Fun stuff I read since his passing yesterday in the Dutch newspapers.
Although he had indeed humility about his contribution to the cassette tape and the CD, he also was frustrated what Sony did in this department. He wanted the CD to be 11,5 cm instead of 12 cm and was disappointed Sony sold the first CD and invented the concept of a walkman instead of Philips.
His opinion about cassette tapes and vinyl having a revival because of the analog experience?
"I am not a psychologist, but that music experience is of course all nonsense. Nothing can match the sound of the CD. It is absolutely noise and rumble free. That never worked with tape. But who am I to say what's better, I'm over ninety and have old ears. I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. But some people call it "warm audio." I think people mostly hear what they want to hear. But there are always madmen who want to look back to the past. There is always a market for that.”
Philips decided on it because it would make the case closer in size to cassette tapes, and they already had a factory capable of producing it. I guess 12 cm would have required more retooling, which would cost them some of their advantage over Sony.
"Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes that Philips were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the cassette tape, whereas Sony were pushing for a slightly larger 12cm disc, partially because they knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 11.5cm CDs and if they could decide on 12cm as the industry standard then they would erase Philips' head start in manufacturing."
Interesting that the universal standard was created for such a petty reason. I was hoping to hear that there was some subtle but huge difference in 0.5cm. But no, it's just to screw Philips over, and we all have to play along.
It’s not like Sony and Philips are friends. They’re competitors. And the reason Philips wanted 11.5 cm is because it gave them an advantage, aka just to screw Sony over. This is normal business, not some moral failing.
Actually it is a moral failing. All that equipment had to be end of lifed earlier and much more work had to be put in. More garbage, more wasted energy. I can't see how that is anything but a moral failing.
I agree, and am glad you recognize it as such. When Sony erased Philips' "head-start", they obsoleted an investment made with the finite endowment of global resources (not to mention time). It's an underhanded tactic which disadvantages everyone to advantage a few.
Philips engineers some good stuff, my last flat screen was 12 years old. The only reason I retired it was because instead of waiting for my friend to come over I decided to move it myself (it was pretty hefty). Lost my grip and boom no more flatscreen (to fix it was far more than it was worth with a cracked screen). I wonder if my TCL will last anywhere near as long, it still had a great picture and it didn't need a soundbar like my new much cheaper TCL :) .
See also JVC's "VHS" vs Sony's "BetaMax". It is the way of standards warfare.
It definitely annoyed me that media cabinets that held an even number of cassette tape drawers "across" would not fit an integral number of CD drawers.
Timmer, the Philips CEO at the time, is on record [0] saying it had to do with the max recording length.
He claims Sony's CEO liked one particular recording of Beethoven's 9th so much, he insisted it had to fit on a CD. And this particular recording was 74mins, 33 seconds.
Immink says the myth is that Sony exec Ohga's wife insisted on the 74 minute length, based on a very slow performance of Beethoven 9, which normally isn't that long. But he also says it's not true. This is in his classic paper on the history of the CD.
Whenever I hear people talk about the superior sound quality of vinyl my response is "Yeah, there's nothing quite like the sound of a rock being dragged over bumpy plastic!"
Well a lot of CD's swapped out loudness (amplitude) for dynamic range and really they aren't much better than vinyl. So there's a bit of truth to it. A properly mastered CD is far superior to vinyl in a technical sense. Not being an audiophile though I don't mind either as long as the record ain't scratchy and it's not a cheap deck with crappy electronics. Obviously the best "sound" is in the ear of the beholder and some people prefer the sounds of their child/teen years to a higher fidelity version available on CD.
Yes, by buying a vinyl record from the 70s (especially from renowned labels), you're buying a sound that is free from the digital remastering craze of the following decades.
Is that really true though? If they have the original recordings (which have a much better dynamic range than vinyl) the digitally remastered ones can indeed be more true to the sound of the original recording.
They can be, for sure, but in my experience it's hit and miss. For instance, I believe the CD reissues of Living Stereo records (from the master tape) are very good. On the contrary, I once bought the integral of Hector Lavoe, remastered, and the sound was very disappointing, with excessive highs giving an unnatural quality to the sound. Whereas my experience with vinyl records from Decca/London pressed in the 70s is consistently good. If you're willing to experiment and take risks, you can probably find good and bad everywhere. I was suggesting a disappointment-minimizing path...
80’s thrash metal and tapes go together really well. The cutting, trebly sound of tapes really works with the staccato, percussive sounds of bands like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, etc.
There’s been a resurgence of bands putting out limited runs on cassette. I think a lot of this is nostalgia (often from people too young for much exposure to tape). Cassette sound quality is definitely inferior, but that can be adopted as part of the overall sound.
lo-fi basement dweller black metal is another one, I mean feast your ears on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU. Ironically, that album has been released on everything; cassettes, FLAC, 4 lp wooden box set, and a wooden USB stick with 128kbit MP3. The medium is part of the art?
Anyway, taste aside I can appreciate this particular artist and their work, it's a lot of midrange noise but the musical elements (mostly percussion tbh) emerge from the swamp with a good listen.
A very long time ago some of the Darkthrone tracks I downloaded from Napster were corrupted and had glitches/noise in them. I didn't know they were glitches, and I listened to this for years and thought it sounded great. I actually regret not having those "damaged" MP3s any more.
60s-era blues is another good example. The recording equipment at the time certainly wasn't bad, but it was not yet perfected. It added a certain sound to recordings from the time that I kind of miss in later recordings.
Way back when mp3 encoders weren't very good, I could hear some of the compression artifacts that were common in the commonly used reference encoder.
I pointed out that sound to someone who thought it was part of the song and forever cursed them with also hearing them everywhere. It's like learning about kerning ...
To me this is analogous to the incredibly common practice of applying scanned grain from 16mm or 35mm film stock in digital cinematography workflows, making the result “feel” more like film — or our expectations and perceptions of cinema. Sometimes high fidelity media isn’t what we really want.
