What's amused you today? XD

They definitely could take a beating better than CDs could. You sneezed on a CD, and suddenly it would skip. But a tape would still play after six months on the floor of your car.

 

Americas next top athlete ….lol...

 

oH well we have too much technology these days.
Don't sneeze on a cd, it might be a covid cd. lol

 

I recognize that Maxell. Brings me back. Making tapes from vinyl for car listening. A case at a time. Usually they could be rolled back in with a pencil on the reel while squeezing the tape between two fingers. But sometimes it'd get so folded up between the capstan and pinch roller that a section would have to be cut out and the remaining spliced back together. That was a bit like surgery I'd say; the cuts had to match precisely and a specialty splicing tape applied and accurately trimmed. A splicing block was a big help but I only had a 1/4" one. If you got it right, it was imperceptible, otherwise it would muck up the works. My preferred tapes were the MA110s. They were pretty good considering a track width of 1/32" moving at 1.875 ips and came toward the end of the lifespan of cassette tape usage.

 

If you ever saw the Commercial break thread.
You would see I posted this ages ago.

 

This thread makes me remember taping songs off the radio as a kid.

 

Did you sing along like me?

 

A little bit. Mostly, I drummed along on my thighs.

 

Well that is a start. x

 

When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to be a drummer in a punk band.

 

And now?

 

A novelist.

Who's also a drummer in a punk band.

 

Oh that is fantastic.

 

In reality a CD is of far greater longevity. Magnetic tape suffers from a weakening of the magnetic fields, a breakdown of the mylar or polyester backing, print-through, stretching, breaking, and mangling due to a misaligned transport.
CDs can diminish in reflectivity, theoretically, and perhaps the plastic can diminish in translucivity, either causing data loss, but I'm still listening to CDs bought 35-40 years ago with crystal clear high definition sound so...

You just have to know the mechanisms by which they work and then it's simple to maximize longevity of either medium. Goes for vinyl, too.

A cassette on the car floor for months collecting all sorts of dirt and debris inside may indeed initially "play", but the damage to the player by the introduction of that crud into the mechanical transport is highly likely to bring on its early demise. Maybe "eating the tape" on its way out also. hehe

The only CD I've ever had "skip" (that's a carryover term from vinyl where the needle would get physically knocked from the current groove path by an obstacle due to surface damage or by physical shock to the arm relative to the groove) is one where I dropped it, tried to catch it, and jammed the reading surface into the metal corner of a component case.
Trying to blame the CD for the resultant inability of the player to read that section of data would be like trying to blame your body for one of your organs not working properly after you fell on a knife and the organ got stabbed.

 

I'd run the tuner into the reel to reel record the whole radio show nonstop then go back through and cue up the songs I wanted, record to cassette from RTR. Made a cleaner tape without the limitations of attention in real time.

 

In recent years I run the tuner into an ADC lightpiped to the computer, record to HDD via the audio editing program (Sonar), use that to slice up the songs I want and output them as WAV files to burn to CD.

Mucho más fácil y rápido!

 

A CD could certainly handle being played over and over better than a tape. Played a thousand times, it sounds as good as the first time you played it. But for that to happen, you had to treat a CD like you were moving the Mona Lisa around. A tape meanwhile could be sat on, stepped on, dubbed over by stuffing cotton into it, and generally physically abused, and still come out functional.

CDs were the better tech, but they were very fragile. Tapes sounded like shit, but they could take a beating.

Either way, streaming HD music now is the greatest.

 

Brilliant.