Thank you for the friendly mention in the video :) This is a very interesting experiment. The difference between the new recording and the 1000th playback was minimal. What surprised me was the good quality of the new recording after the 1000 playbacks. I have very often noticed that new recordings I made on cassettes I got at flea markets sounded not nearly as good as the previous recordings that came on the cassette. It seems like somewhat worn out cassettes are more difficult to record on. But this was not the case in your experiment. The little boombox must be better than it seems. I have often noticed scratches or bends along the tape on cassettes I frequently played. The tape in your cassette looked very good even after 1000 playbacks. Maybe this would have been different with the thinner tape in a 90min cassette...
The test is legit as far as I can tell. Still, it doesn't cover left in the car on a sunny day for some years, various handling, long term storage, bumping, putting in the wallet e.t.c. Also, the rollers and tape-path parts of the casette didn't have to handle a C90 casette end to end 1000 times. Test is 1/9 of worst case.
@@erlendse I may repeat the test with that vintage (late '60s/early '70s) Norelco/Philips C90 cassette I showed, letting it play for 1500 hours (over two months!) to see how it sounds afterwards.
@@erlendse that would distort the result. The amount of friction would increase unproportionally when changing the speed. It'd be better to just cut the tape down to a minute or two.
I wonder if using a closed loop player makes a difference. I guess as the tape gets more and more worn out the closed loop mechanism is still able to drag it along the head perfectly.
And rightly so, for the most part, but if you take a skeptic but realistic sidequest into that world you do realize pretty quickly that there are people out there who can hear things that you simply will not believe. I personally sat through a listening session where during one playback the audiophile people kept turning their heads to one side while the hobbyists kept looking straight in front of them. The guy plahying the recording tater explained it; the recording was not made from straight in front of the orchestr but a good few feet to stage-right. I audiophiles heard that and automatically turned their heads to face the orchestra. But as for the stickers on amplifiers to quiet the transformers, the filters that compensate for the speed at which the high and low frequencties travel through speakercables... yeah... that's not happening.
@@vinny142 And don't forget the specially shaped cartridge lead wires ($1000 +) that are supposed to reduce the effects of 'skin effect' (at AUDIO frequencies!). Give me a break! Some people will buy anything for status...
Whenever someone says they wore out a vinyl record or cassette tape, what they really mean is they didn't take care of it or store it properly. I can't imagine how one would ruin a record or tape through normal use.
Because.. there is some friction involved when a tape head has to contact the tape, and when a stylus has to contact the record. That causes some wear. This is a simple matter of physics. Anyone claiming this is not the case should really go back to do some physics 101 course. This however does not mean it is an actual issue with normal use. Media getting worn down is a thing, but totally not the big deal some people try to claim it is in the large majority of cases.
@@c128stuff I don't care if there is a negligible amount of wear on the microscopic level. Using a record or tape normally does not degrade the audio to any noticeable level.
@@westelaudio943 I'd argue rough tape head or worn stylus would count as 'mishandling' tho.. (but that brings up another point.. how long does a stylus last.. by far not as long as many people keep using them). Too much strain on a tape.. that is an interesting one. Its generally held that a speed calibration tape is no longer accurate after using it in a dual capstan deck due to risk of getting stretched. I think that is slightly exaggerated, through I know from experience it can become an issue after a few uses.. of course, that is way outside the scope of 'normal use' for listening to music.
It would be interesting to see this experiment done with VHS tapes. Then you would not only have to consider the sound quality but also the visual quality.
Yeah. I did such test with VHS tape a month ago. I was able to notice slight degradation after ~10th play, significant degradation in picture quality after ~50th or so. Although, it wasn't anywhere near scientific experiment, just personal curiosity.
@@arthurvlog6259 Interesting, although it sounds a bit severe to me. I used to borrow VHS tapes from the library and they didn't seem degraded. They were probably used a lot by many people. Maybe the heads in your machine need cleaning.
The problems of cassette tapes were never what was claimed about them. The problems were in using cheap tapes that did shed instead of higher quality name brand tapes, in not cleaning the heads and pinch rollers/capstans on a regular basis, and the fact that tapes were subject to warping if left in a hot vehicle for serious lengths of time (which happened a lot). In reality, tapes sound pretty good for the range of sound that they can reproduce, they were fairly durable if just a little care was taken, and represented a good "bang for the buck" during the time they were widely produced as a consumer audio format. (BTW, I am speaking about using recordable cassettes, not the pre-recorded tapes that music labels put out. Those were often made to cheaper standards to keep costs down.)
Especially with the ",Get 13 tapes or 8 Tracks for 1¢" from Columbia House. Those were the best deal on Earth! (Fake addresses and all). Well.......until you actually played them. They sounded cheap, the background hiss was more pronounced, and they had a "flatter" sound than an equivalent store purchased cassette or 8 Track. I didn't think anything of it, until I accidently bought a copy of Animotion Obsession. I put 2 identical Sony Walkman Cassette Players (mine and my brother's) and the quality was overwhelmingly poor for the Columbia House Club tapes. Also I had quality issues with the 8 Tracks from the Club ranging from falling apart after about 10 plays, cheap rollers, broken shells, you name it, and the aforementioned sound quality. But they did have nice sleeves for the 8 Tracks!
we do own all the Metals, but still it sounds crappy, the dynamic range is not wide enough. Tape collectors don't need them for the Quality, they only need to own all the Mixtapes that artists produced in the old days, play them on these old Ghetto Blaster machines.
@@lucasrem It is more complicated. I am very demanding and purchased some 30 cassettes in music shop - all one day and all from one producer. It was some 30 years ago And they were way different about sounding. Some "brilliant" like CD all with Vangelis music and some almost bad for listening due to lack of sopranos like old Pink Floyd. And other just no excitation like E. Morricone or Tangerin Dream . After a years at last I made speakers that make perfect reproduction and all sounds veeeery different - the best ones sound even better and bad sound now fantastic - sopranos always were there but before my system used to cover just them A lot depends on wideness of band - the less band is more demanding from system . In my system I listen 80% to tapes and 19% to LPs 1% to CDs. Cassettes I have are usually more exciting in sounding than CDs so for example I made reel copy of Vangelis from cassette - not from exactly the same which I have on original CD. .
I appreciate the work that went into making this video. Thinking back to the 70's and 80's most of us didn't take great care of our music. We'd grab records with our fingers on the grooves, leave them on the floor, leave cassettes in our coat pockets without the case and leave them in our cars for months. It's not that we didn't care, we just never gave it a thought. Dam teenagers. lol
Back then everything was much easier to replace, Blank tapes where cheap. Now the story is different and it hurts when you see the youth of this day who do not know how to hold a record.
@@mal2ksc That made me think. When was the last time you found the remains of a cassette strung down a hedge at the side of the road ? I guess that was the result of a minor jam causing someone to loose their patience with the tape or someone simply hating the music on it.
I have cassettes I bought and recorded as long ago as the late 80s, and have listened to them countless times, and they still sound good. And some of them lived in various cars through the years (I don't smoke, so that isn't a factor), oh, and I lived in Florida without A/C in most of my cars. (brutal, I know). I have high regard for cassettes. They just aren't quite as convenient as digital. That said, my wife just recently bought a 2002 Honda with a cassette and CD deck, so I've had to pull our old cassettes out of storage so she can enjoy some of her favorites from years past. :-)
yeah something like a square wave tone so that any deviations or noise can be easily seen would have been much more useful, though admittingly much less entertaining
Be more reasonable - with white noise even by ear it is almost 100% sure slightest difference will be heard. Because It is analog which is crazy sensitive for any change. To prevent us from nonsense disputes we should limit our requirements to those which we are able to recognize when listening to real music.And in music the usable band is much less than eventually found and measured in pure noise. I was also big fan of frequencies above 14 kHz but it was when I had not enough experience.
Being of “a certain age,” those Maxell television commercials amused me because they were so damned clever. Oh yes, I willingly bought and used their product(s); at one point Maxell offered a T-shirt with a print of the dude in the chair, replete with flying hair and necktie. The shirt was free, but mailing in X-number of proofs of purchase was the cost. I still have the shirt and after years of washings it was necessary to reinforce the seams several times . . . .
I'm sure a lot of people have a few words that no matter how much they practiced saying the word it simply CANNOT get from the brain the the vocal cords correctly. I have trouble speaking when I 1st wake up and trip and stumble over words I normally say all the time. I chalk it up to brain gas (PPPPFFFTTTTT) LOL.
