Hissette Revival !

[WA3VJB]

Who'd a thunk it?

The humble cassette tape, a happy memory for many music fans of a certain age, has staged a comeback...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22533522

[W3GMS]

My Tascam 122 mk III cassette machine is still alive and well!  The quality is excellent.  As my old tapes age, I have been using it to copy the material over to that thing called a CD!  The last time I checked, I believe only one or two manufactures were making tape, but hopefully a source will be around for some time.  Limited supply really drives the price up, but so be it.

Its so much nicer to watch the reels of a good reel to reel tape machine go round and round as compared to plugging in a digital chewing gum stick in a computer!!   

Joe, GMS   

[WQ9E]

Cassettes are far too "new fangled" for me

[WZ5Q]

Cassettes are far too "new fangled" for me

OUTSTANDING!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

[w1vtp]

My Teac is still working.  I did have to replace all the rubber drive belts.

[KB2WIG]

Can R DAT be far behind???


klc

[flintstone mop]

Can R DAT be far behind???


klc

What R DAT??

[flintstone mop]

Hissettes were pretty dismal sounding before the Dolby noise reduction and the HX circuits.

The automobile environment would take its toll after about a year's worth of riding around.
The automobile players and add-on units interpreted the Dolby stuff differently and the tape never sounded as it was recorded at home.

Hissettes were easier to manage than the 8-tracks. You needed a robust recorder to deal with the ever-problematic head alignment of 8-tracks. The only recorder was an Akai 8-track.

I only somewhat miss my Teac reel-to-reel. The BIG 10 1/2 inch NAB hubs and 15ips. The DBX noise reduction made for beautiful recordings even using 7 1/2 ips.

Fred

[KB2WIG]

"   What R DAT??  "

 Digital Audio Tape

Ask the man who owns one.


klc

[KL7OF]

The cassette tape is one of the most durable and long lasting ways to playback music....20 some yrs ago I started a welding/construction business in Alaska...We have always had a few ghetto blasters around the job sites and a stereo with cassette player in the main shop...Job site condx in Alaska are dirty and always wet....The tapes get all the usual crap from a construction site on/in them as well as sand and bugs.....It is amazing how many of those old tapes the men still play ...some have had the labels missing for years and a hand scrawled title in magic marker written on top of the sheetrock mud or paint that got spilled on the cassette..Now, granted the fidelity is not the best, but the music plays...There is a copy of the White Album that has the corner melted down in a welding related incident that was playing in the machine yesterday...
Cassettes are tough..They may hiss and moan and scratch but they keep on playin'....

[Pete, WA2CWA]

The only recorder was an Akai 8-track.

Fred

Other manufacturers made 8-track recorders.

[W3GMS]

Yep, I have one made or at least sold by Lafayette Radio.  It still works good.  Martha's 73 Mustang Mach 1 still has the AM radio with 8 track player in it.  So its no problem making tapes for the  cruses.

Joe, GMS   

[Steve - K4HX]

My Victrola from 1915 still plays music. I doubt any hissettes or working players wil be around when they are almost 100 years old.   

[flintstone mop]

The only recorder was an Akai 8-track.

Fred

Other manufacturers made 8-track recorders.

I should have structured the sentence better. The only recorder I bought that was any good was an Akai. The rest were really bad. Especially the ones with auto-level features. Most recorded low audio on the tape and I always had to feed them with enough audio to keep the meters in the red. Bias settings were probably not correct
Fred

[WA3VJB]

My Victrola from 1915 still plays music. I doubt any hissettes or working players wil be around when they are almost 100 years old.  

I've seen that Victrola -- with the mechanical volume control !  Very cool.

I dunno about hissettes being around and playable in 100 years, but I've got tapes dating back about 60 years that play fine.

My Dad made some tape recordings when he was courtin' my Mom in the early 1950s, mood music, yeah.  He had a "WebCor" open reel machine, half track mono.  The tapes are acetate, very brittle, but the only risk is during high speed shuttle.  Dynamic braking, and a roll of splicing tape are good.

Machine is long gone, but I remember it looked something like this:



We had a late 1950s RCA furniture console in the living room, beautiful dark mahogany. The phonograph, AM/FM tuner and aux input drove a tube amplifier. Fairly strapping, as I recall. Lasted us through 1968 when we bought our first color TV, a furniture console from Sylvania. Solid state, but AM/FM, phono and TV all in one unit. My brother still has it as an artifact.

