Cassettes Are Back, and It’s Not About the Music

[Zerimas]

My early cars didn't have synchromesh on 1st gear. I soon developed the art of heel-and-toe to downshift into 1st whilst braking up to intersections.

Now, who is old enough to regularly have driven cars with no synchromesh at all?

Takumi in Initial D is always doing the heel-and-toe downshifting whenever he drifts in his AE86. It my dream to one day master the art so I can feel like a total badass. Isn't going to happen. Although I feel he usually shifts in 2nd gear while cornering. I'd have to watch the show again. It is pretty sweet if you are total manchild like myself.

 

[Wombat]

Takumi in Initial D is always doing the heel-and-toe downshifting whenever he drifts in his AE86. It my dream to one day master the art so I can feel like a total badass. Isn't going to happen. Although I feel he usually shifts in 2nd gear while cornering. I'd have to watch the show again. It is pretty sweet if you are total manchild like myself.

Tip. Learn in someone else's car. Happy new gear.

 

[Zerimas]

Tip. Learn in someone else's car. Happy new gear.

I live in a village with ike 100 people. I haven't seen any cool cars. Although the family down the street owns a cool Volvo station wagon from the 90s. I've seen people on the internet drift in those. Unfortunately it is an automatic.

 

[watchnerd]

Takumi in Initial D is always doing the heel-and-toe downshifting whenever he drifts in his AE86. It my dream to one day master the art so I can feel like a total badass. Isn't going to happen. Although I feel he usually shifts in 2nd gear while cornering. I'd have to watch the show again. It is pretty sweet if you are total manchild like myself.

Back when I used to be more into motorsports, I learned to drift by joining a rally club.

Wasn't my car (thank goodness), and we'd go through a set of tires per day. Tires get expensive.

 

[Blumlein 88]

My early cars didn't have synchromesh on 1st gear. I soon developed the art of heel-and-toe to downshift into 1st whilst braking up to intersections.

Now, who is old enough to regularly have driven cars with no synchromesh at all?

I've driven them, but they were old cars.

Did you know early race cars had the gas pedal between brake and clutch pedal. It was to make heel and toe easy.

 

[StevenEleven]

Point A: I learned to drive period, and to drive a stick, on my step-father’s dilapidated Volkswagen Beatle. Someone stole it one night and they were so unimpressed with it they left in on its side in a neighbor’s front yard a few blocks away.

Point B: This is really tough to admit. This is really hard. I was into cassettes and then I turned to. . .to. . . Minidiscs.
Actually, they still play well today. I’ve sent a couple through the washer and drier and they still play. Try that with a cassette or an LP or a CD! You could just stick one in your back pocket because you wanted to listen to it later and forget about it and send it through the washer and drier. No worries! I made probably 200 or 300 recordings on them. They relied on the old Sony ATRAC codec which blew away cassettes but in time fell behind the other lossy codecs. The minidiscs themselves came in rainbow and candy colors. I still have extras.

I believe the Minidisc Community Portal was last updated in, um, well, let’s say it was a long time ago:
http://www.minidisc.org/

 

[Sal1950]

I've driven them, but they were old cars.

Yep, I just don't remember any more.
I vividly remember my 1956 Chevy had blown 2 gear syncros, before that my 52 Ford doesn't raise any memories of shifting issues. We had a 40 something Ford pickup on the farm that was a art to shift, period. LOL

 

[Blumlein 88]

Yep, I just don't remember any more.
I vividly remember my 1956 Chevy had blown 2 gear syncros, before that my 52 Ford doesn't raise any memories of shifting issues. We had a 40 something Ford pickup on the farm that was a art to shift, period. LOL

I don't remember which years were how. Even after synchros were available for a long time 1st and reverse weren't synchronized. If you always coasted to a stop before going to first, you might not notice it much. For a good while longer than the cars 3/4 ton or 1 ton and larger trucks didn't have synchro gear boxes.

One of my first real jobs was driving a 3/4 ton delivery truck in the 70's. It had a 3 speed transmission with a granny gear. Neither the granny nor 1st were syncrhonized. Always thought that a weird way to make it, but I drove it like it was nothing since such things weren't new to me.

 

[Zerimas]

Point A: I learned to drive period, and to drive a stick, on my step-father’s dilapidated Volkswagen Beatle. Someone stole it one night and they were so unimpressed with it they left in on its side in a neighbor’s front yard a few blocks away.

Point B: This is really tough to admit. This is really hard. I was into cassettes and then I turned to. . .to. . . Minidiscs.
Actually, they still play well today. I’ve sent a couple through the washer and drier and they still play. Try that with a cassette or an LP or a CD! You could just stick one in your back pocket because you wanted to listen to it later and forget about it and send it through the washer and drier. No worries! I made probably 200 or 300 recordings on them. They relied on the old Sony ATRAC codec which blew away cassettes but in time fell behind the other lossy codecs. The minidiscs themselves came in rainbow and candy colors. I still have extras.

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I believe the Minidisc Community Portal was last updated in, um, well, let’s say it was a long time ago:
http://www.minidisc.org/

Mindiscs were cool! I had a portable player as a kid just before iPods became a thing. In retrospect the sound quality sucked. It was because I was using mp3s downloads from Napster or whatever and then applying the most of lossy compression that Sony offered (because otherwise it wouldn't hold many songs).

They're actually an amazing piece of technology. The discs magneto-optical (however that exactly works). Anyways the portable player was also a burner. That means a tiny thing you could fit in your pocket would use a laser to heat the the bit of the disc to Curie point (1414°F) and then a magnetic field would alter the polarity. It used a laser to read stuff, but instead of pits and lands it had magnetic poles on this disc. Pretty freaking cool!

The fact that the sound quality wasn't greatest wasn't due to a flaw in the fundamental technology, but rather just the implementation. They did come out with "lossless" MD, but it was at the end of the life of the product, so no one cared. I bet they are pretty indestructible compared to other formats available at the time.