@Melanie , That was funny I wonder how many times he edited his laughter out because he just couldn't stop laughing at himself. As I mentioned in the other comment I'm sure EVERYONE has at least one word that causes tongue somersaults when they attempt to say it. Even regular speech watch the blooper reals included on most movies these days many times they are more funny than the intended lines of comedy.Catch a comical character and the whole crew will be cracking up before it's over with.
Tapes undeniably wear out when playing as there is friction. It just depends on your mechanism being functioning properly. The tape running across the head would be the least of my concern. Much more important is stuff like the pinch roller being clean as well as nice and grippy. If you have a track of crud around your capstan, it will run a groove into the tape (usually rendering one channel of both sides useless) or the pinch roller as lost its grip on one side and the tape slides off in one direction which crumples it. Make sure your mech is fine and tape path is clean and you should be good.
Friction not always cause mechanical wear Wear means damage of material structure. Until that limit is not reached material is no changed - friction lifts only its temperature which only must be kept in safe limit to prevent structure. If you do not believe see bronze - steel bearings. . .
"Tapes undeniably wear out when playing as there is friction." The physical tape yes, but you don't hear the shape of the tape, you hear the magnetic field induced by the metal parts inside the tape. As long as the surface of the tape is not seriously damaged, as in; chucks are missing, the recording will be fine. I'd be much more concerned about the heads producing their own magnetic field and slowly erasing the recording every time it's played.
Obviously, if you don't take steps to keep your tape transport clean, then it will accelerate the degradation of the tape. But what Westlife is showing here, is that with proper care, and a quality player, there is no reason why cassettes can't last for many years, and still sound good. I have pre recorded cassettes from the 1970's that still sound ok. Obviously, recording quality and tape formulations improved over the years, but in a lot of cases, cassettes are more robust than CD's, and can outlast CD's by many years.
@@vinny142 That is why you DEMAGNETIZE the heads, every so often. That is a well known procedure to people that are experienced with cassettes, and just part of general maintenance.
@@hermanmunster3358 Sure, as listeners and users we may judge only the "reception" . We may forget the condition of media, untill without doubt we discover that we do not hear what we want . Then we could blame technology Discussing material wear we often omit other important advantages of systems . For me such often forgotten advantage according to reels was is that reproduction of cassette may be stopped at any time and cassette may be replaced with next without rewinding to begining. Next return back even after long time always started at last moment which is not the case of digital . I think it was main reason why people choosen cassettes over reels . In compare to CDs casstettes are more versatile in outside conditions from where vibrations, need to touch CD with fingers and proper placing in prone to damage and not handy box pushed CD out. For that reason in cars were adopted bulky changers. Just as supplement to discussion
This brings back memories of cassettes strewn all over the floor of my brother's car- we used to throw then around, step on them, leave them in the car in the sun...they still worked fine. I reallty miss the durability of analog cassettes. No cracked screens or file transfers then...
I've seen modern comments on cassettes call them "fragile". How the tape gets eaten easily and destroyed. Do these people not remember how badly we treated them? My off brand (I think the brand name was "International") walkman style player started eating tapes around the time the belt clip started to break and I dropped the thing about 4 times a day. I "fixed" it by shaking the out the dirt. The wrinkles in the tapes usually evened out after a while.
In the beginning I was scared he is going to do the 1000-times playback on the Denon... And yes, it is not the greatest cassette deck ever made, but it is still very good and torturing it like that would be a... sacrilege. Fortunately, Kevin was sane enough to do that part on a cheap boombox.
It's odd to see BOTH reals rotating fast I originally thought that it was running at 3 3/4" ips, then I realized that it's due to the short length of tape!
In the early 1980s my dad recorded some of his LPs onto audio cassettes (things like ABBA and Mamas & Papas) so he could listen to them in the car. Even in the late 90s, those tapes were still going strong despite having been listened to hundreds or thousands of times in the car stereo! I have seen videos of background music systems in shops and such that used audio cassettes. The cassette was run on auto-reverse non-stop, all the time the store was open - and many of those have become damaged or noisy after so many plays!
I'm visualising quintessential 80s Dad driving down the highway, windows down, shades on enthusiastically singing along to ABBA. "Waterloo! La la la da la! Waterloo! Promise to love you for evermore!" *Slaps steering wheel to the beat. "Waterloo! La la la la da...
I have a 40 year old Country music tape in my collection that still sounds outstanding to me! I've also got surprisingly good home recordings on type 1 tape recorded on vintage Hi Fi equipment, such as Denon and Technics, that I own. Great video.
What I found particularly interesting was that this video also seems to debunk the theory that reel-to-reel type tapes wear out quicker than "normal" ones due to friction on the tape edges.
The Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorder, marketed to kids in the late 1980s and early '90s, when it sold for about $100 in the U.S., records a low-resolution monochrome picture, with sound, on Compact Cassettes. If I remember right, one side of a C-90 tape runs through the PXL-2000 in play or record mode in 4½ or 5 minutes, so it was 9 or 10 times the playback speed of your typical audio Compact Cassette. Something about this machine and this way of using tapes meant that, in just ten plays, you could see a BIG drop in the quality of both the picture and a sound. In my experience, the only way to make PXL-2000 recordings on Compact Cassette last was to dub them immediately to VHS. You could also skip the extreme compression of recording on a Compact Cassette and instead feed the camcorder's live picture and sound into a VHS VCR and record there, with a hugely better initial result and hugely better durability.
I have tapes that I made of broadcasts 45 yrs ago from the University of Pennsylvania radio station when they still played classical music . They still play well
I think time is a greater enemy of magnetic tape versus mechanical wear. I have open reel tapes that are 60+ years old that still play fine, but being acetate based, are rather brittle and easily snapped. But the physical appearance of the oxide side of the tape shows remarkably little wear, and these tapes were played dozens of times over the years. So the fact that tape can last 1000 plays doesn't amaze me at all. It's all in the care the tapes receive and the maintenance of the deck. At any rate, this was a very impressive demonstration! Thank you!
Your point about the robustness of tapes and tape playback is extremely well taken. I don't have a good tape deck, just a late-generation Sony Walkman that I keep held together with tape. And yet I have digitized 30-year-old tapes for several friends and family members with it, and the results are frequently astonishing.
As teenagers, my friends 1968 Impala (whale) had a tap deck with the cassette stuck inside. All year long, we got to hear Night Ranger over and over and over.
Love this video. I have no pretentiousness about it, but I have been drawn to cassette recording recently and it's quite evident to me that their bad reputation comes as you said: from crappy and abused car players! Hoping to get a TASCAM 122 soon and make a similar but different video. Yours is very inspiring and love your work!
Even at twenty minutes per play and with auto reverse, I have to admire your dedication to this. Philips' claim that 8-tracks can only be played in certain orientations and angles seems like something that ought to be tested. As long as the rubber roller is driving the tape, I can't see it making any difference in whichever plane someone's playing an 8-track. (I've not tried it.) Something else that might make a difference is transport quality. I'm sure a lot of car cassette decks were very well made, especially the better models from all major automakers, but then there are the ultra cheap and anonymous models that probably aren't precisely engineered enough to treat a tape well. Most of my mixtapes and home recordings (those not subjected to equipment mishaps) still seem to sound as good as the day I made them (recorded on both decent and dubious equipment). It seems much easier to find commercially produced tapes that are worn out, and I wonder if the difference is in tape quality. Some say the record labels used excellent quality tape stock and others not. (I think it varies with time, the label and maybe even the artist/genre.)
You're right about car cassette decks. Some of the lower-priced units lacked auto-stop and would just sit there at the end of a tape, motor running, belt slipping, pinch roller engaged on the capstan, until the driver manually ejected the tape. Most commercial recordings were reduced to a price point to maximize profits, that's certainly true. Cardboard-brown Type I tape in plain white shells with often-blurry black printing, and the tapes seem to be recorded from vinyl masters, complete with "pops." There are also artists that have insisted on higher-quality releases, like Phil Collins was doing in the 90s - he used direct-to-digital recording in the studio, and digital masters for production, and a premium cassette, and proudly affixed stickers to the cassettes advertising that.
Perhaps it is the 8-track cartridges themselves that don't like being at odd angles. If it affects the way the tape feeds back onto the single spool, it could become a problem.
