Brought my cassettes back to life!

[Mike Up]

Ever since the early 90s, I've been using button battery cassette based demagnetizers to maintain my cassette decks along with cleaning my heads with alcohol and a Q-Tip.

I had a tape really mess up my deck's heads. Cleaned them and sounded extremely muffled. Demagnetized with the cassette and sounded much better. However every time I need to demagnetize, the cassettes never sounded that great, especially next to digital or vinyl.

Well I was about to give up on cassettes all together but I have about 60 prerecorded and 20 Metal tapes I recorded myself.

So before selling everything to a local a vintage used equipment, record, tape and CD shop, I tried one last ditch effect. That being a wand based demagnetizer.

WOW, what a difference. My cassettes came back to life. I hear cymbals and all kinds of treble now. I honestly thought my cassettes were worn out being ~30 years old as well as my JVC TD-W318 dual cassette deck. No way, they sound great. Not as good as vinyl or digital but very good. That stupid button battery cassette demagnetizer wasn't fully demagnetizing the heads and leaving some residual. I have been thinking for decades that my deck and tapes were just worn out but it was the demagnetizer. I also had some dirty switches in the deck that kept it turning off during playback. Got the switches working good just by working them a lot which likely cleaned the oxidation off. I've missed out for decades.

I will say that my Metal Type IV tapes sound bad. They didn't last as the Type 1 normal tapes did. I thought Metal tapes were suppose to last longer but after some investigating I guess there is a chemical reaction with them that deteriorates the sound quality after about 20 years.

 

[lovinthehd]

Can't imagine spending any time with cassettes....even when I used high quality stock and recorded my own, just too many issues. Makes vinyl look good.

 

[Mike Up]

I don't know, cassette and vinyl were main formats until mid 90s when I started to get some CDs collected. Even then the early CDs had improper mastering and sounded bad. I have some tapes I can't find on CD or vinyl so it's nice to have a system working good.

 

[lovinthehd]

I don't know, cassette and vinyl were main formats until mid 90s when I started to get some CDs collected. Even then the early CDs had improper mastering and sounded bad. I have some tapes I can't find on CD or vinyl so it's nice to have a system working good.

I generally found vinyl and cassette to be far inferior to digital generally, yes, some bad digital mastering happened, but....

 

[Mike Up]

I generally found vinyl and cassette to be far inferior to digital generally, yes, some bad digital mastering happened, but....

I understand, but I like listening to my music collection even if the media does have inferior sound quality to the latest master recordings and digital formats. After all, there are kids listening to 96 Kbps MP3s and they lack ambience and soundstage but the kids sure love them.

 

[lovinthehd]

I understand, but I like listening to my music collection even if the media does have inferior sound quality to the latest master recordings and digital formats. After all, there are kids listening to 96 Kbps MP3s and they lack ambience and soundstage but the kids sure love them.

I still use my large vinyl collection now and then for nostalgia, not quality. I don't use such low digital bitrates otoh.

 

[Mike Up]

I was listening to my cassette of Twisted Sister-Stay Hungry. I compared it to my WiiM Pro Plus using the Tidal app and the original Digital Album released and the Cassette sounded better!! The digital version of Stay Hungry 1984 and the Extended version Still Hungry 1984 had terrible mastering. Sound is thin, and anemic.

Comparing the Cassette against the 40th Anniversary and Remastered version of Stay Hungry sounded very similar with the Digital version obviously sounding better.

However, just because something is CD or Digital doesn't make it sound better. I found this with many Records and now Cassettes. Many CDs and digital masters are just crap.

I'm glad I've got back into my old vintage music library and equipment as I've learned some things. That even the inferior music formats will sound better than CD and digital when Digital used such horrendous masters in the 80s and some in the 90s.

What good is being a purist and not using tone controls to listen as the artist intended the recording to sound, when there are so many significantly different sounding masters. The artist's intent is a mystery as which master is what they wanted!

So use the bass, treble, and equalizer knobs as well as MP3s, cassettes and vinyl, as it's a crap shoot what will sound the best! The mastering makes the largest and most significant difference over formats and frequency control knobs. The only exclusion is 8-Track tapes as I've never heard a good sounding one.