So a few months back I bought a turntable and now I’ve technologically regressed even deeper–Cassette tapes!
Okay, okay, there’s an explanation for this. I’ve been really digging on the finds I’ve been picking up in the local $0.97 record bins (seriously, 97 cents!) and accordingly looking for a way to share them with some fellow funk and soul addict friends of mine. My buddy Bill has recently acquired a boat. I’ll be heading back home to Wisconsin for a week in mid-August and we’re gonna go out for a day on the lake. I asked him, what kind of musical playback formats does your nautical stereo accept? The answer – cassette tapes, dogg.
Jeez, cassette, wow. I’m not sure I remember the last time I used a cassette tape, or recorded one. I think it’s been since like junior high. Well over a decade, whatever it was. So I needed to dig up a cassette recording device to bring along some hot jams I excavated from dusty 1970s vinyl obscurity. Enter craigslist! Some dude was unloading this NAD 6130 tape recorder which belonged to his father-in-law who recently passed on. Like a lot of good transactions on CL, the vibe I got from him was pretty much, ‘whatever man, I don’t care what this is, just get it out of here’. That’s the attitude I’m looking for! Twenty bucks, yeah that sounds cool.
Kind of a funny thing about reading up on the Dolby NRs; I learned that there are a lot of variations in cassette tape technology! There’s Dolby A and B types of noise reduction, and then there’s Dolby C, which actually sounds WORSE if you play it back on a deck that doesn’t support Dolby C. There’s different types of cassettes too, metal ones, ferric oxide ones, Type II, etc. Whoa. This is all way more complicated than I expected. Fortunately, thanks to it’s utter obsolecence, I was able to pick up a Cadillac of a cassette recorder that should handle all of the above for dirt cheap! Yay antiquated technology! Check out the green reel to reel style cassette loaded in :D
Tags: audio hardware, cassette, gadgets, loudspeakers, Music, retro, technology
NADs are pretty nice. Especially the name. I always wanted to find one of these, which is supposedly the pinnacle of cassette technology:
http://market.classic-audio.com/NAKAMICH-DRAGON
Uber-badass. I used to make all sorts of mixtapes, and I’d take the cassettes apart to paint the shells different colors, then spend 40 minutes doing the labels. Oh, and go for metal. They hold up great! :) I used to use maxwell metal tapes, I forget the exact model, but they were very “heavy”, and tended to last longer than other brands.
Hah, wheeeew, that Dragon is a lotta tape deck alright. 3000 EUROS worth! I can think of a few better uses for five large, or whatever that converts to these days… Still. Something to be said for being the top of the heap. On the same token, I’d kinda like to get an AMD Athlon FX-60, which was the fastest chip ever made for socket 939, Mr. Euclid’s SEVERELY outdated processor socket. It’d be kinda cool to be like, heh, this was teh FASTEST EVAARRRR!