07-17-2018, 02:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2018, 02:59 PM by Mattias Westlund.)
I'm not stating this as a fact, but at least I've gotten the impression that a lot of younger "music producers" -- I hate that term, but that's what they call themselves -- appear to think that the tape sound = cassette tape. When really the only type of tape you should be emulating when mixing is high quality 1" (or similar) analog studio tape from decades past. Those things were very clean, very low noise, but had some characteristics that might be desirable in the digital medium i.e. some slight warmth when hit with a hot signal (tape compression).
The cassette tape sound was not anything you actually desired back in the day. Thinking back to my teens in the late 1980's it was widely agreed among everyone I knew who listened to music that cassette tape was an inferior format to both vinyl and CD. But if you wanted to copy an album from a friend, make a mixtape, or listen to music on the go, you had to live with the drawbacks. Such as hiss, wow and flutter, and the ever present risk of some cheap compact stereo or walkman deciding to turn your tape into salad. Sure, there were high quality cassettes too, like chrome tape etc, and Dolby noise reduction, so you COULD make tape sound almost as good as a CD. But only higher end decks supported any of that, and those were pretty uncommon among kids who had to make do with what they could save up for themselves or what they got for Christmas. So I definitely don't feel any cassette tape nostalgia. Good riddance, I say!
Also, it should be noted that tapes manufactured today are of much lower quality than ones from the 80's and 90's. Today it's just the standard brown ferric tape since there are very few tape manufacturing plants left, and none of them have the capacity to make metal tape. Plus that few if any non-audiophile tape decks made in recent years support metal tape or any of the bells and whistles of older decks. So even if you have an album on high quality tape from 30 years ago, modern tape-playing equipment will not be able to take advantage of that quality anyway.
The cassette tape sound was not anything you actually desired back in the day. Thinking back to my teens in the late 1980's it was widely agreed among everyone I knew who listened to music that cassette tape was an inferior format to both vinyl and CD. But if you wanted to copy an album from a friend, make a mixtape, or listen to music on the go, you had to live with the drawbacks. Such as hiss, wow and flutter, and the ever present risk of some cheap compact stereo or walkman deciding to turn your tape into salad. Sure, there were high quality cassettes too, like chrome tape etc, and Dolby noise reduction, so you COULD make tape sound almost as good as a CD. But only higher end decks supported any of that, and those were pretty uncommon among kids who had to make do with what they could save up for themselves or what they got for Christmas. So I definitely don't feel any cassette tape nostalgia. Good riddance, I say!
Also, it should be noted that tapes manufactured today are of much lower quality than ones from the 80's and 90's. Today it's just the standard brown ferric tape since there are very few tape manufacturing plants left, and none of them have the capacity to make metal tape. Plus that few if any non-audiophile tape decks made in recent years support metal tape or any of the bells and whistles of older decks. So even if you have an album on high quality tape from 30 years ago, modern tape-playing equipment will not be able to take advantage of that quality anyway.