Meanwhile digitization of actual film is manipulated to make it look more like digital cinema, with the grain and scratches removed, interpolated to 60 fps with jitter and shake suppressed.
I went to see Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight projected in all its original glory. I didn’t like the experience: the jitter, the scratches, the flicker of the blindingly bright snow... And the movie itself didn’t seem all that good.
I watched it three times on a blue-ray I bought a year later, and I loved everything about it, every time.
I think it's for more of us who are old folks for nostalgic reasons and cinephiles who want to see what it felt/looked like back in the day. It's not meant for regular people or younger audiences who aren't into the grindhouse nostalgia.
Wouldn't you be able to get the same effect by applying some digital filter to the music? Same goes for warmer sound some people claim for analog amplifiers. I would think you should be able to tune your digital devices to produce the same sound.
In theory you could compress and add some flutter. [1]
The problem is, you don't have access to the master - if you try to apply this filter on top of a final mix destined for CD/digital, it won't sound the same as tape, and will deteriorate the signal even more. That's why some bands still release on cassete, you actually need to mix w/ tape in mind.
I still have a cassette player in my work out room but I don't think I've had a cassette in it for over a decade. The radio and speakers still sound great though and the CD player in it works fine :)
You can always mimic the sound you'd get from analog media using a CD the same way you can emulate a CRT using a modern HDR high-resolution display with fidelity well beyond our ability to differentiate them. With a high-end GPU we can do CRT emulation in real time.
That's not what the person you're replying to is talking about though - they're stating that the motor that spins the disc is causing interference in the signal.
(I have a hard time imagining that it's worse than the electric motors used to drive vinyls or cassette tapes, but if it's there it's there I suppose)
No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to eliminate any signals past 20 KHz before sampling in order to avoid aliasing. Analogue brick wall filters do horrible things to the phase of the signal, screwing up the time relationships between tones and overtones. It was several years before gentler filtering and sampling at higher frequencies, then downconvertig to 44.1 KHz, made CDs listenable at all on a decent system - long enough for there to be a considerable catalogue of awfulness, and for a lot of people to have made up their minds that CDs had to suck. ("The sound of the '80s" had little to do with, say, classical and jazz recordings, which were subject to the same sampling problems.)
It applied to most any type of music on early CDs. They seemed to just really do badly converting it from tape to CD, but improved a great deal as time went on.
Well, vinyl is indeed "warmer audio" in a sense, in that it is more compressed and has higher saturation (due to the format properties), both of which can sound naturally pleasant. (It's also more tactile, which adds to the warmness psychologically).
CDs didn't have that great dynamic range or noise floor anyway (they were copied from -usually- 2inch master tapes, so tapes were still involved, and thus noise). 24bit/48 or 96Hz, on the other hand, now we're talking (but still most people wouldn't hear much of a difference in most mixed music, and in the majority of cheap headphones/speakers).
It's fascinating that someone, within their lifetime, can invent something, watch it become a household item in the entire world and then fade so far into obscurity that new generations only find out about it from encyclopedias.
The cassette tape really is an astounding invention, or I guess a great packaging and convenience improvement, compared to existing tape formats.
A revolution in music portability, distribution (both licensed and DIY), home recording, you name it. All kicked off by "little boys who had fun playing".
Tape trading is still big in certain circles, especially within the punk and black metal milieus. Some albums, EPs and demos get their only physical releases ever on limited edition cassette tapes, both because it is inexpensive, easy to DIY and fits the lo-fi aesthetics.
Where vinyl has a strong presence among audiophiles (for various mostly imagined reasons) and was always a format for those with money to spend, the humble cassette tape was the format of choice for the youth, the working class and people on the go, and it still carries that down-to-earth appeal today.
I know at least for me growing up in the 80s and 90s in a family with just enough money to get by, hand-me-down cassette tapes were how I experienced music, not to mention how we experimented with recording our voices and playing them back at different speeds, and learned what happened when you play the same bit of tape over and over again because it had a really funny bit on it. Getting my first CD and CD player was exotic and felt like science fiction in comparison to the trusty old cassette tape.
I keep a drawer of a few old and obsolete physical formats that meant something special to me. My cassette tapes of Deep Purple In Rock, Machine Head, Sgt. Pepper's, and The Triumph of Death are there, next to the 3.5" floppy disks and Minidiscs.
Tapes were fun. I grew up playing in bands. Demos were all recorded to cassette and shared among band members for reference or maybe passed on to clubs. I was right at the tail end of this, when CD burners became cheap and then we were expected to deliver demos as a cd.
I grew up in the era of cassettes. I’d tape songs of the radio as a kid. In high school and college I would tape my records and the new “cds” so my music would be portable (Walkman and parents car).
My brothers and I bought a really good Yamaha three head cassette player. We did some a/b testing with cds and with Dolby c it was really hard to tell the difference.
Though with Walkman you’d have to clean the rubber rollers when they got a little gummed up and there was always the danger of the tape failing and getting pulled out.
I think a cassette fresh out of the case was great, sound quality wise on good equipment, the big complaint was the wear and stretching over time. Then of course there was the eating of the tape, which you could recover from usually but there was usually a scar in the sound quality that you’d learn to ignore.
The humble cassette was a core part of my upbringing. Creating and sharing mixtapes a great way of signalling affection. I treasure the few times it happened, because as a nerd with social anxiety my interactions with the opposite sex developed a lot later than most people. Forgive me:
I thank Lou for his contributions. Cassette mixtapes were a huge part of teen life in the 80s.
I fondly remember the mix tape. Exchanging mix tapes was a huge part of both my friendships and romantic interests. Spent many hours creating them as well as my own jacket art (while the tapes were recording).
Yeah I think it's like a hand written letter. One of my younger friends saw an old mini boombox I had in my garage collecting dust and pleaded with me to let her have it and to make her an 80's mix tape of some of my favorite "hits" from the period. It was quite fun to clean the old thing up and clean the play area then get some songs off amazon that I loved and make a mix tape. She loves it and mentions it to this day (I did this like 5 years ago) and says she pulls it out a few times a year to play that tape and some other she's found since. Anyway I'm glad some people still appreciate the effort adds a bit more TLC than sending a spotify song list :)
No, a mixtape is more personal and romantic. A playlist is just a list of songs. "I made you this playlist" said nobody ever.