Philips gave us quite a few audio innovations, such as the Compact Cassette, CD (in collaboration with Sony), CDi, DCC, etc. Many quality audio visual brands and systems were developed in Europe, B&O of Denmark, Tanmoy, Wharefdale, Kef, Monitor Audio, Cambridge Audio, Mission/Cyrus, and Linn of the UK, Garrard of France, Grundig of Germany to name a few. John Logie Baird of Scotland, UK also pioneered television and showed the first moving pictures on a television set in 1925. So Europe has a rich history of developing quality audio visual products. We can rightly be proud of European innovation, which often also set the standards in the industry. The far east quickly caught up however, and the Japanese in particular had a skill to make products smaller and more portable, through the use of transistors instead of Vacuum tube designs.
Maxell STILL uses that man-in-a-chair logo to this day! At work they use Maxell headphones on their computers and the boxes still have that logo on them.
Thank you for the exhaustive tests! That was a great deal of work. I have tapes from the 80s and not all of them are high quality media but they still work well. Notable cheapo brands that held up: Memex, Lasonic, and budget RS Realistic cassettes. I think proper storage is key here, but these have been exposed to a great deal of smoke, and not all of it from cigarettes ;)
Especially the ‘endclap’ comparisation in the beginning revealed some pretty loss in high frequencies. But maybe it’s not due to the wear of the tape, rather than the partly erasure of the tape due to magnitized heads and capstans… People often clean the tapepath, but forget to demagnitize. Pretty good video, though! Also, it depends wich tape after all those years are still playable. Some of my tapes sound horrible. Others (like the TDK SA-X) I could have recorded yesterday…
"Honey, what are you working on?" "Oh just a little UA-cam video about tapes. Hey, you're alright with listening to Ride of the Valkyries a thousand times in a row, right?" "What?"
Super experiment and the conclusion is spot on - moisture makes the biggest difference and the quality of the tape. Coming from costal south India, with absurd high moisture, I can vouch for this. Moisture and dust kills not just tapes, but speaker suspensions, mechanisms and the like. In VHS tapes, the moulding of tapes was so visible we had to regularly spool them using a so called 'video cassette rewinder'. In case of audio cassettes, the degradation is highly evident, especially with pre recorded cassettes. If you really wanted long term qualirt, had to use a Sony, Maxell or TDK cassette. Last but not the least, the deposits on the magnetic head was plenty. Requiring frequent cleaning. Thanks, this experiment bought back a lot of memories.
@@nickwallette6201 Check out the recordings of Enoch Light. He was one of the pioneers of stereo, albeit totally SEPARATED stereo (no 'center-channel'). However all his recordings were mastered on 35mm magnetic film, providing an inch-wide track for each channel!
that moment i realized he actually played 250 times.. subscribed. seriously, someone so dedicated to prove something i could tell from experience (didn't reach results yet still anxious to see conclusions). thumbs up.
Another brilliant video! I couldn't help noticing the amount of drivel manufacturers printed on their stuff back then. ,"Precision Audio Technology", "High Quality Sound"... And I wouldn't have had a clue why I didn't hear loud clunking noises or why those lights were flashing to indicate the music level if it hadn't said "Silent Mechanism" or "Fluorescent Peak Meter"!!!
It is definitely the storage/environment and maintenance of the equipment that affects the life of the media. I’ve never had any tapes wear out, and I still have all of my original cassettes from back in the day. I’d seems like any wear is superficial and not really noticeable. But the same applies to video cassettes. Never had any of mine wear out, and still play perfectly after all these decades… The issue there is rental tapes: those go through VCR hell with machines that destroy tapes over and over again due to something being wrong with the machine. That’s why I hate when people assume (and use filters to simulate) VHS dropouts and noise like that is the norm. Or storing tapes in an attic for years The try to play them… the results are not very good. But anyways, fantastic video as always :3
I give major props to Maxell for still making magnetic tape media. I still buy it! I used to pick up and fix cassette tapes found along the side of the road! So many idiots threw away expensive music they paid for!
I'm young enough that my only experience with Memorex is buying computer mice and USB keys from them that inexplicably still had the "Is it live or is it Memorex" slogan, and having no idea what on earth that was supposed to mean.
Cassettes are largely affected by how they are stored, and to a degree, how they are handled. And if you use them in cheap equipment, with a poorly aligned transport path, this can also damage the edges of the tape as it travels along the transport path, resulting in the edges curling over, or being chewed. I have cassettes from the 70's and 80's which still play fine. But recording technology back then, tended to give pre recorded cassettes a bass heavy characteristic, which is quite different from cassettes recorded to the latter half of the 80's and early 90's. And actual tape quality peaked towards the late 80's, to align with the sound quality of CD's, so your home recordings sounded as good as possible, and as near as possible to the original CD. But again, results largely depended on the quality of your recording equipment. But if used on Good quality equipment, with a well aligned transport, and correct storage, cassettes can potentially last a lifetime. However, I was never a lover of Dolby C, to me, recordings can sound a little compressed, and un natural. But Dolby B is a good compromise. Some say Dolby S is better than both Dolby B & C, but I have yet to experience Dolby S personally.
I have Maxell UDXL II's and FUJI XRD's from 1976 I've played TEN THOUSAND times in my MOTORCYCLE DECK on my trip from Tulsa to Glacier National Park south to Tixalcopti (SP???), Mexico, a tiny wide place in the road, (I was headed to Tampico, but Pemex 75 octane fuel sounded like it was "knocking" my engine to death, and I turned back). My "own mix tapes" of Hank Williams Jr. , Willie Nelson, ect. I had a Blaupunkt car stereo head in my fairing with two very good 5" two-way speakers and my helmet headphones (not 50 state legal in 1983). I rode thru Rifle, CO. singing "On the Road Again" at the top of my lungs...My single LONGEST bike trip-8,100 miles at 55MPH!!! I put 71,000 miles on that Suzuki GS-650G (shaftie) in 21 or 22 months! One reason I have the AMA "Iron Butt" Award with 15 Preparation H clusters for my million plus AMA touring miles...
I have a two boxes in my hallway closet filled with cassettes I recorded from 1980 to 1983. They still play pretty good for 40 year old tapes. I listened to The Police's "Zenyatta Mondatta" a few months ago and it sounded fine.
A very well done controlled experiment, I'm impressed. We did not have an actual A-B comparison of the source vs 1000 plays, but close enough. But this does not simulate the usual abuse by the typical owner, and as mentioned at the end of the video. The typical used cassette tape has many enemies, improper storage near magnetic fields, temperature extremes, play on magnetized heads, exposure to dust that physically abrades the tape, (promotes oxide shed) play on dirty heads which damages the tape... worn or damaged transports that physically deforms the tape, also extreme REW and FF speeds that stretch the tape.
Now that's a super effort video! Awesome. I would say, that yes - there is an audible degradation at the snip section 14:07 with the high frequencies. It would be cool if you could check the spectrum of each of these snipies/samples in audacity (analyze>plot spectrum), and post the images in the community section for comparison. I would say that the degradation from 0>500>1thousandths is quite linear. Cool stuff.
. More sound distortions are presented due to coloring of speakers and amplifiers and due to not aligned head azimuth than due to almost not noticeable losing band wideness in magnetic tape.
The short leader is so you can start saving programs without having to manually go past the leader. Same with loading, you'll save a few seconds of your life.
man, this reminds me, i need to find some of my cassette tapes and vhs tapes that I have buried in my room somewhere, hoping to god they ain't destroyed.
This has been bugging me lately because I play around with recording for fun and 'lo-fi' is really popular in the guitar and synth world so you get all these cassette simulator modes on guitar pedals and and cassette tape plugins that always add a glitchy vibrato as if the capstan roller is an egg shape and then they add some overdrive and roll off all the high end. It definitely gives people a weird idea of what cassettes sounded like. There's also a guitar pedal that sounds like a CD skipping, super weird.
A few months back my friend and I endured an absurd game of chicken where we endeavored to listen to the Austin Powers 2 OST on cassette tape once a day for an entire year. Circumstances meant early on I had to record a digital copy of the tape so we could listen separately at times when one of us was out of town or working when we weren't both around for joint listen. I swear, that used tape was played more than 300 times in a year. At the end, the tape still sounded, quality wise, the same as our first. Out of morbid curiosity I recorded the tape in sections against the recording I made near the beginning and while there were some waveform differences (no doubt because I was not scientific about how I made either recording) once I matched the gain between the two recordings there were no audible degradations between the recordings and the tape. I would say I have a unique relationship with these songs, and I could not tell a difference. I can't say I know what these songs are supposed to sound like, but I know the tape held up like a champ.
