Techmoan
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2016–2025
22:46 · 2.8M views · Feb 1, 2016
Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.
HN commenters cite it whenever cassette quality comes up, as proof that cassettes sound good with decent gear, metal tape and Dolby noise reduction.
9 comments from Hacker News
>"As others have attested there is nothing good about tapes." Tapes weren't as bad as you may think/remember, at least not from an audio point of view, if you Type-IV cassettes and Dolby S noise reduction you can get pretty decent sound output: this video I personally preferred MiniDisc, but I don't see them making a resurgence, probably lots of proprietary parts of the tech owned by Sony.
> They sounded bad. Cassettes weren't _that_ bad. The problem is that there were essentially different grades of tapes and players that supported different noise reduction techniques, and people tend to remember the ones played back with low end gear. Here's a great video on the subject: this video
Matt from Techmoan did a couple of videos about how to make cassette tape sound very good: [LINK] [LINK] They're worth watching but to be honest it hasn't made me want to convert all my music to tapes. Edit: The link I was actually looking for is: this video
Take a look here[0] for a discussion about cassette quality. TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools. [0] this video
TechMoan on YouTube has a great video on cassette tapes - granted he's got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment. this video