I think the big distinction, is that music collections were more personal back then too. Now if you have Spotify, you can hear any song you want. But then you only had the tapes that you had, or if you're willing to deal with lesser quality the ones that you recorded off the radio.
There is a great documentary[0] about the cassette. They explore its creation, history, and what it meant (and means) to people. They interview Ottens extensively as part of the film.
That's a great interview. You really get the sense he saw the engineering as a way to optimise the user experience. He wasn't just trying to put some tape in a tiny box for the sake of it.
I hope we all appreciate the "hackability" of cassette tapes. Even as a young kid I was able to use the family Hi-Fi to record my own cassettes where I could mix together sounds from a microphone, vinyl, CDs, the radio, etc. Literally any signal I could send through the stereo jack. I often think of one of my first programming books detailing how to save your BASIC programs to a cassette tape - though our family computer had no such attachment.
I don't have quite the same memories from my later days of MP3s and ripping / burning CDs.
edit: I've noticed hexagonal pencils seem to be less common than circular ones now, and I can't help but feel it's because they just aren't as useful anymore.
Another kind of hackability: There is a whole little music genre called "tape loops" where people make music by cutting open cassettes and taping the ends of the tape to make infinite loops. You record onto a few of those of different lengths, play them back in parallel and get neat rhythmic effects as the loops go in and out of phase with each other.
One of the great pioneers of electronic music, Delia Derbyshire, part of the equally pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop, hacked reel audio tapes and machines in the way you describe and much more, to create her sounds. She was so OCD in doing so that it was a bit damaging, and may have viewed the later digital synths as a godsend or with disdain. She created the Dr. Who theme.
Speaking of creativity, the Beatles famously used a tape-based keyboard, the Mellotron [0]. For instance, in Strawberry Fields Forever, the spooky instrument heard in the introduction is a flute replayed in reverse on the Mellotron [1].
My Dad was a consumer audio technology enthusiast at the time so we always had the latest (CD then minidisc). There was a weird doldrums period between the release of the CD and Napster (iPod even) for creating and sharing music and mixtapes. It seemed that we would be stuck in a perpetual 5-10 year new technology release cycle. Cassette tape remained the best way to share music as CD burners were not readily available and hardly anyone used minidisc.
Analog copying, those were the days. Specifically, the days of not being able to use my computer or my minidisc player for a solid hour, lest stray noises from apps or excess CPU usage goof up the audio going from one to the other. And then there was the separate joy of twiddling the little wired remote to title the newly written tracks...
NetMD solved this, allowing for digital copying and titling via USB, but it came along so late (2001) as to make no meaningful difference - especially in the face of the iPod, which had its advent in the same year.
Yeah, the main shift from cassettes to copying CD's to downloading MP3's to where I am now, Spotify, has been one of quantity.
I had a few tapes, often re-recording over them with whatever CD my brother bought (he paid money for them, the fool!). Later on I had a stack of burned CDs that I accumulated over the years, once again mostly copied from my brother; during my paper rounds I would flip between the handful of CD's I had.
Then I got an iPod Mini and permanent internet, and my daily listening habits broadened a bit.
And I listen to the most and broadest range of music ever thanks to Spotify. Mind you, its algorithms do tend to steer me to the same things regularly. At least when I had all of my music in itunes I would know what I had and liked better.
Oh for sure. I'm don't think I'd want to give up today situation. The ability to discover new music, get so much of it on demand, podcasts, etc. Just wonderful. I suppose I just appreciate, as a hacker, the very flexible abstraction of being able to take anything through the stereo cord, and record it with the play, pause, rewind, and record buttons. I was able to do so much as a 7-year-old. It seemed more complicated to learn digital sound editing software, CDs weren't always so rewritable, etc.
Not to underestimate Mr. Ottens' contribution, but as the article notes, he was the "head of product development at the Belgian Hasselt branch of the Eindhoven company Philips" - so I guess he didn't single-handedly invent both the Compact Cassette (as it was called initially) and the Compact Disc, I think it was more of a group effort under his leadership...
In a Dutch eulogy I read yesterday it has the anecdote of him showing a wooden block that would fit in the inside pocket of his jacket and decided for the team: this is how small the music cassette should be. He also quickly negotiated with Sony when they started to copy the design to make Philips' design the universal standard.
Edit: Found this quote in Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape (2016):
"You can credit me with a few ideas. But the designers developed the device. I haven't done anything special. "
It's normal to credit leaders with the team's effort though. Just about anything is a team effort, but credited to the leader, at least for public announcements.
A little anecdote/legend from the Philips Research Labs (Nat. Lab.):
When the team demonstrated the first CD they drilled some holes in them, and showed: "Look how robust, they even work when they are this damaged" (paraphrased).
In reality the locations of these holes were chosen very precisely. Not sure if this is true, but this is a story that my colleagues told me in the 90's...
This seems unlikely. CDs don't have physical sectors. But they do have generous error correction, with cross-interleaved versions of the data combined with parity spread out along the "groove".
The rule of thumb is that error correction can compensate for gaps of up to 2.4mm. So if a hole is smaller a CD should be able to cope.
What’s interesting to me beyond the invention itself is all the technology that was developed around it. For example my friend’s Dad had a Nakamichi cassette player that would physically flip the cassette to play the other side. And on the other end of course using a pencil to advance the tape or wind up slack if it accidentally got caught in the player.
He has an extensive article in the Dutch Wikipedia, with a star, and shorter ones in German and Polish :) The Dutch one seems well-cited, so it would probably be okay to just translate it.
I once visited an art exhibition where the theme was art objects that change while being displayed. Once exhibit which I particularly enjoyed was a cassette that was being played, while its outrolled tape was tightend around some bars in the room. So the tape slowly grinded down and changed the (cryptic) sound that was being played. It was a super cool idea, which also played with the experience of an unwound cassette tape, that everyone (who is a bit older) knows.
