Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , tony sayer

wrote:
In article , Jim Lesurf jcgl@st-
and.demon.co.uk writes

Well, I found that many of the cassette recordings of R3 concerts sound
far better to me than many LPs I'd bought. They also sound preferable
to having no recording of many of the performances.

As I now transfer some of them onto CDR I remain pleased that I decided
to buy a cassette recorder and use it, all those years ago. :-)


I remember many years ago at one of the hi-fi exhibitions in the 70's
there was a cassette recorder playing some stuff recorded by Angus
McKenzie, remember him?,

Indeed, yes. :-)

sounded superb, and to this day I still couldn't believe that you could
get such quality out of a cassette format.

Mind you the application of the Dolby A equipment might have had
something to do with it!.....

Well, I first bought a cassette recorder back in 1981. Until then I'd used
a reel-to-reel but found the tapes to be too expensive and space-consuming
for me to make as many recordings as I wanted. I was quite shocked by how
good a careful recording from Radio 3 could be. Yes, it did have drawbacks
which were noticable at times, but easily good enough to simply sit back
and enjoy the results. (Although I must confess that I opened up the deck
and adjusted it to get optimal behaviour. Something with Angus would also
probably have done.)

Alas, the situation with pre-recorded cassettes tended to be very
different. Most of those I tried sounded poor or dire.

Slainte,

Jim

I too found that cassette was a very usable medium provided the machine
was aligned for the tape being used, and one stuck to one type. My
Nakamichi 482Z was capable of making recordings which were
indistinguishable from the source (CD) for rock music, and only barely
distinguishable for classical music where the noise floor was a little
higher, as, in order to keep distortion down, it was necessary to keep
recording levels down to peak at Dolby Level (0dB-200mM/mm) . Dolby C
was a great help, as was using metal tape but the machine had to be
exquisitely aligned for Dolby C to work properly. Unfortunately, TDK,
Maxell etc would keep bringing out new "improved" tape formulations, and
all the settings had to be redone. Nevertheless, I don't think I had
better recordings until CD-R came along. They were certainly better than
my earlier Revox A77 even at 15ips.

I agree that pre-recorded cassettes were dire. I once bought Mike
Oldield Crisis on cassette, and ended up borrowing the CD and taping it
myself. That way, I have the original box and a decent recording.

S.