Nice video! I do not know why, but I have always liked Cassettes. Nostalgia may be an (small) factor (today) of course. Listening to old radio-recordings I did in the 90s I just found, was very enjoyable. Ironically enough back then I did try to not record the talking part of the radioshow, just the music inbetween, but today I more appreciate the times I did not care and just recorded the whole show, that hits in the right place, strangely enough I recognize most of it straight away, it reminds me of another time.
Wow...what a detailed and we'll executed video! To my ears, by 1000 plays there were some small drop outs and a little loss of HF but the recording really stood up well.
bravo..well done vw! In addition to the environmental affects of playing tapes in 70s & 80s cars, the other bad thing was the bouncing up & down while driving which would cause tapes to take-up unevenly. This would lead to binding & negatively affect tracking.
I came to UA-cam with a question about cassette tape life, and you created this incredible video which answered it in more detail than I ever could have imagined... And given that you used a low grade tape in the demo means high quality tape would do even better. And then there's the car issues you pointed out. Well done, well done.
Thank you for your Experiment. In 1986 I tried this with a 120 min. tape from BASF ferrum. I used that tape to record a weekly radio chart show. But I remember that after half a year the soundquality was completly gone. The seperation between a side and b side was‘t there. With other words. The tape was ruined and I threw it in the bin. Keep up the good work. Nice to hear that you learned something from Dr. Cassette.
You are very good (and thorough) at these tests, your turntable tests and comparism videos I have watched more than once. Thanks for the window cleaner tip, I also follow Dr. Cassette.
That's exactly my experience. All the cassette tapes I had in my car in the 90's are completely worn out. I now have a youngtimer car as a daily with air conditioning, I take very good care of the cassettes (not leaving them under bright sun), I don't smoke anymore, and I now have very good results listening to tapes in my car
This was brilliant. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics will get that tape in the end! We had a Le Corbusier chair in the listening rooms of our London hi-fi shop along with a Breuer Wassily chair to the point I still get confused which one was used on the ad. (Le Corbusier).
As children in the 90s we would listen to children's plays all day long... I had a trashy "walkman" that came for free with a pair of shoes.. 80% of the cassettes didn't even have a case and where stored in bins with other cassettes, matchbox cars and the remains of the Ninja Turtle bus... I don't recall ever destroying a single cassette- way more robust than Vinyl or CDs if you ask me.
I don't think anyone ever claimed CD-Rs would last forever. Philips did claim regular CDs would have "Perfect sound forever", but they're made with an entirely different process and different materials than CD-Rs or RWs.
CD-Rs degrade very quickly if you put a paper label on them, but otherwise I have a bunch of them that are 20 years old and still play fine -- even the ones which have turned brown around the edge.
@@vwestlife Mine are in very good condition, too. The Sony ones tend to turn brown or gold on the label side which is pretty strange because I never expose them to the sun or even bright lights, and yes, some got a discoloration over the edge, too, making them unreadable. A friend told me if the laser writer is old the laser couldn't write on them properly. Those old green tinted ones were the best.
I have recorded cassette tapes that go back 40 years ago which still play crystal clear today. Temperature and humidity conditioning are the most critical factors for a cassette tape. Love your video!
You needed to record a frequency sweep over and over on the tape, then run the spectral analysis on it to see what frequency's it was able to or not able to recreate at different numbers of plays.
The best channel ever. Technical, true, trust, every single second of my attention. Thanks man. The "Other" techo channel is just entertainment for me.
Technically, "yes".... It was mentioned in the video. However, if we use your suggestion, then the tape was played over 2000 times - 500 more than Philips originally stated; though that was back in the very early days of the cassette format...tape formulations improved immensely during the 70s & 80s though, so Philips' early estimates would have been made redundant!
The damage is also caused by worn out players, hard or dirty pinch roller and heads with trenches in them. I'm always amazed how long sound can exist on tapes without being damaged by the earths magnetic field. But tapes do need quite a high bias when recording, so i should not be too supprised .
Thank you for the friendly mention in the video :)
This is a very interesting experiment. The difference between the new recording and the 1000th playback was minimal. What surprised me was the good quality of the new recording after the 1000 playbacks. I have very often noticed that new recordings I made on cassettes I got at flea markets sounded not nearly as good as the previous recordings that came on the cassette. It seems like somewhat worn out cassettes are more difficult to record on. But this was not the case in your experiment.
The little boombox must be better than it seems. I have often noticed scratches or bends along the tape on cassettes I frequently played. The tape in your cassette looked very good even after 1000 playbacks. Maybe this would have been different with the thinner tape in a 90min cassette...
The test is legit as far as I can tell.
Still, it doesn't cover left in the car on a sunny day for some years, various handling, long term storage, bumping, putting in the wallet e.t.c.
Also, the rollers and tape-path parts of the casette didn't have to handle a C90 casette end to end 1000 times. Test is 1/9 of worst case.
@@erlendse I may repeat the test with that vintage (late '60s/early '70s) Norelco/Philips C90 cassette I showed, letting it play for 1500 hours (over two months!) to see how it sounds afterwards.
@@vwestlife Or.. I am sure you can find a way to speed up the playback some.
Like no fast rewind/forward, but more like 2x normal playing speed.
@@erlendse that would distort the result. The amount of friction would increase unproportionally when changing the speed.
It'd be better to just cut the tape down to a minute or two.
I wonder if using a closed loop player makes a difference.
I guess as the tape gets more and more worn out the closed loop mechanism is still able to drag it along the head perfectly.
I love how passive-aggressive he is towards audiophile snobbery.
And rightly so, for the most part, but if you take a skeptic but realistic sidequest into that world you do realize pretty quickly that there are people out there who can hear things that you simply will not believe. I personally sat through a listening session where during one playback the audiophile people kept turning their heads to one side while the hobbyists kept looking straight in front of them. The guy plahying the recording tater explained it; the recording was not made from straight in front of the orchestr but a good few feet to stage-right. I audiophiles heard that and automatically turned their heads to face the orchestra.
But as for the stickers on amplifiers to quiet the transformers, the filters that compensate for the speed at which the high and low frequencties travel through speakercables... yeah... that's not happening.
@@vinny142 And don't forget the specially shaped cartridge lead wires ($1000 +) that are supposed to reduce the effects of 'skin effect' (at AUDIO frequencies!). Give me a break! Some people will buy anything for status...
I love playing DSOTM on a Crosley... For the very same reasons.
@@markw9285 that skin effect bs is some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever read.
You can only be passive or aggressive, not both.
Otherwise, you will cancel yourself out.
Whenever someone says they wore out a vinyl record or cassette tape, what they really mean is they didn't take care of it or store it properly. I can't imagine how one would ruin a record or tape through normal use.
Because.. there is some friction involved when a tape head has to contact the tape, and when a stylus has to contact the record. That causes some wear. This is a simple matter of physics. Anyone claiming this is not the case should really go back to do some physics 101 course. This however does not mean it is an actual issue with normal use.
Media getting worn down is a thing, but totally not the big deal some people try to claim it is in the large majority of cases.
@@c128stuff I don't care if there is a negligible amount of wear on the microscopic level. Using a record or tape normally does not degrade the audio to any noticeable level.
@@nocturnaldivision
If you use a crappy player, yes it does. Worn or low quality stylus, rough tape head, or too much strain on the tape.
I think the exact same thing when they say they wore out a CD
@@westelaudio943 I'd argue rough tape head or worn stylus would count as 'mishandling' tho.. (but that brings up another point.. how long does a stylus last.. by far not as long as many people keep using them).
Too much strain on a tape.. that is an interesting one. Its generally held that a speed calibration tape is no longer accurate after using it in a dual capstan deck due to risk of getting stretched. I think that is slightly exaggerated, through I know from experience it can become an issue after a few uses.. of course, that is way outside the scope of 'normal use' for listening to music.
If smoking in a car can affect cassette tapes so badly, imagine what they do to the lungs!
So far I've only smoke one cassette, will never try again.