Neat! If you're ever interested in more of that kind of stuff check out Hainbach, heres a similar thing to what you described with some really great background info on the technique and tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVy9ABT5-iY
My youth would not have been the same - we made our own mixtapes back then and the good ones were made on TDK chrome tapes.
This was before we had internet (it came 1991) and our local radio stations back then never played funk or R&B music so one night I listened on AM to an overseas station and heard this awesome song and I taped it and listened to it over and over despite the bad AM quality.
Later I found it was "When Doves Cry" by Prince and I became a lifelong fan.
ps: I don't know how much an urban legend it is, but jdilla (famous in the hiphop beatmaker circles) is said to have learned his very very skanky sense of rhythm through a bare tape recorder that he used to overlay various samples by rewinding it with a pencil.
I recorded radio shows and other stuff to hundreds of compact cassettes as a kid. Years later, my parents insisted on throwing them all away because I didn't listen to them anyway. They'd be a goldmine now. They were all chrome tapes!
I love the character of cassette tapes. They aren't my primary medium for listening to music, but I'll be damned if they don't sound pleasant to the ear.
It saddens me that Lou Ottens has died; as so often happens we often only get to reflect on the lives and achievements of influential people after they've died, before that we often know very little about them. It's especially so for those who work in technology, as their work is often hidden behind corporate structures, thus they go unnoticed by the public.
If you'd asked me before this article appeared who Lou Ottens was then I'd have replied 'I'm not sure but it rings a bell'. As an audiophile, I recall reading many articles about Philips and Sony and the politics of cassette tape technology after it appeared on the market. At the time Hi-Fi and electronics magazines were full of articles about cassettes so my sense of déjà vu upon hearing his name likely came from that immersion.
The audio cassette played a very significant—even special—role in 20th Century audio recording technology and with his passing we've lost a direct link to not only cassette technology but also its history.
In those days, one of the major thrusts of Hi-Fi was to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, which, by today's standards, was pretty marginal, so like many audiophiles of the day I initially derided its introduction and considered it a scientific step backward thinking its only practical use would be for Dictaphones and other low fidelity uses. When the cassette first appeared its performance was in fact only suitable for low fidelity voice, thus reinforcing our perceptions. Music sounded terrible and its wow and flutter (W&F) specifications were woeful, so too were its noise figures, frequency response not to mention its high distortion.
That perception soon changed because the audio cassette was immensely practical compared to what was already in use—that, of course, was the reel-to-reel tape recorder. And reel-to-reels were very expensive for the home user to buy, especially so if he/she wanted a good one that could complete with the best fidelity had to offer, which for the public, was LP records. Recorders such as the Tandberg models 64 and 74 met the quality criteria but they were hellishly expensive (I could never afford to buy a new one and it was only some years after the Model 74 was released that I managed to buy one second-hand).
(As I mentioned, back then achieving a good balance between the best signal-to-noise ratio and minimum distortion in the analogue domain was a never-ending battle and about the best one could achieve was ≈60 dB at 2 to 3% THD (Total Harmonic Distortion)—even for professional tape equipment such as Ampex studio reel-to-reels this was a bit of a struggle and they required continual tweaking (head alignment, bias level adjustments, etc.) to keep them within these specs.)
Nevertheless, a sort of miracle happened; as cassettes were introduced in appliances such as car radios their quality improved dramatically even to the extent that some people started to use them to supplement their home Hi-Fi systems.
Eventually, at the pinnacle of its evolution, ca 1982—some 19 years after its introduction—the audio cassette had become a very capable recording medium to the extent that its audio fidelity had almost rivalled professional reel-to-reel recorders. This was achieved with an optimal combination of low-noise, high dynamic range [metal and similar high coercively] tapes together with very well designed cassette recorders such as the Nakamichi Dragon and Nakamichi 680. These used Dolby and other noise reduction techniques, however they never made it to true professional quality but it was a damn good effort just the same. By the mid 1970s many a home listener was very satisfied and content with fidelity available from the humble cassette.
Even I succumbed. In the mid 1970s I tried to get a Nakamichi 700 duty free when my father was visiting Asia but that failed through poor logistics. Then around 1980-81 I attended a trade demo arranged by the local Nakamichi agent and the draw card was Mr Nakamichi himself demonstrating his company's then latest product, the Nakamichi 680. Several years after that I managed to buy a little-used 680 for an excellent price. The 680's fame revolved around the fact that in addition to normal speed recording of 1 7/8"/sec it also had a half-speed mode of 15/16"/sec. At that speed and using the right high quality tape, it could achieve a very respectable bandwidth of 15kHz at ≤2% THD with a ≈60dB S/N whilst also holding a W&F of ≈0.1-0.2%. (Of course, the 680's performance at 1 7/8"/sec was considerably better; its frequency response at this speed was in excess of 20 kHz).
The fact that the humble cassette had progressed this far technically in only about 17 years was a remarkable achievement to say the least. It reached its pinnacle several years later with the Nakamichi Dragon, which has always been regarded as the best cassette tape recorder ever made.
Mind you, these remarkably excellent audio specifications were only ever achieved on machines of this caliber, most others that were considered in the Hi-Fi class performed very well but never to heights of the best Nakamichi machines.
However, keeping the Nakamichi 680 in top shape and in full spec wasn't always straightforward. I broke the head azimuth alignment knob and I returned it to the local agent for repair only to receive it back in worse condition than I sent it. After whingeing loudly that the service was substandard for a machine of Nakamichi's class, the agent returned it to Japan for repair. When I received it back several months later it was still not performing up to standard (like most organizations, service usually comes a poor second to getting product out the factory door). The solution was to repair it myself which I did. Fortunately—unlike these days where service manual is an unknown term—I had the excellent Nakamichi 680 service manual to go by, so servicing it was dead easy.
I still have my Nakamichi 680 some 37 years later and it still performs to specifications.
