C30, C60, C90 ...Gone?

9:59 AM GMT 25/04/2008

"CD-R? schmeeD-R!" MOJO's Stevie Chick mourns the passing of the humble cassette tape.

WHEN THE INEXORABLE rise of the Compact Disk finally lifted the stylus on the vinyl records market toward the end of the 20th Century, record collectors let loose a collective howl of anguish. The slow decline of the Compact Audio Cassette has evoked a more muted response, and yet we shouldn't forget the impact tapes have had on music culture.

True, tapes never really supplanted vinyl in music lovers' affections. The lush artwork that graced a 12" album cover was diminished when shrunk to cassette size, while a Hawkwind vinyl gatefold sleeve, say, made a better surface for rolling joints. Cassettes never sounded as good as vinyl, occasional pop and crackle preferable to muffled high-end and tape hiss. You couldn't skip to a preferred song with the ease of picking up and dropping the needle. And cassettes were shockingly vulnerable, to heat, moisture and magnets, the spools of tape often chewed up in the gears of a malfunctioning cassette deck.

Tape's USP was that it was portable, and you could record on it, freeing car stereos from the tyranny of the radio DJ, and enabling consumers to duplicate their record collection – or, indeed, a friend's record collection, thus unwittingly initiating the death of the Record Industry.

Manufacturers cannily fetishised such acts of piracy, marketing a myriad variety of cassettes, in black, coloured or transparent plastic, daubed with logos and decals and bewildering-but-impressive techno mumbo-jumbo like ‘HIGH BIAS', ‘EPITAXIAL' and ‘ANTI-RESONANCE CONSTRUCTION'. If you were serious about your taping, you always bought Chrome or Metal cassettes, never employed "High-Speed Dubbing" and never ever used C120s, which were prone to stretching.

Home Taping Was Killing Music, the Record Industry claimed, but the opposite was true. The increased portability of cassette recorders aided the efforts of the bootleggers who, in the 1970s, risked a roughing-up by Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant if caught taping the Zep. Many now, however, are grateful for the bootleggers' illicit activities, and the archives of demos and live performances they have furtively preserved.

Home Taping was, in fact, democratizing the Record Industry. Affordable 4-track cassette recorders turned every musician's bedroom into a studio, Lo-Fi pioneers Robert Pollard and Lou Barlow waxing rhapsodic over 4-track's warm, fuzzy sound. Tape-to-tape recorders served as pressing plants for a cottage industry of DIY cassette-only labels, selling via mail order or West London's Rough Trade shop. Subterranean genres like industrial, grindcore and lo-fi flourished in this hermetic, anarchic market, while DJ-produced mix-tapes have long been a staple of Hip Hop culture.

The home-made mix-tape was, however, the cassette's most endearing and enduring gift to pop. The mix-tape turned us all into radio programmers, forcing our favourite songs upon our friends via painstakingly compiled and decorated cassettes that celebrated our uniquely wonderful taste in music, or expressed our feelings via the medium of other peoples' songs. CD-Rs sound "better," perhaps, but an actual mix-tape – where the compiler has had to sit and listen to every song as they taped it for you – offers a wholly more intimate experience than simply clicking and dragging some mp3s in iTunes.

The cassette tape finally ran afoul of the capstans and cogs of fate with the arrival of affordable CD Walkmans and domestic CD-R hardware, its USP not quite so Unique anymore. Some cassette-only labels survive, esoteric operations like Noise label American Tapes, whose releases come encased in squashed paint-cans and found-art sculptures. Mostly, though, tapes are relics of a past age adorning hip twentysomethings' apparel and accessories, fetishised with a mixture of irony and nostalgia, as Baby Boomers eulogized the 8-Track Cartridge a decade before them. Consider it a most pop-cultural form of immortality.

Stevie Chick

PS. Tape-fans may enjoy this cassette-porn, and are highly recommended to peruse Thurston Moore's affectionate 2005 tome, Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture (Universe Publishing)

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 9:59 AM GMT 25/04/2008

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Is still use a tascam 4 track cassete recorder to make demos from the tracks I compose, and despite a little bit of noise, I like it a lot. then I pass the mix to wav in a computer and that´s all.

I may buy a digital multitrack recorder beacuse I´m not a great fan of standing in from of a screen the whole time, it tires my head..