@@rudimentaer4830LOL
Watching this makes me happy to know that my physical music collection won't lose its sound quality after only a few hundred plays.
So it will lose if it is recorded from Dolby ...
Yea everyone says they degrade yet tapes I find from the 70s work like new after continuous re-recording and playing
Didn't expect to see you here
yoo daniel t. gaming
@@mclovinpo but what about playback devices from 70s? that's the issue, not the magnetic media which can obviously outlast us...
It would be interesting to see this experiment done with VHS tapes. Then you would not only have to consider the sound quality but also the visual quality.
Yeah. I did such test with VHS tape a month ago. I was able to notice slight degradation after ~10th play, significant degradation in picture quality after ~50th or so. Although, it wasn't anywhere near scientific experiment, just personal curiosity.
@@arthurvlog6259 You must have a very poor tape or player to notice a difference after 10 plays.
yeah, but that's not fear, because then it would be PCM! :_)))
@@arthurvlog6259 Interesting, although it sounds a bit severe to me. I used to borrow VHS tapes from the library and they didn't seem degraded. They were probably used a lot by many people. Maybe the heads in your machine need cleaning.
@@DaveFlash pretty scary
The problems of cassette tapes were never what was claimed about them. The problems were in using cheap tapes that did shed instead of higher quality name brand tapes, in not cleaning the heads and pinch rollers/capstans on a regular basis, and the fact that tapes were subject to warping if left in a hot vehicle for serious lengths of time (which happened a lot). In reality, tapes sound pretty good for the range of sound that they can reproduce, they were fairly durable if just a little care was taken, and represented a good "bang for the buck" during the time they were widely produced as a consumer audio format. (BTW, I am speaking about using recordable cassettes, not the pre-recorded tapes that music labels put out. Those were often made to cheaper standards to keep costs down.)
Especially with the ",Get 13 tapes or 8 Tracks for 1¢" from Columbia House. Those were the best deal on Earth! (Fake addresses and all).
Well.......until you actually played them. They sounded cheap, the background hiss was more pronounced, and they had a "flatter" sound than an equivalent store purchased cassette or 8 Track.
I didn't think anything of it, until I accidently bought a copy of Animotion Obsession. I put 2 identical Sony Walkman Cassette Players (mine and my brother's) and the quality was overwhelmingly poor for the Columbia House Club tapes. Also I had quality issues with the 8 Tracks from the Club ranging from falling apart after about 10 plays, cheap rollers, broken shells, you name it, and the aforementioned sound quality. But they did have nice sleeves for the 8 Tracks!
Edit: Meant to say extra copy of Animotion Obsession 1 Columbia and one purchased from Hastings.
we do own all the Metals, but still it sounds crappy, the dynamic range is not wide enough.
Tape collectors don't need them for the Quality, they only need to own all the Mixtapes that artists produced in the old days, play them on these old Ghetto Blaster machines.
@@lucasrem It is more complicated. I am very demanding and purchased some 30 cassettes in music shop - all one day and all from one producer. It was some 30 years ago And they were way different about sounding. Some "brilliant" like CD all with Vangelis music and some almost bad for listening due to lack of sopranos like old Pink Floyd. And other just no excitation like E. Morricone or Tangerin Dream . After a years at last I made speakers that make perfect reproduction and all sounds veeeery different - the best ones sound even better and bad sound now fantastic - sopranos always were there but before my system used to cover just them A lot depends on wideness of band - the less band is more demanding from system . In my system I listen 80% to tapes and 19% to LPs 1% to CDs. Cassettes I have are usually more exciting in sounding than CDs so for example I made reel copy of Vangelis from cassette - not from exactly the same which I have on original CD. .
90% of these prerecorded tapes had lower and cheaper quality type-1 tapes..
I appreciate the work that went into making this video. Thinking back to the 70's and 80's most of us didn't take great care of our music. We'd grab records with our fingers on the grooves, leave them on the floor, leave cassettes in our coat pockets without the case and leave them in our cars for months. It's not that we didn't care, we just never gave it a thought. Dam teenagers. lol
I totaly agree with this. :) I have many scratched records without inner sleves, (or any sleve at all).
The tapes in the car were always copies anyhow. Who cared? They were meant to be disposable.
Back then everything was much easier to replace, Blank tapes where cheap. Now the story is different and it hurts when you see the youth of this day who do not know how to hold a record.
@@markdavis4754 Or a DVD for that matter. I've ruined quite a few movies as a kid, just throwing them around without care.
@@mal2ksc That made me think. When was the last time you found the remains of a cassette strung down a hedge at the side of the road ? I guess that was the result of a minor jam causing someone to loose their patience with the tape or someone simply hating the music on it.
I have cassettes I bought and recorded as long ago as the late 80s, and have listened to them countless times, and they still sound good. And some of them lived in various cars through the years (I don't smoke, so that isn't a factor), oh, and I lived in Florida without A/C in most of my cars. (brutal, I know). I have high regard for cassettes. They just aren't quite as convenient as digital. That said, my wife just recently bought a 2002 Honda with a cassette and CD deck, so I've had to pull our old cassettes out of storage so she can enjoy some of her favorites from years past. :-)
Same here
moi aussi
Our 2008 Lexus RX350 also came with a cassette deck and a 6 CD changer. My wife dragged out all her Depech Mode tapes and keeps them in the car.
I recorded thousands of songs 🎵 back in the mid 90s on my aiwa stack system and they still sound as clear and crisp in 2021
unable to get the iPhone working?
I would love to see a repeated test with white noise as a source, and comparing the resulting spectrogram/frequency response over time.
That would be interesting
Yup
it would have sounded better i guess, old people love it!
yeah something like a square wave tone so that any deviations or noise can be easily seen would have been much more useful, though admittingly much less entertaining
Be more reasonable - with white noise even by ear it is almost 100% sure slightest difference will be heard. Because It is analog which is crazy sensitive for any change. To prevent us from nonsense disputes we should limit our requirements to those which we are able to recognize when listening to real music.And in music the usable band is much less than eventually found and measured in pure noise. I was also big fan of frequencies above 14 kHz but it was when I had not enough experience.
Being of “a certain age,” those Maxell television commercials amused me because they were so damned clever. Oh yes, I willingly bought and used their product(s); at one point Maxell offered a T-shirt with a print of the dude in the chair, replete with flying hair and necktie. The shirt was free, but mailing in X-number of proofs of purchase was the cost. I still have the shirt and after years of washings it was necessary to reinforce the seams several times . . . .
My sister used to make her own mix tapes from either her own or rented/borrowed cds and she swore by maxell gold tapes.
"ONE THOUTHANTHTH...ONE THOUTHANTSH" LOVE IT! Keep up the good work!
Lol, that part caught me off guard. It had me rollin. 😂😂😂
I'm sure a lot of people have a few words that no matter how much they practiced saying the word it simply CANNOT get from the brain the the vocal cords correctly. I have trouble speaking when I 1st wake up and trip and stumble over words I normally say all the time. I chalk it up to brain gas (PPPPFFFTTTTT) LOL.
@Melanie , That was funny I wonder how many times he edited his laughter out because he just couldn't stop laughing at himself. As I mentioned in the other comment I'm sure EVERYONE has at least one word that causes tongue somersaults when they attempt to say it. Even regular speech watch the blooper reals included on most movies these days many times they are more funny than the intended lines of comedy.Catch a comical character and the whole crew will be cracking up before it's over with.
And I thought it's just my problem as not a native English speaker.
Channelling Daffy Duck there?
Tapes undeniably wear out when playing as there is friction.
It just depends on your mechanism being functioning properly.
The tape running across the head would be the least of my concern. Much more important is stuff like the pinch roller being clean as well as nice and grippy. If you have a track of crud around your capstan, it will run a groove into the tape (usually rendering one channel of both sides useless) or the pinch roller as lost its grip on one side and the tape slides off in one direction which crumples it.
Make sure your mech is fine and tape path is clean and you should be good.
Friction not always cause mechanical wear Wear means damage of material structure. Until that limit is not reached material is no changed - friction lifts only its temperature which only must be kept in safe limit to prevent structure. If you do not believe see bronze - steel bearings. . .
"Tapes undeniably wear out when playing as there is friction."
The physical tape yes, but you don't hear the shape of the tape, you hear the magnetic field induced by the metal parts inside the tape. As long as the surface of the tape is not seriously damaged, as in; chucks are missing, the recording will be fine.