I reckon that when Lou Ottens had gotten to see cassette machines of the 680 and Dragon class he must have been pretty pleased with what he and his team had achieved at Philips in the early 1960s.
Before cassettes were used for music in the US they and their tape recorders were a rare import, just a slick portable tape recorder like the portable battery-powered mini-reel-to-reels which were just using small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).
But too expensive for casual or student use, these were the newest exotic office machine for dictation, monophonic only of course like the little reel-to-reels.
For music in the car the 8-track tape cartridge was well established and growing wildly, with its single endless reel of the regular 0.25 inch tape inside, but having multiple _tracks_ so you could get stereo and more music on less tape.
I was so fortunate my father got the first portable Sony cassette recorder for his business, there was only one specialty store that had unique imports like that.
He eventually let me bring it to school instead of my little reel unit one day, this was about a year before any pre-recorded music tapes were available.
I was recording off the radio, AM of course since pop music had not yet made it to FM and the FM sets and broadcasting stations, though not many were very powerful or stereo yet, basically had an insignificant fraction of listenership compared to AM.
Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes, but on the radio (which is about the only way stuff got popular) almost everyone was listening to things in monophonic for years to come. This was before FM stereo pop stations began to prevail, followed by home consoles and AM/FM car stereos.
Only 5 years before Woodstock, most people were still buying mono vinyl since stereo cost extra and few had stereo players. By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.
Even after FM stereo took over at home, most second-hand cars only had mono AM radios left over from just a few years earlier, but did slowly get replaced by newer vehicles. But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.
Music lovers who wanted no commercials all had 8-tracks already. Nothing in-dash was found, still under-dash like a CB radio.
Anyway, at school it was still the point where no other businessmen, teachers, or students had seen anything like a cassette, so it was a curiosity but not completely unexpected due to such great familiarity with other dictating machines and 8-tracks too.
People thought the tape was cool since it was smaller, easy to use, and worked like a tiny reel-to-reel, plus we naturally had a lot of fun recording with the microphone. 8-tracks didn't record for years to come.
By the end of the day when one of the umpteenth students to be amazed at my little recorder saw it I just naturally blurted out, "It's going to replace the 8-track".
Of course everyone laughed since there were no music tapes from record companies and no stereo.
But you could record your own, and the rest is history.
Eventually one day my father got me a Beatle tape from Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.
Inside the little fold-out tape liner they had the entire catalog of Capitol cassettes listed, these were stereo but played perfectly on our mono player too.
All 6 titles, one Beatles, one classical, one Sinatra, one jazz, and a couple soft pop. Capitol was just testing the waters.
Eventually got one of the earliest Ampex home cassette decks, naturally with sliders to mix stereo mics together with stereo line inputs.
Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market on a technicality where they had supplied a non-updated schematic with a product after a single component had been changed.
By 1973, Sony had just come out with their first stereo portable cassette recorder, same size as my early mono unit but with an additional matching auxillary speaker. Also their first single hand-held stereo directional microphone, which my buddy's father had gotten for him these years later. They were expensive. And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.
We had always tried to keep up with an interesting group of English artists who had been coming to town for 5 years beforehand, they were too different to be on the radio yet, but since the first time I saw them people had been telling me I was crazy when they heard it. "Nobody's ever going to listen to that, these guys are never going to be on the radio."
Anyway, when Pink Floyd came to town this time they had just released a little record called The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl. Each year they always played a set of the earlier material, then took a long break and came back to play their new stuff, usually no opening acts. It was crowded for the first time, mainly with new fans who were very anxious for what they had heard on the radio, but there was none of that and then the band took a long break as usual.
It was almost like a riot but once they got back on stage and played the whole Dark Side everyone loved it and they've been on the radio ever since.
Got it all on tape. In stereo. Quad didn't really catch on.
On the way back from the concert we listened to it on my Sears car cassette recorder (with mic unplugged!), underdash of course, the first one they had in the catalog.
Yeah, I know it was deliberate on two counts. First, my post was pretty long and second, the topic was about Lou Ottens of Philips, 8-track was RCA and others. Besides, 8-track never achieved the large following that the cassette did. Where I saw it being used most (and that was its professional variant) was in radio and TV stations for audio inserts, etc. The number of times I saw it used in say a car was trivial when compared with cassettes. That said, the quality was much better but ultimately it was doomed because it was too big and other commercial considerations.
"<…>small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).<…>"
I remember those, the quality was pretty terrible and most of them didn't even have electronic [RF-driven] erase head, instead they used a permanent magnet erase head for the purpose. I think everyone was pleased to see the end of them.
"Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes,<…>"
Didn't know that but I'm hardly knowledgeable about 8-track releases. I saw the Woodstock movie sometime in 1970 and about four or five times since. I've been meaning to get a copy but not managed to do so yet. It really is a must-own movie given that incredible performance by Hendrix.
"<…>By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.<…>"
That's my recollection too.
"<…>But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.<…>"
I'm very familiar with that situation, in the early 1970s I had a lot to do with the transmitting side of FM broadcasting.
"<…>Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.<…>"
There were very few pre-recorded ones around where I was at the time, they were more popular in some areas of the world than others.
"<…>Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market<…>"
OK, I can't recall that incident at all. All I know is that the market narrowed for 8-track pretty quickly then essentially it all but disappeared (I never owned a player so I suppose my interest wasn't there to note). Anyway, Ampex wasn’t in the domestic recorder business much after the early 1960s, essentially it had become a pro-recorder only company. My first experience of Apex was with its VR-1000A and VR2000 2" quadruplex machines and the multi-track audio recorders.
"<…>And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.<…>"
Well, Memorex tape was better than Ampex 406/407 and especially the rotten 'melting' Ampex 456 which shedded the coating in a sticky gooey mess. It was a disaster.
"<…>The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl.<…>"
Wasn’t aware of quad on vinyl on that recording. About two years ago, I went to a friend's place who has an excellent hi-fi setup, he owned the vinyl recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and I the CD one. We did a critical listening test between the two recordings (I'm not going to enter the debate about which recording sounds best).
