REWIRE YOURSELF

REWIRE YOURSELF

The Cassette Syndrome

by

Richard Robinson

The compact audio cassette is the most popular and universal tape format in current use. Its acceptance by consumers has eliminated the eight-track cartridge and banished the reel-to-reel tape, creating a situation where consumer endorsement has forced cassette manufacturers to slave at making the cassette do things it wasn’t originally designed to do.

Cassette? were never supposed to sound as good as records. They weren’t designed to achieve the fidelity of cartridges or open reel tapes. No one expected they’d ever be connected to expensive hi-fi systems to produce quality sound. But all these things have been demanded of the cassette, and, by and large, in the last 10 years the cassette has done admirably in its efforts to fulfill the demands made on it.

It is heartening that once in a while the consumer can actually affect the direction of corporate technology. From a field of some half dozen cartridge and cassette formats that were introduced in the late 60’6 and early 70’s, the compact Philips audio cassette flourished because it was the most economical and handy. Having served in the corridors of corporate power, where those in charge seldom use the products they sell, I had first hand experience of the commitment many of these corporations made to the eight-track cartridge. As late as 1971, I remember one RCA Records vice president telling me the cassette would never catch on, the eight-track was better.

But now that it is obvious to even the corporate dullards that the cassette is the only format, the fear is that the cassette may so intrude on the sales records as to dent the profit margin. Indeed this may happen in the next 10 years, as the possibilities of pulse code modulation and digital technology are applied to the state of the art of selling prerecorded music.

In the meantime, the cassette has reached some outstanding levels of technological perfection. High quality tape, accurately constructed cassette housings, and a revolution in the electronics and mechanics of cassette playersrecorders have produced a final sound that is really pretty good. Even so, if your ears are well tuned, you can tell the difference between a record and a cassette, but the difference is more aesthetic than the result of poorer reproduction on the part of the cassette.

This means of course, that as far as I’m concerned “Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?” is a lot of hooey. There is rather a large difference between “live” and any recorded electronic process, and most certainly a difference between live and cassette. A more interesting question would be “Is It A Record Or Is It Memorex?” The record would still win, but the call would be close. And if record companies continue to cut off their ears and noses by pressing even poorer quality records, then it may not be long before the cassette is better by default.

There are many different kinds of cassettes and cassette systems. In seeking high fidelity from the cassette only the most advanced and costly cassettes and cassette recorders can be considered. Even in this depression there are still $29.95 cassette machines and 69¢ cassettes. There are also $499.95 cassette machines and $9.95 cassettes. This range of prices is certainly one reason why cassettes are so universal, and why they’ve outpaced other tape formats and records in populatity. Unlike any other recording-reproducing devices, cassettes have a wide range of uses of which music is just one part.

As music players cassette machines come in two distinct types. Most popular are the cassette machines with built-in speakers that cost from $30 to $300 and are totally self-contained. These range from the one small speaker monophohic machines like Panasonic RQ335 ($49) to the hefty units that include two stereo speakers with AM/FM radio tuners like the Sharp GF-5050 ($99) and the JVC RC-656 ($208). In this category are also the' new stereo playback only systems like the Sony TPS-12 ($157) that come with special headphones so you can walk around wearing the system. None of these cassette types are truly high-fidelity, but they do produce acceptable sound in a relatively inexpensive, easy-to-use package.In this area the cassette has no equal.

It’s in the area of cassette decks /Costing $200 to $500 that cassettes have challenged records and tape systems with wider, faster running tape. Cassette decks are meant to be plugged into a amplifier and speakers just like a record player. While the less expensive types like the Teac CX-351 ($157), the Akai CSMOla ($119), the Technics RSM6 ($99), or the Pioneer CTF650 ($199) will not really give a good turntable and a new record a run for their money, there are cassette decks that will. These high priced decks, often using more expensive cassettes, are being designed for compete with records. Among the decks that can be considered superior to records are the Technics RMS95 ($829), the Pioneer CTF1250 ($466), and the Teac C-2 ($628).

Yes, the price is high on a cassette deck that will give the kind of quality reproduction through a good hi-fi system that will let you forget the sound is coming off a cassette. Partially, this is because the cassette just wasn’t designed to do this in the first place, so the precision of these expensive cassette decks costs 10 to 15 times more than the $29.95 it takes to make and sell a simple cassette recorder. Similarly, the precision needed to make and sell a cassette that works okay.

An expensive cassette deck run through a good amp and speaker sounds better because of what it subtracts from the overall signal rather than what is added. A cheap deck in the same situation would produce bass rumble and high

treble hiss; the expensive cassette deck playing an expensive cassette attempts to remove the rumble and the hiss without interfering with the sound reproduced.

As I reported here earlier this year, the development of “metal tapes” cassettes is the most recent addition to the technologies the manufacturers have introduced in an attempt to close the audible gap between cassette and disc. This has, of course, brought forth a new top of the line in cassette decks—those capable of taking advantage of the expensive metal tape cassettes.

One such cassette deck is Yamaha’s new K-950. At $490 it is representative of the best in current cassette technology, proving that it is possible to split hairs over the difference between class cassette sound and record sound. Yamaha admits that “records have usually offered better quality, ” but that with their K-950 deck and metal tape “manly conventional discs are probably in the same sonic class as tapes recorded on the K-950.”

Will cassettes ever replace records in the marketplace? Well, the people who make the records might deny it, but then they never expected the popularity of the cassette format to bring the cassette this far. Among current technologies there is; at this point, every possibility that cassette quality will continue to improve while record quality staggers backwards. And the nice thing about it is that in this case the consumer is making the decisions.