Cassette High Speed Dubbing : Really, What Was The Point?
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- Опубліковано 24 лип 2024
- I am sure many of you remember high speed dubbing. Many stereos, boom boxes, cassette decks and ghetto blasters back in the 80s and 90s offered this feature. I recall using it a few times back in the day. It seemed to be a popular feature that people looked for when they bought a new tape player/recorder.
But from my experience, high speed dubbing often sounded terrible. I recall the dubs sounding very faint, hollow, tinny and just all around awful. So, I have to wonder, what was the point of high speed dubbing?
I take a close look at this in this video. As I mention, I don't understand how the speed of completing a copy was more important than the quality of the copy itself. Seriously, why couldn't people just wait that extra 15-20 minutes for a much better quality dub? Was it really that important to get a copy as quickly as possible?
Maybe you had very different experiences with high speed dubbing. Maybe the deck you used offered high speed dubbing, and maybe you found the quality acceptable, or maybe even downright good. That was never my experience.
I do think that maybe the novelty of it all may have been appealing at the time. And as I mention in the video, there could have been situations where I could understand this feature coming in handy. For example, someone running a small micro label out of their bedroom.
I actually still have some of the copies I made back in the day with high speed dubbing. I honestly can't listen to them, they are that bad. I guess maybe some folks just didn't care. I guess recording quality didn't really matter much to some folks. As I say in the video, I guess it is similar to someone today listening to an MP3 at a very low bitrate. I do think for some folks, high quality is just not that imperative.
So, what did you think of high speed dubbing? Did you use it often? Did you have better experience with it? How did it sound to you? Do you feel it was a waste of time?
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I hated "High Speed Dubbing"! My parents back in the 80s and 90s Always copied their tapes using this feature, they were Very Impatient. The result of those copied tapes sounded extremely horrible, I would never tell them to wait out those extra 20 to 45 minutes depending on the tape length, I would let them do their own thing. However, once I became a teenager and owned my own stereo, this feature stood out useless. Nowadays I still have a Sony TC-WE805S dual cassette with simultaneous recording from 1999, that still has that feature and would prefer to simultaneously record on both tapes at the same time instead. Great Video!
I never used it myself in the 80s or 90s but my dad did once to tape his friend some albums from cassette. I never knew it was worse quality than normal speed. I guess he didn't like his "friend" that much then lol.
i never used High Speed Dubbing back in the 90's to copy my tapes , first of all because the few boomboxes / stereos we had in my parents house were BPC (black plastic crap ... like that Yorx system at 0:30 ) recording with DC BIAS , so very noisy and low quality sound even at Normal speed ... and also because , as a 6-7 y.o kid that i was back in the 90's i was kinda scared of the ''chipmunk'' noises of the high speed dubbing 😅 fortunately i quickly overcomed that weird fear ..
Even now , with my Technics RS-TR575 deck , when i make some mixtapes using other tapes , i never use HSP because even with a better quality deck , the results still sounds like sh*t 😝
Whoa ! I fell like I've seen this video already. 🤣🤣🤣
I think it was just the cheap decks but I dunno for sure. I should do a comparison with my Onkyo deck.
My English teacher ran a backroom duplication farm, it was basically a large stack of decks with one master deck and a whole lot of recorders parallelled, but from what i remember they were playback-speed dubbed. If you were a microlabel, by all reason you'd use that, not high speed dubbing. More cheap decks with no fancy features is the saner choice here.
Also i don't know i mean if you consider physics, what actually prevents good high speed dubbing? Just the fact that the erase head can't do its jov very well if it's a passive one, like on these boom boxes? Active erase heads might not have that limitation.
I also don't remember high speed dub off my Panasonic sounding particularly bad but maybe it was and i just didn't care.
this name confused me as a youth as "dub" was what we called a genre of music we listened to mainly