I love music so pay a lot of attention to stuff like speakers. One thing I notice is that when people get into vinyl, they get into the overall experience of listening to music. They spend a little more on speakers, align them with music in mind and start sitting down and listening to music. Digital is so easy that it’s background noise when we’re driving, working and living. Vinyl takes more work and in my experience, that work leads to an enhanced experience. It’s not surprising people call it ‘warm’.
For a lot of people (including myself), digital has essentially become radio. Most of the time I just listen to playlists of various sorts and, mostly, not even ones I've curated myself. I haven't done any meaningful rating and curating of my music lists in years.
This is a great comment! At risk of dating myself, I remember a brief period between CDs and CD players in cars being commonplace. At the time, mixtapes were an entire art. Crap, the hours I put into mixing and curating tapes?? Those were the days...
After switching my entire collection over to CD, one of the bands I later got into, only as a "CD band" were The Muffs (R.I.P., Kim).
Years later, seeing their albums that I loved so much released on vinyl, I thought, why not? The instant I put the needle down I knew there was magic in vinyl that I had traded for convenience years ago. It sounded that much better.
The significance for me was that this was a band I knew digitally before I ever heard analog. Somehow, going that direction, and enjoying the vinyl better convinced me there was something there.
Explain away. I am happy when I put on my records.
Mastering on Vinyl is almost always less compressed, and sounds more natural due to natural limitations of the medium. This sounds especially better (IMO) when you turn up the volume.
Of course, it's entirely possible to master like that on CD, MP3, etc but nobody does it.
Exactly. I have so many late 70s/early 80s stuff made in the early days of digital that sound so gross on CD, and are just amazing on vinyl. I know the mastering could be done way better on CD, but especially with the loudness wars now it never does.
Geez bud, I have nothing of any value to add but you triggered a long session with the Muffs today. What a wicked, wicked band. Once again, poor Kim Shattuck...what a talent.
I suspect that for people who like vinyl, the experience of music isn't just about the sound. Putting on a record, as a ceremony, just seems more appealing than menu-diving down to a playlist on your phone.
It's true. An LP defines a concrete slice of time, defined by decisions made by the artists and the producers. That work and craft is different from the playlist creator. Also, the management of a record collection takes attention and patience. A record collection itself is a type of identity repo, a lot like Walter Benjamin's library, e.g. I will argue that CD's cannot capture a certain plangent timbre, though I've never found any research to back that up (hard as I have tried).
Yes, a similar converging discussion is physical vs digital media games, with enough time both storage and internet connections will reach a point where digital will be light years more practical than physical discs (or cartridges, anyone remember those?), but the feeling of having a hard copy and all the ceremonies involved about playing a game gives a so much richer experience for me. Is just like prepping popcorn and getting comfy for a movie session at home, you can always just play a movie at your laptop, but sometimes you just want to get 100% into it
Nice sized print paper backs have a much better resolution then kindle and the like. That's why I prefer it. I used my kindle for trips because of the size to amount of content ratio. When I'm at home I prefer a well printed book it has much higher resolution of text and is easier on my eyes if I'm going to be reading for a while.
> But other than that vinyl is such a strange "fashion".
The problem is that a lot of music that was originally recorded on vinyl was either never remastered for modern audio equipment, or else has been remastered in a way that makes it even worse than the original version. E.g. a lot of the early Beatles stuff is pretty painful to listen to using even just basic earbuds, and I can only imagine that it would be even worse using good headphones.
And I say this as someone who isn't an audiophile, owns no vinyl, and isn't even especially into music.
Why? Bluetooth isn’t perfect but it the fidelity is not so poor as to reverse the “warmth” of the analog distortion, and even a cheap ADC won’t either... it should reproduce it pretty well.
What people get wrapped up in cognitive dissonance is that they equate “pleasing” with hi fidelity... but anything likeable about vinyl is because it is low fidelity — but if you tell certain people this they take it as a pretty personal attack. Anyway, a decent digital signal chain should reproduce this low fidelity pretty well including high bitrate SBC.
I agree with your statement; to give my initial comment some context I was poking fun at the ‘audiophiles’ that prefer vinyl for its analog characteristics but then unknowingly digitize it by using, for example, a Bluetooth speaker... I’m in no way an audiophile and if I want quality sound than WAV or FLAC is fine...but that’s just for certain albums
;)
One advantage vinyl has is that it is often mastered better. Music mastered for CDs often has a much lower dynamic range because otherwise it would be impossible to listen to over the sound of the road etc. in a car.
The obvious answer for this is to release a different mastering in a digital format, but that's not cool and hipstery enough so instead vinyl made a comeback.
> otherwise it would be impossible to listen to over the sound of the road etc. in a car.
Do you have a source for the claim that CDs are mixed with audibility in cars as a priority? Because, to be honest, it sounds like bullshit, but I'd like to be proven wrong.
I have an in-law who has a Pro Tools setup and does professional mastering, and they absolutely have filters for "what this will sound like in a 2003 Corolla with the stock sound." I don't know how much that kind of thing shapes the actual decision making process, but it's absolutely considered (and it's almost certainly considered all the more for FM/satellite radio broadcasts where in-car listening is expected to be the bulk of the audience).
Also relevant is Lars Ulrich's famous quote defending the disastrous state of Death Magnetic, exposed in part because of how much better the tracks sounded in their Guitar Hero versions:
"Listen, there’s nothing up with the audio quality. It’s 2008, and that’s how we make records. [Producer] Rick Rubin’s whole thing is to try and get it to sound lively, to get it to sound loud, to get it to sound exciting, to get it to jump out of the speakers. Of course, I’ve heard that there are a few people complaining. But I’ve been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds fuckin’ smokin’."
Listening back to mixes over a car stereo system is a pretty common practice, but that's more for making sure a mix translates to common listening scenarios and less to do with road noise.
Sounds like OP was describing compression. And there has been a trend toward dialing up the compression — but I thought it was to make the tracks "louder", stand out. I had not heard any car connection.
