An interesting comparison of old vs. new:

iPod vs. Cassette Tape

Heh... funny

I think it's more than 5 years now since I last used a cassette tape. I still keep them in a huge box in my basement though (I've got about 1000 of them)!

Very nice comparison.

Luckily I'm too young to have spent much on cassettes.

Very interesting indeed. Sort of makes you wonder: music used to be so cheap to carry around and record (with cassettes), and is now quite expensive if you go the iPod route. For those of us pursuing advanced degrees, $300+ is a bit much to be spending on something that plays music! Probably why I still use minidiscs and tapes in my car...CD's don't hold enough music and are too fragile for screwing around with around when you're going 120kph on the interstate.

Here's something to think about: for those of us who are 25 or older, we have probably spent more time around cassettes than any other format. I bought my first LP around 1982, and have tapes going back to the early/mid 80's as well. CD's didn't come into my collection until late 1995!

I must say that I'm 27 and finally own more stuff on CD than cassette (doesn't count the hundreds of mix tapes). Granted, alot of the cd's are stuff I had on cassette.

Same here, although it took me much longer to amass more CD's than LP's as opposed to cassettes. Most of my tapes were home-recorded copies of LP's or the radio, etc., so they were pitched as soon as I bought the CD versions. (Or banished to the car).

Gotta say, those cassettes are pretty durable if they have lasted me this long. I'd like to see somebody drop an iPod on the concrete

its funny because its true

Amusing comparison.

I used to use cassette tapes all the time when I was younger and had a portable cassette player. I'd record my CDs to cassette tapes to take with me on the road. But once I got my first portable CD player I stopped using cassettes and have since to use them. Now I have an iPod and don't even use my portable CD player. So now AAC/iPod is my portable format

Should have added WinMX + 50c CD-R's + $50 MP3 Discman vs iPod

Funny comparison. Makes you think...

Got the first cassette player in '69...
Some albums I bought on Cassette, LP and CD...
Oh Boy, the record companies must have been laughing all the way to the bank back then.

Now that the MP3-players are gaining momemtum the major electronic shops in Denmark are heavily discounting MD as they want to discontinue MD.

Thats one format I did not change to, saved me a bundle.

Just goes to show that using "old" and "reliable" technology takes you a long way on a low budget.

Now I am transferring my CD's and best tapes to PC.

Happy user of ITMS and iPod now.

Funny, however alot of it's true.

I don't own an iPod but with most electronics I would only expect it to last roughly 2 to 5 years. The strange thing is I have an old Sony portable cassette player that is approximately 17 years old, it has been dropped so many times I lost count, and the thing still works today.

Cassettes are surprising very durable for a magnetic erasable medium. When I transferred all of my old cassettes to my PC only one of them was showed signs of wear, but then again I listened to that one very often, all of the others sounded fine.

to me, the most annoyable fact about tapes always was, that i couldn't select a certain track directly for playing - and instead had to fastforward/-backward to find them. If there would have been an easy (and fast) way to access titles directly on a tape, i would probably never have changed to CDs.

(yes, i know that there are some players which have a "scan"-function to search for silence)

Anyways - something along the size of a minidisc, but protected in a case(like 3,5" floppy-disks) should be quite durable and protect from most "accidents" which cause scratches.

The problem with hdd-based players is that you cannot "swap" the storage-medium on-the-road easily - a disc on the other hand is easily exchangable - but it has other problems like shock-resistance.

- Lyx

Nice.

Once upon a time (1987 - 1998) I recorded all my music from Systemdek IIX to Sony WMD6C ('Walkman Pro.'). For mobile listening I used a WM-D33 (still use it sometimes).

All analogue, mostly.

Halcyon days.

R.

I can't say I had too many cassettes but that is funny. A very "scientific" comparison lol

I swear a professional cassette (chrome, metal, etc none of those supermarket crap) , recorded with a professional cassette deck sounds better than most mp3 at 128 kbps.

GoaTrancer, this discussion board is not like other discussion boards. This one entierely devoted to "audio based on proofs".
Please read the TOS n°8, and FAQ to know what it is about (ABX blind tests..).
We can't take your comment into account unless you back it up with blind listening tests whose statistic signifiance is over 95 %.

Hmm, doing an mp3@128kbps vs high quility cassette ABX test is not a bad idea.
I might just be crazy enough to do that

ironic that the page was created with .mac

funny none the less.

I remember that me and some friends of mine once (must have been 1991 or 1992) performed a blind test (with pen and paper btw) using CDDA-Sources vs. properly-calibrated high-quality compact cassette tape recordings (mostly TDK SA-XS IIRC) on decent tape decks (the cheapest one in this test was a Pioneer CT-757) just for the fun of it.

It was very interesting to see that all of us failed to reliably distinguish between CD and a properly recorded cassette (using Dolby C or Dolby S if available) on not-too-expensive listening equipment with mostly popular music ...

Right now I'm digitising cassette tapes going back to the early 70's so that I can use my iPod to get all nostalgic.
Great fun I have to admit and quality really quite good.

auldyin

Me too
However, technically, it is not obvious. A good start would be ABXing an MP3 from a cassette and an MP3 from CD. Let's use the MP3 settings chosen for Roberto's last test. Then we can ABX cassettes copied from MP3 and CDs. Using the program that randomizes wav files, we can get a bunch of files, some being from MP3, the others from CD, and record them all on a cassette.

Oh, and I've got a killer sample for cassette too
I've got a TDK MA-XG and a Sony Metal Master, but they are old and must suffer from drop outs now (new, they both had drop outs for the first minute of each side). If some peple are really interested, I could buy a new MA-XG for testing.

I have to be honest I spent more than 300 dollars on a couple of my cassette walkmans, my first minidisc player was only just more expensive than my last cassette walkman (£270 compared to £240) and my first and only so far personal mp3 hard drive player was cheaper than both of them at £185 inc delivery. (iriver h120)

I'm 29 and pre-recorded tapes were never a great part of my collection, I think I only have 2 or 3 albums on tape and a couple of singles. Have lots and lots of cd's, think I must have got a cd player much earlier than you, not long after the first time I saw one.