I'd be much more concerned about the heads producing their own magnetic field and slowly erasing the recording every time it's played.
Obviously, if you don't take steps to keep your tape transport clean, then it will accelerate the degradation of the tape. But what Westlife is showing here, is that with proper care, and a quality player, there is no reason why cassettes can't last for many years, and still sound good.
I have pre recorded cassettes from the 1970's that still sound ok. Obviously, recording quality and tape formulations improved over the years, but in a lot of cases, cassettes are more robust than CD's, and can outlast CD's by many years.
@@vinny142 That is why you DEMAGNETIZE the heads, every so often. That is a well known procedure to people that are experienced with cassettes, and just part of general maintenance.
@@hermanmunster3358 Sure, as listeners and users we may judge only the "reception" . We may forget the condition of media, untill without doubt we discover that we do not hear what we want . Then we could blame technology
Discussing material wear we often omit other important advantages of systems . For me such often forgotten advantage according to reels was is that reproduction of cassette may be stopped at any time and cassette may be replaced with next without rewinding to begining. Next return back even after long time always started at last moment which is not the case of digital . I think it was main reason why people choosen cassettes over reels . In compare to CDs casstettes are more versatile in outside conditions from where vibrations, need to touch CD with fingers and proper placing in prone to damage and not handy box pushed CD out. For that reason in cars were adopted bulky changers. Just as supplement to discussion
This brings back memories of cassettes strewn all over the floor of my brother's car- we used to throw then around, step on them, leave them in the car in the sun...they still worked fine. I reallty miss the durability of analog cassettes. No cracked screens or file transfers then...
I've seen modern comments on cassettes call them "fragile". How the tape gets eaten easily and destroyed. Do these people not remember how badly we treated them? My off brand (I think the brand name was "International") walkman style player started eating tapes around the time the belt clip started to break and I dropped the thing about 4 times a day. I "fixed" it by shaking the out the dirt. The wrinkles in the tapes usually evened out after a while.
In the beginning I was scared he is going to do the 1000-times playback on the Denon... And yes, it is not the greatest cassette deck ever made, but it is still very good and torturing it like that would be a... sacrilege. Fortunately, Kevin was sane enough to do that part on a cheap boombox.
I think the Denon would have survived 1000 passes of a tape that's only 5 minutes a side.
I think part of the point was to introduce a certain level of abuse to the cassette that only a $20 boombox from Kmart could impart.
Imagine caring that much about obsolete, outdated, old hardware, your life must be sad.
It would be fine after a head clean anyway.
Also it is a worse case scenario for the tape itself as a good deck probably wears it out less.
It's odd to see BOTH reals rotating fast I originally thought that it was running at 3 3/4" ips, then I realized that it's due to the short length of tape!
In the early 1980s my dad recorded some of his LPs onto audio cassettes (things like ABBA and Mamas & Papas) so he could listen to them in the car. Even in the late 90s, those tapes were still going strong despite having been listened to hundreds or thousands of times in the car stereo!
I have seen videos of background music systems in shops and such that used audio cassettes. The cassette was run on auto-reverse non-stop, all the time the store was open - and many of those have become damaged or noisy after so many plays!
I'm visualising quintessential 80s Dad driving down the highway, windows down, shades on enthusiastically singing along to ABBA.
"Waterloo! La la la da la!
Waterloo! Promise to love you for evermore!"
*Slaps steering wheel to the beat.
"Waterloo! La la la la da...
If my father listened to Abba I wouldn't tell anybody!😄
I have a 40 year old Country music tape in my collection that still sounds outstanding to me! I've also got surprisingly good home recordings on type 1 tape recorded on vintage Hi Fi equipment, such as Denon and Technics, that I own. Great video.
This video is the perfect example of why this is my favorite tech channel on UA-cam. Great job Kevin. Appreciate the effort that went into it.
What I found particularly interesting was that this video also seems to debunk the theory that reel-to-reel type tapes wear out quicker than "normal" ones due to friction on the tape edges.
Great video on durability of cassettes.
It's the media format I grew up with.
Glad I'm back into recording & playing music on cassettes.
The Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorder, marketed to kids in the late 1980s and early '90s, when it sold for about $100 in the U.S., records a low-resolution monochrome picture, with sound, on Compact Cassettes. If I remember right, one side of a C-90 tape runs through the PXL-2000 in play or record mode in 4½ or 5 minutes, so it was 9 or 10 times the playback speed of your typical audio Compact Cassette. Something about this machine and this way of using tapes meant that, in just ten plays, you could see a BIG drop in the quality of both the picture and a sound. In my experience, the only way to make PXL-2000 recordings on Compact Cassette last was to dub them immediately to VHS. You could also skip the extreme compression of recording on a Compact Cassette and instead feed the camcorder's live picture and sound into a VHS VCR and record there, with a hugely better initial result and hugely better durability.
I have tapes that I made of broadcasts 45 yrs ago from the University of Pennsylvania radio station when they still played classical music . They still play well
Just got my first cassette deck. Great format, love this channel.
if people get over excited here, it was not any good.
you need to find a realrape recorder, you could have some fun.
That stereo separation on "... Four-Leaf clover" is amazing. Sounds great even for compressed UA-cam.
I think time is a greater enemy of magnetic tape versus mechanical wear. I have open reel tapes that are 60+ years old that still play fine, but being acetate based, are rather brittle and easily snapped. But the physical appearance of the oxide side of the tape shows remarkably little wear, and these tapes were played dozens of times over the years. So the fact that tape can last 1000 plays doesn't amaze me at all. It's all in the care the tapes receive and the maintenance of the deck. At any rate, this was a very impressive demonstration! Thank you!
Your point about the robustness of tapes and tape playback is extremely well taken. I don't have a good tape deck, just a late-generation Sony Walkman that I keep held together with tape. And yet I have digitized 30-year-old tapes for several friends and family members with it, and the results are frequently astonishing.
As teenagers, my friends 1968 Impala (whale) had a tap deck with the cassette stuck inside. All year long, we got to hear Night Ranger over and over and over.
Love this video. I have no pretentiousness about it, but I have been drawn to cassette recording recently and it's quite evident to me that their bad reputation comes as you said: from crappy and abused car players!
Hoping to get a TASCAM 122 soon and make a similar but different video. Yours is very inspiring and love your work!
Even at twenty minutes per play and with auto reverse, I have to admire your dedication to this.
Philips' claim that 8-tracks can only be played in certain orientations and angles seems like something that ought to be tested. As long as the rubber roller is driving the tape, I can't see it making any difference in whichever plane someone's playing an 8-track. (I've not tried it.)
Something else that might make a difference is transport quality. I'm sure a lot of car cassette decks were very well made, especially the better models from all major automakers, but then there are the ultra cheap and anonymous models that probably aren't precisely engineered enough to treat a tape well.
Most of my mixtapes and home recordings (those not subjected to equipment mishaps) still seem to sound as good as the day I made them (recorded on both decent and dubious equipment). It seems much easier to find commercially produced tapes that are worn out, and I wonder if the difference is in tape quality. Some say the record labels used excellent quality tape stock and others not. (I think it varies with time, the label and maybe even the artist/genre.)
You're right about car cassette decks. Some of the lower-priced units lacked auto-stop and would just sit there at the end of a tape, motor running, belt slipping, pinch roller engaged on the capstan, until the driver manually ejected the tape.
Most commercial recordings were reduced to a price point to maximize profits, that's certainly true. Cardboard-brown Type I tape in plain white shells with often-blurry black printing, and the tapes seem to be recorded from vinyl masters, complete with "pops."
There are also artists that have insisted on higher-quality releases, like Phil Collins was doing in the 90s - he used direct-to-digital recording in the studio, and digital masters for production, and a premium cassette, and proudly affixed stickers to the cassettes advertising that.
Perhaps it is the 8-track cartridges themselves that don't like being at odd angles. If it affects the way the tape feeds back onto the single spool, it could become a problem.
Conclusion: Philips invented a pretty decent system.
Makes me proud as a Dutch citizen.
Invented in Belgium though, engineers at Philips Hasselt. And the CD also invented in Belgium. Although the manager Lou Ottens was Dutch.
Philips gave us quite a few audio innovations, such as the Compact Cassette, CD (in collaboration with Sony), CDi, DCC, etc.