I didn't say it was for "road noise". Car stereos was one of the popular places for listening CDs at the height of loudness war.
> So the recording and mastering engineers began to produce recordings with limited dynamic range that would sound "better" on iPods and car stereos that are used in areas with more ambient noise than a quiet listening room. [1]
> Today, many people listen to music primarily in the car or other noisy places, where louder music cuts through against the background noise. Record companies, especially today, tend to cater to this market of casual, “on-the-go” listeners and make heavy use of compression and limiting in order to make their album louder. [2]
The loudness war was more about mastering for radio; in a world where all listeners are fleeting, you do everything you can to keep them, including making the music as loud as you can fit in your channel.
Not for the reason GP mentioned, but you can increase the loudness much more on CDs than on vinyl, since on vinyl the needle physically jumps out if the loudness is constantly high, so it needs to be mastered with more dynamic range. There is also the thing that the high bitrate/high sampling rate masterings sound much better in that regard, since they target a different audience
Sure, if you deliberately refuse to interpret the context.
Vinyl releases have a different target market and are mastered with more fidelity in mind, while CD releases are mainstream, and have been mastered with small dynamic range for decades because of the loudness war.
Players were first made for the home, and while the first CD player for automobiles was introduced in 1984, it was not until mid to late 90s that they became mainstream.
Cassettes have good bass and midrange. Vinyl is great and more defined. CDs have too much treble and anything digital can’t really produce the same waveforms exactly.
Pure analogue recording studios are in the minority and by the time you expand your search to pressing plants, the vast majority of vinyl has been digital before it hits our ears.
(I belong to the vinyl cult too and badly want to believe what you’re saying.)
What I said was true. Whether it was digital or not can be a subtle difference.
I never said that vinyl is only analog or that that is the reason for the difference in sound between vinyl and other formats, because it’s not.
The “warmth” is cassettes and more so with better balance in vinyl is known. Digital didn’t kill music quality; it did affect waveforms, but that’s not the reason for vinyl sounding better to most.
Of course, there are many more reasons that music sounds better or worse.
I wonder if we’re really getting into mechanical differences between turntables? It’s hard to talk in terms of sound but you sound like a lot of fun. If you’re ever in or around Regina, Canada let me know. I have two Technics 1200s that I’ve modified heavily. If you’d like, I can show you some cool stuff with three tonearms (the stock 1200 tonearm, a straight tonearm that will tell you precisely when I went to raves and a tonearm that is engineered for better sound. You’ll hear the difference right away. Then I can show you some differences between cartridges, proper cartridge alignment (a fraction of a degree makes a huge difference) and even styluses.
One downside of the proliferation of turntables is that most don’t work with shit. It’s been happening since everyone was a DJ and is still happening now!!! :)
That's incorrect. CDs can reproduce anything that a tape can with higher fidelity and much more dynamic range. You could "master" from a cassette tape and not be able to tell a difference between the CD and the cassette tape without signal analysis. Humans claim a lot of things but those claims fall apart in double blind studies when it comes to music and wine.
Saying "CDs have too much treble" is like saying "books have too many adjectives."
And no, for millionth time. Per the Nyquist theorem, the waveform being generated is identical -- the same, without any difference whatsoever -- when the sample rate is twice the frequency being reproduced. Which it is, because the sample rate of a CD is more than twice the theoretical upper range of human hearing.
You can talk about aliasing if you like. I see some people in the thread with super-human hearing can detect the buzz of CD drive motors. But this "digital is not as good because it's discrete and audio is continuous" is complete nonsense.
If you are thinking that the "digital waveforms" (?) coming out of your speakers don't sound as good because they're not continuous, or "choppy," or missing information . . . you're really not making any sense at all.
Please omit swipes like "for millionth time" and "you're really not making any sense at all" from comments here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Even just getting a decent DAC can make a lot of difference. There's a difference between playing a CD on a decent setup or a cheap portable player with 5$ headphones, shitty cheap DAC and sloppy electronics. With the right software, you can even emulate a lot of distortion and warmth of analog equipment even. Some more expensive consumer grade hardware (Bose is a good example) takes a lot of liberty with processing the sound that gets send to the speakers.
It's basically the same as iphone owners claiming their cameras are better because they get such nice crisp colorful photos. Which depends on roughly the same kind of lossy algorithms that electronics manufacturers use to make cheap hardware sound awesome. Compress, filter, boost, etc. It's a lossy process. It's intentionally losing recorded detail for the effect. The audio equivalent would be the wall of sound type sound associated with 1980s pop music. Sounds great on a cheap brand walkman ripoff (went through several in the 80s).
CD recordings have historically been optimized for cheap equipment and FM radio. The storage medium is not the problem: the sound is intentionally compromised when the master is created already. That's why remastered recordings are a big deal these days and also why a lot of LPs sound better (different master, generally better equipment used for playback). Same recording, but a better masters optimized for different purposes. One sounds better than the other but people get confused about why that is.
I said there were differences. A lot of people putting words into my mouth.
I was actually alive and aware listening to pre-1980s vinyls, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, etc. unlike some of you. CDs added additional frequencies into the high range, which people thought sounded crisp and new, but it never had the warmth of cassettes and vinyl.
The waveform thing is true but I never said that it was the reason for the difference in warmth.
Right. I was actually alive too. What we're trying to tell you, is that the kind of explanation offered in that article is absolute bullshit. It's common! People make this kind of argument all the time. It's still wrong, for the reasons eloquently outlined in the replies.
I think the thing that trips people up is that they think that a digital process can somehow fail to make something happen to an analogue speaker cone that an analog process can do effortlessly because of the nature of the process (or the medium). It's not true.
Do you like vinyl better? Or CDs better? Or reel-to-reel tape? You'll get no argument from me, because "better" is a pretty subjective thing. But the following propositions are absurd:
1. Vinyl has "higher fidelity" than CDs.
2. CDs "add treble" to recordings.
3. Digital processes can never accurately reproduce analog phenomena.
4. Analog "warmth" is only achievable with analog equipment.
5. No one ever over-compressed their tracks until CDs (or Pro Tools, or DAT tapes, or whatever) came along, and so these things are to blame.