My car has cd and tape, and I still record from vinyl to tape and make mixtapes (I was born in 1977)

My ipod battery gets shorter time working each day, it´s a piece of stuff that does not last more than 2-3 years I think and I´m going back to my old walkman with good headphones that has been working for 15 years perfectly

Posted by Tito - spain at 12:53 PM GMT 25/04/2008 Report Abuse

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Something you forgot to mention was the "exclusive" tracks or extended versions available only on cassette. (Best example was the extended version of the David Byrne/Twyla Tharp "The Catherine Wheel")This was done, of course, to try and hasten the demise of the LP.

There were other interesting spinoffs of cassette culture such as SFX - an audio "magazine" that featured interviews, reviews, and excerpts of new music. Remember "From Brussels With Love" - an eclectic mix of music originally on cassette with a booklet from the Crepuscule label - Thomas Dolby, Michael Nyman, Durutti Column, Gavin Bryars, Bill Nelson, plus an interview with Brian Eno.

There was a realy cool promotion only cassette of Bruce Springsteen B sides called Boss B's. Think there was something similar for the Rolling Stones. Please a short lived Beatle's compilation made to promote Henieken beer.

Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" coloured vinyl LP was matched with a coloured vinyl cassette (at least in Canada).

I've got an album preview cassette from the Odds in which they play a few seconds of the key tracks from their upcoming album, mixed with commentary from the band.

The cassette had been the poor cousin of the 8 track (and 4 track) cartridge. Serious audiophiles wanted their pre-recorded music on open reel. The 8 track was an attempt to make 1/4" open reel tape portable. The humble cassette ran at half the speed of an 8 track and on half the width of tape - sound quality was seriously compromised. It took chromium dioxide tape and Nakamichi to upgrade the audio pedigree of the cassette to rival that of the 8 track. (I recall the Nakamichi cassette deck producing specs rivalling that of Revox 1/4" tape deck at 3-3/4 IPS in one High Fidelity magazine producxt review.) A few years later high end cassette decks had replaced open reel as the preferred home stereo recording technology.

But the audio quality of pre-recorded cassettes lagged well behind that of the 8 track cartridge. That and crap packaging that provided little of no information other than a reduced cover graphic.

Then Sony brought forth the Walkman. And it was good - so good that it showed up deficiencies of pre-recorded tape.

EMI was the first to respond with XDR formulated tape and better mastering - Billy Idol was given the honour of being the first cassette to be released in the new sonically improved format. Listening sessions to compare cassette and album quality were set up to convince the retailers to reinvest in cassette to take advantage of the Walkman technology. The other labels soon jumped on board and sales of pre-recorded cassettes jumped dramatically. High quality cassette players replaced the 8 track player as car sound systems. Even the classical market embraced music on high quality cassette. And for audiophiles, real time duplicated metal tapes became the audiophile standard for pre-recorded tape.

But other tape-based technologies soon arose.

The Elcasette was one. Essentally a larger version of the cassette, utilizing 1/4" tape at 3-3/4 IPS it offered higher fidelity but of course one had to buy a player/recorder and tapes which were not backwards compatible with previous technologies. It came and went within 3 years - now a curiosity of vintage audio equipment buffs.

The DAT was another. Pre-recorded DATs never took off - too pricey! But the recorders, capable of making a digital master, were snapped up by recording studios. The Cowboy Junkies recorded their Trinity Sessions album directly to DAT using a Calrec Ambisonic microphone and the art of placing the band members at varying distances from the microphone to achieve sound balance rather than isolating each as a separate channel on a mixing console and using multi-track tape.

Finally, there was the DCC or Digital Compact Cassette. The idea was simple - digitally record on redesigned cassette technology. Despite being able to play standard cassettes, the format never took off as people spoiled by the instant access features of the CD were not content to wait for tape to fast forward or rewind to the desired selection. But the decks are worth seeking out as they came with an optical output meaning that one's old cassettes can now be directly transferred to digital .wav or .mp3 files. Pre-recorded DCCs exist - and what could be cooler than one-upping another diehard fan by showing them a DCC of Nirvana's Nevermind?

Posted by frederick.harrison@sympatico.net at 4:17 AM GMT 28/04/2008 Report Abuse

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Thanks Frederick. Great tip about DCC optical outs!

Posted by Danny @ Mojo at 1:44 PM GMT 02/05/2008 Report Abuse

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