Is it just me...

[Pointdexter1906]

Or do home recorded cassettes sound WAY beter than store bought cassettes? I am listening to some oldie but goodie pre-recorded cassettes on both my Power Player and Sony CFS 500 and it's like, ehhhhh okay. So I pop in an old tape from the early 90s I found with "Time After Time" by Timmy T and "Computer Power" by Jamie Jupiter, and whoa - didn't even sound like the same boxes! Chest-rattling bass!

Ps. Just stumbled onto the Vintage cassette tape prices ???? topic. Um, wow. But in any event, perhaps Jaetee could chime in, he certainly seems to know a lot about this stuff.

 

[Master Z]

Pre recorded cassettes probably have set levels according to industry standards.
Home made tapes, you can bump up the levels and it will make it sound crazy loud.

 

[hollyrockets]

When I used to do a lot of dubbing onto tapes (a long time ago) I bought really expensive blank tapes. They were about $7 for a pack of two. I liked to record my vinyl then put away the albums so they wouldn't get scratched. They sounded pretty amazing.

 

[Fatdog]

Commercial cassettes probably used a lesser-grade tape stock to cut down on expenses.

 

[Gluecifer]

Commercial cassettes probably used a lesser-grade tape stock to cut down on expenses.

Absoloutely, I mean how many retail albums were even commercially released on Metal tapes? I've never even seen one!
I've got about 800 retail cassette albums in my collection and even the amount of Chrome tapes I have amongst them I could count on one hand.

When the record labels wouldn't even use the best quality available it makes you wonder...



Rock On.

 

[Pointdexter1906]

Great points all - the tape in question was a Maxell XL-II S 90. Sounds as good as the day I made it...