Many quality audio visual brands and systems were developed in Europe, B&O of Denmark, Tanmoy, Wharefdale, Kef, Monitor Audio, Cambridge Audio, Mission/Cyrus, and Linn of the UK, Garrard of France, Grundig of Germany to name a few.
John Logie Baird of Scotland, UK also pioneered television and showed the first moving pictures on a television set in 1925. So Europe has a rich history of developing quality audio visual products.
We can rightly be proud of European innovation, which often also set the standards in the industry. The far east quickly caught up however, and the Japanese in particular had a skill to make products smaller and more portable, through the use of transistors instead of Vacuum tube designs.
Maxell STILL uses that man-in-a-chair logo to this day! At work they use Maxell headphones on their computers and the boxes still have that logo on them.
Certainly worth keeping.
Thank you for the exhaustive tests! That was a great deal of work. I have tapes from the 80s and not all of them are high quality media but they still work well. Notable cheapo brands that held up: Memex, Lasonic, and budget RS Realistic cassettes. I think proper storage is key here, but these have been exposed to a great deal of smoke, and not all of it from cigarettes ;)
This is the kind of video that I'm glad youtube exists...
Especially the ‘endclap’ comparisation in the beginning revealed some pretty loss in high frequencies. But maybe it’s not due to the wear of the tape, rather than the partly erasure of the tape due to magnitized heads and capstans… People often clean the tapepath, but forget to demagnitize. Pretty good video, though! Also, it depends wich tape after all those years are still playable. Some of my tapes sound horrible. Others (like the TDK SA-X) I could have recorded yesterday…
Would be good if capstans were made of plastic instead of metal, so to avoid magnetizing in capstans.
@@HamtaroEL Why not just stainless steel then? Most alloys of stainless aren't ferromagnetic.
"Honey, what are you working on?"
"Oh just a little UA-cam video about tapes. Hey, you're alright with listening to Ride of the Valkyries a thousand times in a row, right?"
"What?"
vwestlife: going the extra mile to prove rumors wrong so you don't have to!
Super experiment and the conclusion is spot on - moisture makes the biggest difference and the quality of the tape. Coming from costal south India, with absurd high moisture, I can vouch for this. Moisture and dust kills not just tapes, but speaker suspensions, mechanisms and the like. In VHS tapes, the moulding of tapes was so visible we had to regularly spool them using a so called 'video cassette rewinder'. In case of audio cassettes, the degradation is highly evident, especially with pre recorded cassettes. If you really wanted long term qualirt, had to use a Sony, Maxell or TDK cassette. Last but not the least, the deposits on the magnetic head was plenty. Requiring frequent cleaning. Thanks, this experiment bought back a lot of memories.
Techmoan did a video about a cassette tape cleaning machine that was probably used in your part of the world.
17:21 - I couldn't help but notice that crescendo sending the level seriously into the red! Even that cheap Laser tape tolerated it!
Man, I miss dynamics. Well-recorded music that hasn't been smooshed to a 3dB range just sounds so _good._
@@nickwallette6201 Check out the recordings of Enoch Light. He was one of the pioneers of stereo, albeit totally SEPARATED stereo (no 'center-channel'). However all his recordings were mastered on 35mm magnetic film, providing an inch-wide track for each channel!
1:47 - damn bro, I didn't expect to get rickrolled by a tape.
Cassettes are one of my favorite audio mediums. Still have several which play just fine after decades of use.
that moment i realized he actually played 250 times.. subscribed. seriously, someone so dedicated to prove something i could tell from experience (didn't reach results yet still anxious to see conclusions). thumbs up.
Another brilliant video! I couldn't help noticing the amount of drivel manufacturers printed on their stuff back then. ,"Precision Audio Technology", "High Quality Sound"... And I wouldn't have had a clue why I didn't hear loud clunking noises or why those lights were flashing to indicate the music level if it hadn't said "Silent Mechanism" or "Fluorescent Peak Meter"!!!
It is definitely the storage/environment and maintenance of the equipment that affects the life of the media. I’ve never had any tapes wear out, and I still have all of my original cassettes from back in the day. I’d seems like any wear is superficial and not really noticeable.
But the same applies to video cassettes. Never had any of mine wear out, and still play perfectly after all these decades… The issue there is rental tapes: those go through VCR hell with machines that destroy tapes over and over again due to something being wrong with the machine. That’s why I hate when people assume (and use filters to simulate) VHS dropouts and noise like that is the norm. Or storing tapes in an attic for years The try to play them… the results are not very good.
But anyways, fantastic video as always :3
I give major props to Maxell for still making magnetic tape media. I still buy it!
I used to pick up and fix cassette tapes found along the side of the road! So many idiots threw away expensive music they paid for!
They still do? Bought the last UR90s in 2019 and since then they have vanished from the market where I live...
@@Nile9063 You need to check around to stores you don't usually shop. I know 2 stores in my area with Maxxel tape media on the shelves.
Oh wow you're the second guy I know who picked up a cassette thrown on the road. Mine wasn't even a cassette. A reel! It works fine!
No one else but the guy in the video can bring what he brings to the table and perform his style of magic. 🙂
They certainly are better than you don’t remember.
I was getting nervous when I thought you were going to play that tape through that really nice Denon deck 1000 times.
I can appreciate the level of detail and thought you put in this.
I'm young enough that my only experience with Memorex is buying computer mice and USB keys from them that inexplicably still had the "Is it live or is it Memorex" slogan, and having no idea what on earth that was supposed to mean.
And here we go again, awesome topic as usual :) I always wanted a cassete tape that looks like a reel to reel like the one in the thumbnail.
"Shedding Oxide" is the name of my new album
Cassettes are largely affected by how they are stored, and to a degree, how they are handled. And if you use them in cheap equipment, with a poorly aligned transport path, this can also damage the edges of the tape as it travels along the transport path, resulting in the edges curling over, or being chewed.
I have cassettes from the 70's and 80's which still play fine. But recording technology back then, tended to give pre recorded cassettes a bass heavy characteristic, which is quite different from cassettes recorded to the latter half of the 80's and early 90's. And actual tape quality peaked towards the late 80's, to align with the sound quality of CD's, so your home recordings sounded as good as possible, and as near as possible to the original CD. But again, results largely depended on the quality of your recording equipment.
But if used on Good quality equipment, with a well aligned transport, and correct storage, cassettes can potentially last a lifetime.
However, I was never a lover of Dolby C, to me, recordings can sound a little compressed, and un natural. But Dolby B is a good compromise. Some say Dolby S is better than both Dolby B & C, but I have yet to experience Dolby S personally.
I have Maxell UDXL II's and FUJI XRD's from 1976 I've played TEN THOUSAND times in my MOTORCYCLE DECK on my trip from Tulsa to Glacier National Park south to Tixalcopti (SP???), Mexico, a tiny wide place in the road, (I was headed to Tampico, but Pemex 75 octane fuel sounded like it was "knocking" my engine to death, and I turned back). My "own mix tapes" of Hank Williams Jr. , Willie Nelson, ect. I had a Blaupunkt car stereo head in my fairing with two very good 5" two-way speakers and my helmet headphones (not 50 state legal in 1983). I rode thru Rifle, CO. singing "On the Road Again" at the top of my lungs...My single LONGEST bike trip-8,100 miles at 55MPH!!! I put 71,000 miles on that Suzuki GS-650G (shaftie) in 21 or 22 months! One reason I have the AMA "Iron Butt" Award with 15 Preparation H clusters for my million plus AMA touring miles...
Absolutely fantastic show my friend. It is evident a lot of hard work went into this!
Whats more impressive is that the cheap Boom Box did his job till the end.
3:45 - You forgot "well calendered"!
I have a two boxes in my hallway closet filled with cassettes I recorded from 1980 to 1983. They still play pretty good for 40 year old tapes. I listened to The Police's "Zenyatta Mondatta" a few months ago and it sounded fine.
They last if you take care of 'em. I still have a few from the '70s.
It's funny how he Rickrolled us though cassettes 1:48
A very well done controlled experiment, I'm impressed. We did not have an actual A-B comparison of the source vs 1000 plays, but close enough. But this does not simulate the usual abuse by the typical owner, and as mentioned at the end of the video. The typical used cassette tape has many enemies, improper storage near magnetic fields, temperature extremes, play on magnetized heads, exposure to dust that physically abrades the tape, (promotes oxide shed) play on dirty heads which damages the tape... worn or damaged transports that physically deforms the tape, also extreme REW and FF speeds that stretch the tape.
mention of cigarette smoke in the video.. Yep, what does smoking not damage?
