Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 12:40:09 PM

Login with username, password and session length

"A what pod?" (Or, Being stubbornly old-fashioned when it comes to new technology)

Started by Emergency Lalla Ward Ten, April 16, 2005, 04:59:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Do you still use cassettes?

Yes, it's nature's way
20 (31.7%)
No, I'm from space
43 (68.3%)

Total Members Voted: 63

Voting closed: April 16, 2005, 05:08:07 PM

Consignia

Well, to be fair, most schools don't have typewriters, and you can cripple the word processor programs so they don't much text editing facilities. Anyway, it's much more difficult to pour ideas into a computer than onto a piece of paper, so it's advantages and disadvantages over handwritten put it about equal.

Saturday Boy

I love the sound of Vinyl, and the way it feels and smells and all that. I think CDs are horrible and clinical. I also think that Cassettes are nasty little things. Imagine a world without CD or Vinyl though. What would singles go on, Cassettes? The Cassette single was the most ugly creation of human society.

I'm all for sticking with lovely and valuable past creations and not "upgrading" to horrible new things (The Amiga 500+, Windows Media Player 10, quadrophonic sound, e-books, plastic flowers), but:

It seems that a lot of the luddites here are just being wilfully "stuck-in-the-past", for ideological rather than practical reasons.. They whing about modern technology and claim ignorance of iPods and whatnot, but at the same time have (possibly) downloaded gigabytes of Morris mp3s, Comedy Programs, etc. The sort of things that would be available to far fewer people, often in a far muddier and more complicated format otherwise.

Adrian Brezhnev

Yes, and with a decent pair of headphones (like mid-range Sennheisers), these devices sound absolutely brilliant, even the cheapest ones.

Unlike cassette tape walkmans, where a dodgy source signal will always mean second-rate listening, whatever headphones you use.

Saturday Boy

I always used the PAUSE button for click-free mixtapes. Sometimes when I forgot I redid the tapes. I had prototype mixtapes around the house which I listened to and I realised that "that song just doesn't fit".

Nowadays I compile a setlist in Winamp and listen to it through a good couple of times, I switch the songs around, and so on.

If the song segues in from the previous one, I remember to edit out the two-second silence between tracks. I design covers, I do a proper tracklisting.

I still put the effort in, just in different ways, and if getting it together makes it easier... so what?. If I want to show my love to someone I can make them a Mix CD much quicker than a cassette, If I want them to know I've slaved over it, I'll include a small sachet of my blood, tears and other bodily fluids to "prove" the effort and thought involved.


(sorry for splitting the post, my computer seems to be having troubles with the long one... damn technology!)

Peking O

Quote from: "Saturday Boy"The Cassette single was the most ugly creation of human society.

...and was also known by no one (other than a few industry types) as the "cassingle".

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

I'd have to buy a completely new pc if I wanted to start downloading, ripping and burning - this FUCKING THING I'm on now wouldn't be able to handle it. Once I get a few debts paid off, I'll be in there...and be strangely excited about things everyone else took for granted about eight years ago.

Anyone ever edited quarter-inch tape using a razor blade? One of the most therapeutic things you can ever do. Almost completely outmoded now, but I still reckon it should be taught on editing courses - it teaches you certain editing skills you can't acquire with a computer (mainly the skill of listening intently to the sound you're physically holding in your hands, the knowledge that a cut can't be reinstated easily meaning that you 'respect' the recording more...which may be romanticism, but fuck it). I think this way about cassette compilations - the fact that you couldn't go back and rearrange stuff meant that you put more effort into the edits at the time. Well I did anyway.

I did buy a radio/cassette player a couple of years ago (for around £35) and was quite taken aback by how hissy the recordings were. Someone correct me, but I'm sure radio/cassette players of equivalent price in the 1980s/early 90s used to record stuff pretty decently didn't they? The same thing happened to turntables in the late 80s - a decent turntable used to be pretty standard, but when midi systems came in they became cheap and nasty.

I'm sure prerecorded cassettes got worse too. An old prerecorded tape from about 20/25 years ago will usually still be OK, but by the mid 90s (if my battered cassette copy of Dog Man Star is anything to go by) they were getting pretty rotten.

Saturday Boy

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"Once I get a few debts paid off, I'll be in there...and be strangely excited about things everyone else took for granted about eight years ago.

It's definitely worth it. I only got a computer with internet access in 2001, and didn't get a broadband connection till I started University for the second time in 2002. It has changed my life in a much larger way than I would've anticipated.

Saturday Boy

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"
I did buy a radio/cassette player a couple of years ago ...


Was it a comparable price in today's money though?

I used to have a nasty midi-system in my teens, god forgive me, but when I got my first job the first thing I bought were some simple (and cheap) low-end seperates, and the sound quality was so much better. Incidentally, that was when I stopped listening to cassettes. I simply didn't have a means of playing them anymore. I didn't see the point in shelling out on a tape player when I didn't buy pre-recorded cassettes, and knew I'd get my hands on a CD burner in year or two.


(Again, apologies for the split-post. I had bittorrent running all night and I think it's screwed with the speed of my connection, so I'm going to go restart)

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

Quote from: "Saturday Boy"Incidentally, that was when I stopped listening to cassettes. I simply didn't have a means of playing them anymore. I didn't see the point in shelling out on a tape player when I didn't buy pre-recorded cassettes, and knew I'd get my hands on a CD burner in year or two.

What about transferring old cassette material onto CD - do you do that?

Lt Plonker

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"I remember at my primary school you were allowed to graduate from writing in pencil to writing in pen *only* if your handwriting was neat. I wonder if that still hapens?

We had that! I remember the day well. I was so chuffed and excited to have earned my pen, that I ended up making lots of mistakes on my poem about Moses. I was clever though, and stuck some paper over the mistake.

chand

Quote from: "Saturday Boy"Cassettes reliable? I'm twenty-two, so I have used the things. The number that got mangled in the sort of tape-recorder or cheap walkman a 13 year old could afford was infuiriating.

I used to tape a lot of live gigs off the radio. One year I took my 5 or 6 favourite tapes with me on holiday and my walkman mangled every single fucking one of them. I only have one or two audio cassettes from my young teenage years left now, the rest are all snapped or twisted and in one case melted (though to be fair you can probably melt a CD too if you left it under a hot bulb).

Anyway, yeah, fuck tapes really. I do very occasionally tape stuff off the radio, the last thing was a Peel session by Themselves last year or something.

Saturday Boy

Quote from: "Emergency Lalla Ward Ten"
Quote from: "Saturday Boy"Incidentally, that was when I stopped listening to cassettes. I simply didn't have a means of playing them anymore. I didn't see the point in shelling out on a tape player when I didn't buy pre-recorded cassettes, and knew I'd get my hands on a CD burner in year or two.

What about transferring old cassette material onto CD - do you do that?

Nope.... Pre-recorded albums I either buy again, or download (with a view to buying, usually when they reissue the damn things).

I've got a bunch of tapes in London that I'll probably never listen to again, including the odd radio session I'd love to convert if I had the knowhow, energy, and technology.