartphone. Guess witch one was sacrificed from RAD/CD/cassette ? yes, cassette, of course.
Even in my previous car, I used something else than those awful cassettes: A (Sony) mini disk portable machine. This kind of thing:
Who could imagine that, 35 years after CD, some people will be nostalgic about cassettes, witch was the worse support for music that had never been invented, apart those 8track cartridges ...
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Maybe you are simplifying a complex situation too much. People use music differently today than they did in the past. They don't sit down and listen, they play music in the background while focusing attention elsewhere.
In the old days, payola helped too. Teenagers exposed to limited music on limited radio stations learned to like what was available, since they were at an age to be susceptible to that.
Even at that, record labels never knew what would sell and profit margins were high enough they could afford to take lots of chances. They could hide profits from successful artists and often did. More money left over for quality recordings, or more for lavish parties and plenty of drugs?
Technology has changed. Large studios have mostly gone away. Land where they were located is often more valuable for other uses. People have learned how to produce music in small project studios, and everybody has their own, including many successful artists. The new studios are not usually as well equipped as the great commercial studios where.
Anybody can make music digitally and the market is flooded with competitors.
Etc., etc.
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