Anyone still listen to their cassettes?

[rage]

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? 

[jj]

I still enjoy it. Usually record my tapes when I play them and post the rips on soundcloud once they're edited. I use a Nakamichi DR-1 cassette deck for playing and recording them.

 

 

 

[rage]

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.

 

 

[Rich]

I once had about fifty odd packs dating from 1992 to 2003. As I got older they remained in a cardboard box which was never opened and just took up space. As more and more sets started to become available on Soundcloud due to good people like jj, I decided to get rid of them. I listed them on DnB Forum as free for collection and someone came and picked them up, said he was going to rip them to mp3 then vacuum pack them for long-term safe keeping.

I kept four of my favourite packs back which I still have on my bookshelf now.

This is probably my favourite pack, though I haven't listened to the actual cassettes for probably 15 years:

[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.