[KL7OF]

I have an AKAI reel to reel that has an 8 track in the side...able to transfer from reel to reel  to 8 track as well as full playback...Has 2 speakers built in to the wooden cabinet..Vietnam war era piece that came back from the war with a buddy of mine... ... I haven't played it for a few years

[Detroit47]

I have never stopped using tape. It just so happens I am an analogue device with stock analogue ears. I still use my Pioneer RT-909 with 10in reels. I am still stuck on tube audio also still using a MAC system with a MC240 amp and a C20 preamp.

[w3jn]

Cassettes are tough..They may hiss and moan and scratch but they keep on playin'....

And not so amazingly, they still sound better than MP3s.

[WQ9E]

I have an AKAI reel to reel that has an 8 track in the side...able to transfer from reel to reel  to 8 track as well as full playback...Has 2 speakers built in to the wooden cabinet..Vietnam war era piece that came back from the war with a buddy of mine... ... I haven't played it for a few years

Akai (also sold under Roberts) had some interesting combination units including a couple of models that provided reel, 8 track, and cassette to cover all bases.  I picked up a lightly used 1800SD with 8 track capability for $10 at a garage sale a few years ago.

But my favorite built in speaker Akai is the X-330 with twin 15 watt amplifiers and 10.5 inch reel capability.  I have one that spends a lot of time in the gazebo during nicer weather:  http://classicaudio.com/gallery/audio/akaiX330.html

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I still use my Astrocom Marlux auto-reverse machine. Lafayette bought their entire inventory which was in a storage warehouse somewhere in NY state for a number of years.

[Steve - K4HX]

I'm almost certain none of us will be around in 100 years. 

[WA3VJB]

I have an AKAI reel to reel that has an 8 track in the side...

Roberts sold that model as a 1725-8-LIII. I had one of them for a while.  Eventually bought a Roberts 771X, the successor to the tube type 770X. 

Put a lot of miles on it from brand-new. Woolco, a descendant of F.W.Woolworth's, had a display model that I bought in 1971 for $149. Even got the optional 15ips capstan sleeve and pinch roller, and a spare pack of felt oxide pellets that went into a sleeve on the supply side to catch dirt.

You can see it on the right side of the operating desk, circa 1977.

[flintstone mop]

I have an AKAI reel to reel that has an 8 track in the side...able to transfer from reel to reel  to 8 track as well as full playback...Has 2 speakers built in to the wooden cabinet..Vietnam war era piece that came back from the war with a buddy of mine... ... I haven't played it for a few years

Akai (also sold under Roberts) had some interesting combination units including a couple of models that provided reel, 8 track, and cassette to cover all bases.  I picked up a lightly used 1800SD with 8 track capability for $10 at a garage sale a few years ago.

But my favorite built in speaker Akai is the X-330 with twin 15 watt amplifiers and 10.5 inch reel capability.  I have one that spends a lot of time in the gazebo during nicer weather:  http://classicaudio.com/gallery/audio/akaiX330.html

COULD NOT beat the  X Field Heads. Cross Field.....Separate head for Bias and wonderful recordings.

[WA3VJB]

The automobile environment would take its toll after about a year's worth of riding around.

The automobile players and add-on units interpreted the Dolby stuff differently and the tape never sounded as it was recorded at home.

Fred

Hey Fred,

Maybe your car interior was more hostile than ours, but this weekend during spring cleaning I found a tape in Pam's car that she still plays, and it's OK fine ! 

I made it when a local radio station was in the midst of format and ownership instability, and I expected their "good" progressive programming would soon go away.  So I would take this tape deck, shown, drop a fresh tape in there, and hit REC to get their current playlist, flipping the tape when I would hear the automatic stop reach the end.

A couple of things noteworthy in the discussion.  The tape is part of a stock of "freebies" that were being mailed to me by Radio RSA when South Africa was under apartheid rule. Propaganda material disguised as cultural enlightenment.  I'd bulk-erase and reuse. 

The quality of the tape is average, regular bias, with okay-grade plastic that doesn't seem to have warped or distorted through many summers. We have had expensive high-bias tapes fare just as well.

The machine is monaural with no noise reduction, just a three-position bias selector.  Plenty of saturation and freq response, and I can't detect any transport speed flutter.

Today, what, 25+ years later, it's very cool to have a snapshot of what was on the radio at the time.  Songs you don't hear anymore, from bands who apparently went nowhere after that, and merchants that are long out of business.  I had no idea I would save this material for this long.