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Originally posted by bob p
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As for cassette tapes until Advent came out with their 201 deck in 1971 with Dolby most home cassette decks were very low-fidelity. I recorded hundreds of concerts off the radio with my Advent 201 but with one problem: I used Dolby on all of them to reduce the tape noise.
So what was the problem? In the age of digital recording and editing it is easy as pie to remove tape hiss without affecting the musical content very much at all: you take a sample of the hiss at the beginning of the tape and digitally subtract it from the entire track. Voila — tape hiss is gone! (One trick... rather than set the plug-in to remove 100% of the tape hiss I would set it a bit lower, finding a happy medium which had a very natural sound to it.)
On DIME (a legal file sharing site), there are some very high quality live recordings dubbed from cassette tapes assuming that the asimuth was set properly and that any Dolby processing was decoded properly on playback.
As for recording songs off the radio if they were done with a cheap microphone you can forget about high fidelity. I made my mono r-to-r recordings by tapping the signal from the speaker terminals of a fairly decent AM/FM clock radio so there was an impedance mismatch but no ambient noise picked up by a microphone.
As for your rant against CDs when they first came out in 1982 there were not a lot of 5-1/4" floppies in people's homes. I personally boycotted CDs until 1989 when some albums I wanted were available *only* on CDs and cassettes. BTW I never bought pre-recorded cassettes because they were total crap — I bought, borrowed or rented LPs and recorded them myself. And the initial crop of CD reissues of old vinyl albums were pretty crappy as they were usually processed by engineers with little or no expertise in the field of music. At least that is what I thought judging by the results...
IMO mfgs switched from cassettes to CDs because they could be pressed in one fell swoop rather than dubbed at some multiple of real time. The size and shape of the CD reflected the inherent limitations at the time.
Had the conversion in the recording industry from analog to digital media occurred 20 years later there is a good chance that we would buy albums on USB thumb drives, which are even more convenient than cassette tapes.
Steve A.
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