Despite the 21st Century romanticism on how
better cassette tapes are in comparison to CDs, MP3s and other digital mass
music media, are cassette tapes just “too fragile” to be a hi-fi audio medium?
By: Ringo Bones
Romanticism and a rose-tinted view of the heyday of the
cassette tape had been on the up-rise on every social media network since the
first decade of the 21st Century that sometimes I wonder if these
people were actually there first hand – as working musicians and amateur
musicians – with only expensive and fragile cassette tape recordings to fall
back into when rehearsing for their respective cover-song. Maybe I’ll just
ramble yet again on my “bad experiences” of the cassette tape during the 1980s
up to the early 1990s.
Unlike those CD transports found in cheap boom-boxes and table-top
AM/FM cassette recorders of the 1990s, tape transports found in these devices
tend to eat cassette tapes. Although cleaning with 90-percent isopropyl alcohol
on top-flight cassette tape decks, especially the capstan and rubber pinch-rollers
on a regular basis means that cassette tapes being eaten on reasonable quality
hi-fi decks are an extreme rarity, cheap boom-box CD transports are not known
to damage CDs with their “overactive” ultraviolet lasers.
Another cassette tape
– in fact every magnetic recording tape as well - weakness is that when they
are exposed to a sufficiently powerful magnetic field, they tend to go dull
that is they loose their high-frequency response. This problem is often
experienced by electric guitar and electric bass players where a cassette tape
copy of the song they are supposed to rehearse is tossed in the electric guitar
case or bass guitar case causing the recording to become dull and some parts to
drop-off or be erased completely upon exposure to the powerful magnets of
electric guitar pickups or bass guitar pickups. Open-reel tapes – as in master
tapes of bands whose budgets allow them to work on one - in transit often avoid
this problem by being stored in a mild-steel case that acts as a magnetic
shield to prevent dulling and erasure of high frequency signals – i.e. cymbals
and lead guitar parts – but when was the last time you’ve seen a cassette tape
housed in a magnetically shielded mild-steel housing and case?
