rage

Sorry for the late reply Rich! That’s a dope looking pack and very kind of you to give away the ones you didn’t want. I recently dug out my Helter Skelter Decadance pack that hasn’t been played in forever and the Andy C set won’t play, on one deck the tape just stops once it gets past the leader and on another it’s really struggling, the tape looks perfect and winds ok so it seems to be the felt pad gripping onto the tape when it plays for some reason.

Nice man that’s a sweet deck! Nakamichi made some beauties, really sought after these days. I’ve got a Technics and also an old Sansui which has a bit of wow and flutter so need to fix the belts on. Yeah maybe I should upload mine to SoundCloud too. I ripped all my tapes 15 or so years ago and many of them are on YouTube etc but at 128 / 256k as we were kind of restricted for file size back then. I like the idea of recording mixes I find online back to cassette but I’d rather not use lossy files if I can help it.

Something interesting about these. Notice they’re marked Chrome, something I always assumed to be a fib as the notches are like a Type 1, but the sound quality on all of the Swing tapes was always second to none so something was up. I’ve since learned that if a duplicator uses Chrome tape but records it with a Type 1 setting you still get 99% of the sound quality benefits of using Chrome tape while still being compatible with even the most basic of decks. Towards the end of the 80s some of the major labels started making tapes this way. A cassette that uses a true Chrome formulation such as a BASF Chrome Super has a very distinctive smell, like a wax crayon. When I was recently playing my Phantasy tape I gave it a sniff and sure enough these cassettes have that exact same smell so they are genuine Chromes just like they promised, likely using BASF tape as I believe they were the only ones still manufacturing pure Chrome at that time.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying extremely distorted but yeah there’s some distortion on both sides. Doesn’t ruin the experience though, there’s a ton of bass and all round it sounds great.

Recently I’ve been playing through some of my original cassettes, unfortunately I only have small fraction left of what I had in 93 so very rarely play them but it’s really enjoyable listening to them in their original form. It almost feels like a special event, like I should be at least recording it or streaming it or something, they’re getting older and more fragile and any play could be their last. My DJ Sy @ Obsession 3rd Dimension has definitely seen better days! With the abundance of lossy rips available online it would be great to create some kind of museum of WAV quality original tape rips while we still can. When I look on discogs generally only a few seem to have the originals of any particular cassette. Anyone else still enjoy doing this, and what are you listening on?

Easy everyone! Great to see RDB is back, as a long time lurker before it went down can I say a massive thank you to the peeps that made all the tracklists, they’ve been so helpful over the years.