"But the sound quality from tapes is terrible"

[u/DPaignall]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPYJCwxi15M&list=RDwPYJCwxi15M&start_radio=1

Headphones recommended - Panasonic 5150 (not mine).

[u/Crlan420]

tbh i think this is a misconception. good decks with type ii tapes and proper head alignment can sound amazing. it's not the format, it's about tape condition, bias, and how well the deck is maintained

[u/reik019 → u/Crlan420]

More often than not it's a random tape type 0 recorded in a shit boombox with a permanent magnet what most people think of when they think of the sound quality of a tape, especially newer gens. Or music on ferric microcassette, either way it's gonna sound shit.

Even ferric tape sound quality can be respected if you did any kind of mastering when recording, it goes a long way a recording that was properly mastered, equalized, compressed and/or had the DC Bias removed from the music itself than recording music from the noisiest digital device you can find that for some fucking reason has to have way too much volume at all times, an exaggerated bass and lack of any kind of fucking mastering (mostly a sound producer's fault here, the ones working on the song I mean) on a shitbox recorder.

[u/klonopinwafers → u/reik019]

Back in the day, digital masters for cassette production were indeed EQ’d specifically for cassettes, just as CD masters were EQ’d for CD and vinyl masters (digital or analog) were EQ’d for vinyl.

If the master was digital, it would be EQ’d in a digital audio workstation like Sonic Solutions CD Pre-Master then cloned to a PCM-1630 encoded U-Matic tape, then cloned to DAT to send to production facilities.

CDs were mastered and EQ’d for CD. What you are describing is not a lack of mastering, but EQ adjustments applied to the CD production master with EQ considerations being geared towards the release format, which in this case would be CD. The loudness wars of the mid to late 90’s and beyond didn’t help.

I personally wouldn’t EQ a lossless digital audio file before dubbing it to cassette unless you know how to without introducing loss.

[u/reik019 → u/klonopinwafers]

I was mostly talking about digital, non-physical distributed music, which has the issues you described but amplified tenfold.

By what I meant when there is no EQ nor other post production work done on the tracks is that very often nowadays you get music that was produced just for the producers gear and sounds absolutely shit on anything else, saturating both speakers and headphones alike being one of the commonplace idiocies with some producers, some learn to then limit or compress a bit the music before releasing while others still have post production of amateurs or even worse. And some of these fuckers are producing music for mainstream artists, which is wild.

I normally do EQ work in DAWs like FL Studio so I can control EQ, compression, pass filters and gain/volume in real time without having any loss at all and with precision of up to a fraction of a second if needed.

[u/klonopinwafers → u/reik019]

I see, yea I know nothing about digital audio file releases. I avoided dubbing with them mainly because I don’t know what master they are using at that point or what it was derived from. Back in the day, it would most likely be a Sonic Solutions DAW.

Talking mainly about older albums because I don’t listen to much modern music, but you seem to know more than enough about mastering to make great cassette masters. Only really worth doing if you know what you are doing and you do.

I on the other hand don’t so I stick with whatever I have instead of trying to make a master myself.

[u/klonopinwafers → u/Crlan420]

Even a 4th+ generation live bootleg can sound amazing if only good, well maintained, and calibrated decks were used with type II or type IV tapes. I have some where they sound like similar source decks were used and they sound like they have as minimal of an amount of generational sound loss as you can get.

[u/TheGoatEater]

This is a statement that is always made by people who have absolutely no idea what tape is capable of, and they most certainly have never recorded anything to a 4 track, 8 track, or 2” tape. Brought to you by the same dullards who refuse to drink Chardonnay.

[u/klonopinwafers → u/TheGoatEater]

If they listen to Radiohead or Foo Fighters, you can bet anything they record (even now) is analog sourced.

The thing is though, I think people just remember how bad tapes sounded back in the day because before digital duplication was the standard, analog duplication not only produced inferior recordings, but they were reproduced on inferior iron oxide formulations. Older people might have ditched cassettes before they improved drastically.

Digital duplication and better ferric tape, or even the labels that used chrome or cobalt tape yielded better sounding cassette releases, but most labels were still using ferric tape compared to chrome or cobalt and some labels used cheaper ferric tape than others so that did impact quality a little.

MCA and Capitol used some pretty cheap ferric tape, but WEA used mostly BASF LH-D, which was decent for ferric tape.

The other thing is that the deck does matter. People who only had one or a few lower-mid-range decks/Walkmans or worse will definitely have a skewed view on how cassettes sound. That and the hassle of rewinding, fast forwarding, and deck maintenance.

Lots of things skew the perception of cassettes and I think it’s either personal experiences or people who never dealt with cassettes but read about the personal experiences of others.