I could go on.
I'm not accusing you of having said all of these things; they're just examples of things are absolutely not true, but which get said all the time, and which start to seem like truth because everyone is nodding.
They -can- emit higher frequencies with better fidelity (and DR), however that's a product of mastering the CD, not something that need occur in the CD by its very nature. So the way you're stating it is incorrect. A CD can replicate anything a cassette/vinyl can do (that is perceptible by human hearing). Now whether industry respects that or not is up to the company/band/whatever making the CD and what they choose to emphasize.
I didn't look at the Innersense article until after I had written what I have below, but a quick skim shows the vendor/author is a complete digital audio enthusiast.
I like both digital and analog.
But there's always some analog distortion in your recording and playback process.
It's worth looking at the ocilloscope to compare the type of distortion that square waves give which does not appear from sine waves having the same amplitude.
The ideal thing about digital is the recording can be very accurately reproduced, vastly more so than analog media, and can be duplicated without degradation.
While being recorded with significant analog distortion (like intentional fuzz guitar or the occasional unintentional mic overload) or not, the signal is digitized as good as the ADC can accomplish.
But when you've got a bit of analog square wave coming in to the ADC to begin with, the overshoots are too narrow to be accurately captured by mere 44.1Khz sampling.
People who can tell the difference between different playback DAC's can also figure they could probably tell the difference between different recording ADC's if they were involved with the recording process.
While all of these digital electronics of course meets or exceeds Nyquist margins and Shannon's minimums.
But some people hear the difference between them anyway. Isn't that supposed to be theoretically impossible?
Some really clean, high-fidelity, wide-dynamic-range digital recordings (ideally material that is espcially _easy_ to record) can be good reference tracks for comparing systems.
So beautiful.
Then take not-so-clean but excellent sounding reference material having the same functional amplitude going into a particular DAC.
Sounds a bit worse as expected but in different ways than the pure analog _analog_ of this type listening test.
Because analog components like transistors are not perfect, but that's what ADC's & DAC's consist of anyway. Lots & lots more transistors in the signal path compared to simple pure analog gear.
It has always helped to carefully select vacuum tubes and audio transistors too when they came along.
Looks like the tradititon continues with different audiophiles preferring to carefullly scrutinize the DAC chips they have today.
Also, anybody else ever see audible subharmonics on the scope resulting from the beat notes generated by two different frequencies above the range of human hearing? One of the frequencies which is sometimes 44.1Khz.
> CDs added additional frequencies into the high range, which people thought sounded crisp and new, but it never had the warmth of cassettes and vinyl.
Sure, there is an audible difference between digital audio and vintage analog equipment — but it has nothing to do with quality problems in digital audio. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: vinyl and cassettes deliver low-quality, heavily distorted audio (with a dynamic range equivalent to that of 5 or 6 bit digital audio). This does create a distinctive “warm” tone, and a lot of people really like the sound (or the nostalgia) created by this distortion.
The article you linked does not demonstrate quality problems with digital audio; it is a bunch of nonsense intended to sell a product.
First of all, it compares a “digital square wave” with an “analog sine wave”, and remarks that “the digital signal does not follow the smooth flow of its analog compliment.” Of course they look different, they’re not the same wave! A square wave is “supposed” to look blocky, it’s not a digital vs. analog thing.
At least it mentions the Shannon-Nyquist theorem and gets one thing right: “there is no difference whatsoever between an analog sine wave and a digital one”
But then it totally blows it again with its comparison of a “digital” square wave to a “natural” one, observing that the “natural” square wave is more curved.
Again, this is nonsense because you’re not comparing the same wave! The “digital” image is of an ideal, mathematically pure square wave, whereas the “natural” image is bandlimited. The first mathematically pure wave cannot exist in the real world, because it would require infinite bandwidth — the voltage would have to change instantly.
In fact, a digital signal is bandlimited; it’s just a bad illustration. The digital square wave, when converted to analog, will not include any frequencies above half the sampling rate, making it match whatever our bandlimited analog signal is supposed to look like.
Then the article goes into full-on snake oil mode, trying to convince you that “technology that resolves that problem, by creating infinite phase, is currently available” if only you buy their “Sensorium™ LSV III Function Generators and Altitudinal Oscillators [that] utilize a polynomial transition region algorithm”. This is very much nonsense; by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, you can reproduce a bandlimited waveform exactly from a sampled signal, no matter how “complex” your waveform is.
> Then the article goes into full-on snake oil mode, trying to convince you that “technology that resolves that problem, by creating infinite phase, is currently available” if only you buy their “Sensorium™ LSV III Function Generators and Altitudinal Oscillators [that] utilize a polynomial transition region algorithm”.
Definitely my favorite part. It's complete gibberish, but because it uses audio nerd words (phase, oscillator, function generator) it sounds like it might not be.
> CDs added additional frequencies into the high range
CDs didn't add anything. The treble was always there, or was added in mixing/mastering for creative reasons. Vinyl and Cassete simply didn't or couldn't reproduce those frequencies.
You could, of course, remove the frequencies on CD to match Vinyl or Cassette, but they were kept (or even added) in CD for artistic reasons.
Although he had indeed humility about his contribution to the cassette tape and the CD, he also was frustrated what Sony did in this department. He wanted the CD to be 11,5 cm instead of 12 cm and was disappointed Sony sold the first CD and invented the concept of a walkman instead of Philips.
His opinion about cassette tapes and vinyl having a revival because of the analog experience?
"I am not a psychologist, but that music experience is of course all nonsense. Nothing can match the sound of the CD. It is absolutely noise and rumble free. That never worked with tape. But who am I to say what's better, I'm over ninety and have old ears. I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. But some people call it "warm audio." I think people mostly hear what they want to hear. But there are always madmen who want to look back to the past. There is always a market for that.”