How About Creating a Modern Cassette Player?

[Billy Budapest]

Really? I still remember the painful process of recording tapes from vinyl, fussing with level matching and hyper-vigilance trying to stop the tape at the exact end of track moment, then cueing the tone arm and hitting record at the precisely correct moment to avoid pops and crackles when the needle hits the disk. Now I just copy my flac library to usb. Not going back.

I seriously doubt I will record anything to tape ever again, but I need something to play back tapes that have no digital equivalent. That’s what I use my Nakamichi BX-150 for.

 

[DavidEdwinAston]

I wonder if I could get my 1985 CR7 serviced?
Presumably you could do it John, if I can get it to Oz?

 

[sunjam]

I love all these vintage walkman. I bought a Sony DC-6 a few years ago too.

However, my concerns are

1. where can we find quality content on cassette tapes?
2. It is same for blank cassette tapes. Not easily available.

Once the media issue is fixed (which I don't think it is possible), I am more than happy to get a new 2024 "walkman" from you guys.

I still remember the old days of playing around with Dolby B, C

 

[Robin L]

I still remember the old days of playing around with Dolby B, C

I remember playing around with Dolby B, C and DBX and preferring Metal tape without any noise reduction. Had one three head, dual capstan Yamaha deck that could really push levels when recording. The meters would be fully in the red, but the recording wasn't distorting at all when I was using metal tape. A lot of the musicians I made cassettes for preferred TDK SA without noise reduction as they could easily hear the way Dolby messed with dynamics. I took a Walkman Pro to concerts I was recording, could give the artists a cassette at the end of the concert. Remember, tapes recorded with Dolby on one machine won't properly play back on another machine. I made hundreds of cassettes because I was a freelance audio engineer. Cassettes never were all that good anyway, noisy with wow and flutter. I got caught on the bleeding edge of recordable music CDs around 1996, but around ten years later recordable music CDs got a lot easier, thanks in part to ITunes. Made a lot of those for people who had LPs they couldn't play. But now, thanks to streaming, nobody really wants CDs anymore.

 

[Billy Budapest]

I wonder if I could get my 1985 CR7 serviced?
Presumably you could do it John, if I can get it to Oz?

The CR-7 is one of the best performing tape decks ever made. I would certainly get it serviced if I were you. There have got to be Nak techs in Australia that could do it.

 

[mjgraves]

Everything I had on cassette was copied to MD or files long ago. MD was a rational replacement for cassette. Digital. Durable. Random access. Vastly better sounding than any cassette deck I ever encountered.