Now that's a super effort video! Awesome. I would say, that yes - there is an audible degradation at the snip section 14:07 with the high frequencies. It would be cool if you could check the spectrum of each of these snipies/samples in audacity (analyze>plot spectrum), and post the images in the community section for comparison. I would say that the degradation from 0>500>1thousandths is quite linear. Cool stuff.
. More sound distortions are presented due to coloring of speakers and amplifiers and due to not aligned head azimuth than due to almost not noticeable losing band wideness in magnetic tape.
Everything about this video is awesome
The short leader is so you can start saving programs without having to manually go past the leader. Same with loading, you'll save a few seconds of your life.
man, this reminds me, i need to find some of my cassette tapes and vhs tapes that I have buried in my room somewhere, hoping to god they ain't destroyed.
This has been bugging me lately because I play around with recording for fun and 'lo-fi' is really popular in the guitar and synth world so you get all these cassette simulator modes on guitar pedals and and cassette tape plugins that always add a glitchy vibrato as if the capstan roller is an egg shape and then they add some overdrive and roll off all the high end. It definitely gives people a weird idea of what cassettes sounded like. There's also a guitar pedal that sounds like a CD skipping, super weird.
I was overly quick to dismiss that "Laser" tape as type zero garbage. It actually sounded good considering it was intended for computer use.
I love my cassettes. Thnx for another great video. You deserve so much more viewers.
A few months back my friend and I endured an absurd game of chicken where we endeavored to listen to the Austin Powers 2 OST on cassette tape once a day for an entire year. Circumstances meant early on I had to record a digital copy of the tape so we could listen separately at times when one of us was out of town or working when we weren't both around for joint listen. I swear, that used tape was played more than 300 times in a year. At the end, the tape still sounded, quality wise, the same as our first. Out of morbid curiosity I recorded the tape in sections against the recording I made near the beginning and while there were some waveform differences (no doubt because I was not scientific about how I made either recording) once I matched the gain between the two recordings there were no audible degradations between the recordings and the tape. I would say I have a unique relationship with these songs, and I could not tell a difference. I can't say I know what these songs are supposed to sound like, but I know the tape held up like a champ.
Nice video!
I do not know why, but I have always liked Cassettes. Nostalgia may be an (small) factor (today) of course.
Listening to old radio-recordings I did in the 90s I just found, was very enjoyable.
Ironically enough back then I did try to not record the talking part of the radioshow, just the music inbetween, but today I more appreciate the times I did not care and just recorded the whole show, that hits in the right place, strangely enough I recognize most of it straight away, it reminds me of another time.
Getting that dopamine hit watching that realtime unwrapping of a LAser 10min tape
#STewieGriffin Yeah, that's the Good Stuff...
Wow...what a detailed and we'll executed video! To my ears, by 1000 plays there were some small drop outs and a little loss of HF but the recording really stood up well.
I am impressed that anybody listened to the same album 1500 times.
bravo..well done vw! In addition to the environmental affects of playing tapes in 70s & 80s cars, the other bad thing was the bouncing up & down while driving which would cause tapes to take-up unevenly. This would lead to binding & negatively affect tracking.
Wow thats incredible, the high end is completely gone and the lower voices are more audible, who would have thought. Really cool experiment
Nice video!
Interesting to hear same recordings after some time (one year, maybe) to compare
The good old days of tapes. The sound quality was actually quite good!
I have a cassette that is over 50 years old and still working.
14:03 "One thousandth" without teeth.
Me too
I came to UA-cam with a question about cassette tape life, and you created this incredible video which answered it in more detail than I ever could have imagined... And given that you used a low grade tape in the demo means high quality tape would do even better. And then there's the car issues you pointed out. Well done, well done.
VWestlife, I purchased that exact Denon Deck in January this year. It's brilliant; my first three head deck. Took me 35years to get there, though.
Actually, here's a clip of me using it a few months ago.
ua-cam.com/video/rqcxdJXcUWQ/v-deo.html
Thank you for your Experiment. In 1986 I tried this with a 120 min. tape from BASF ferrum. I used that tape to record a weekly radio chart show. But I remember that after half a year the soundquality was completly gone. The seperation between a side and b side was‘t there. With other words. The tape was ruined and I threw it in the bin. Keep up the good work. Nice to hear that you learned something from Dr. Cassette.
You are very good (and thorough) at these tests, your turntable tests and comparism videos I have watched more than once. Thanks for the window cleaner tip, I also follow Dr. Cassette.
the hiss noise is nostalgic. I grew up in era of portable music players and cassettes
great work! always been something i wondered about. I no longer have a tape collection but proves, if they are looked after they last!
That's exactly my experience. All the cassette tapes I had in my car in the 90's are completely worn out. I now have a youngtimer car as a daily with air conditioning, I take very good care of the cassettes (not leaving them under bright sun), I don't smoke anymore, and I now have very good results listening to tapes in my car
Re-Record Not Fade Away ! - Re-Record Not Fade Away ! - Bonus for any one who remembers this make of Tape ? LOL
Scotch video cassettes, every time I pick up a VHS tape I remember the singing skeleton from the advert !
@@woodhouse122 Me Too . I loved that advert back in the day. Never Forget.
This was brilliant. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics will get that tape in the end!
We had a Le Corbusier chair in the listening rooms of our London hi-fi shop along with a Breuer Wassily chair to the point I still get confused which one was used on the ad. (Le Corbusier).
As children in the 90s we would listen to children's plays all day long... I had a trashy "walkman" that came for free with a pair of shoes.. 80% of the cassettes didn't even have a case and where stored in bins with other cassettes, matchbox cars and the remains of the Ninja Turtle bus... I don't recall ever destroying a single cassette- way more robust than Vinyl or CDs if you ask me.
A lot of my CD-Rs have failed but the old cassettes still work and sound pretty good.
CD-R are degrading pretty fast between 5 to 10 years.
@@albertocabezas282 - Yup, but they marketed them as lasting forever lol.
I don't think anyone ever claimed CD-Rs would last forever. Philips did claim regular CDs would have "Perfect sound forever", but they're made with an entirely different process and different materials than CD-Rs or RWs.
CD-Rs degrade very quickly if you put a paper label on them, but otherwise I have a bunch of them that are 20 years old and still play fine -- even the ones which have turned brown around the edge.
@@vwestlife Mine are in very good condition, too. The Sony ones tend to turn brown or gold on the label side which is pretty strange because I never expose them to the sun or even bright lights, and yes, some got a discoloration over the edge, too, making them unreadable. A friend told me if the laser writer is old the laser couldn't write on them properly. Those old green tinted ones were the best.
I have recorded cassette tapes that go back 40 years ago which still play crystal clear today. Temperature and humidity conditioning are the most critical factors for a cassette tape.
Love your video!
Wow… I used to have the same Emerson boom box! Awesome video as usual!!!
JEEZ... i still remember when that Maxell ad first aired... man I'm old...
I know I'm a person of specialized tastes, but speaking as a casualty of the cassette era, this video is edge-of-my-seat excitement.
I still have the first cassette I ever owned...Van Halen 2. Got it in 1979, and it still plays fine!
You needed to record a frequency sweep over and over on the tape, then run the spectral analysis on it to see what frequency's it was able to or not able to recreate at different numbers of plays.
Brings back memories. I had that same Laser tape to back up programs from my TRS-80 color computer in the 80's.
This video is absolutely hilarious! Love it!
The best channel ever. Technical, true, trust, every single second of my attention. Thanks man. The "Other" techo channel is just entertainment for me.
Wouldn't one play of tape count as both sides playing so you would just leave the number The way is?
If you think so, then you can take the number on the counter at face value instead of doubling it.
Technically, "yes".... It was mentioned in the video. However, if we use your suggestion, then the tape was played over 2000 times - 500 more than Philips originally stated; though that was back in the very early days of the cassette format...tape formulations improved immensely during the 70s & 80s though, so Philips' early estimates would have been made redundant!
The damage is also caused by worn out players, hard or dirty pinch roller and heads with trenches in them.
I'm always amazed how long sound can exist on tapes without being damaged by the earths magnetic field.
But tapes do need quite a high bias when recording, so i should not be too supprised .