oh the hours spent winding cassettes back when various walkmans/ cassette decks had chewed them up! happy days!

Anyone ever use a power drill? Mmmm, melty.

Mix tapes FTW!

>Anyone ever use a power drill?<

Nah everything was 240v fixed speed back then 😉

my 19 yr old got the link straight away

maybe I should have bought her more upto date stuff in the past 🙂

I remember these! It was just before they invented focus….

I was one of the last of my peers to still use a mix tape. Still have a tape deck in the car.

My 2 year olds swipe the screen on my blackberry and then say, dad the Ipod is broken…

My ’51 Skoda actually had a radio with a tape deck and a multidisc CD. There’s an old cassette still lurking in a door pocket, I do believe. Damn, the hours I spent doing compilation tapes for the car and various girlfriends over the years. Around three hours per tape, on average, I reckon.

Heather Bash – Member
>Anyone ever use a power drill?<

Nah everything was 240v fixed speed back then

LOL yeah would have torn the tape to pieces

I remember them somehow, born in 1996

I used to tape john peel (not an easy thing to do with radio reception in ireland), same cassette would then be shared with mates at school and come back to me needing pencil and/or sellotape to be used again.
I´m old 🙁

The link was even more important when walkmans became popular

I used to set my cassette recorder on a timer to auto-record Radio 1 Essential Mixes, then set an alarm to wake me up at the right time to turn the cassette over once it’d finished on the first side!

look through the eyeholes on the plastic square bit and stick the other stick shaped thing bit up your bumhole? pretending to be a spy or a member of the conservative party.

is the pencil used to break the tab so you couldn’t record over it?

Never mind them, my (older) brothers car stereo took these

Bregante – Member
Never mind them, my (older) brothers car stereo took these

I used to fit them to cars when I was a mechanic around the time they came out, nightmare ❗

Brilliant. Now 18 on cassette was my first album.

It was a present mind, there’s no way I’d have bought Bombalurina on purpose.

TDK C90s were my cassette of choice. Could mostly get an album on either side 🙂 Someone’s older brother told me C120s would put stress on the mechanism of my Walkman and wear the batteries out. This “axiom” became stuck in my brain and nothing anyone said could convince me otherwise.

DD- the tape was thinner and more likely to stretch making your hard sought after tunes go all slow. That was the theory. or it got chewed up more. 120 was way over the edge. No one who knew what they were doing used 120, no **** way.

Yay! I knew I was right never to go for the behemoth storage that was C120. 🙂

Around three hours per tape, on average, I reckon.

😕

Was that a C90 on some sort of slow speed record? I think I had a deck that had that feature. Stuff sounded crap though, I think it was only for if you really needed a longer recording time.

C120s were only any good for one or two recordings and a few playbacks. No good on a Walkman, as the transport mechanism wasn’t as stable as on a static tape deck.

A mate had the Nakamichi Dragon; what an expensive bit of kit! 😯

Thankfully CDs had bin invented by the time I started buying my own stereo gear. Bought a Sony Minidisc recorder about 2000; just as MP3s were coming in. 😥

lost my mini disc player/recorder on a night out in the Jazz Bar in Dalston, didn’t even miss it. Gave all my left over mini discs that I had taken ages to compile to someone…some girl has all my tunes on a defunct bit of retro kit!

Worst thing was, I bought my MD player about the same time as my iMac. I’d never heard of MP3s.

Within a couple of weeks, I realised MD was obsolete. 😥

Thing is though, I now have a 20GB MP3 player, and my ‘phone plays tunes too and has a tiny little SD card in it for storage, but I never use either.

The MP3 player is practically worthless now, but maybe, I hope one day the MD player might be worth something to a collector, like early Walkmen are now.

You’ve got to feel sorry for anyone who bought a Beetamax player, a Laserdisc player (jeeze they cost a fortune) and what was that thing recently, like Blu-Ray but already dead? Isn’t Blue-Ray itself already practically obsolete too?

Cassette tapes had a pretty good innings though eh? 30-odd years. CDs have had a good run, but vinyl has to be the longest lived. Ironic considering it’s inconvenient, bulkiness, lack of portability and fragility. And the need for relatively spensive equipment to get the best out of it.

I used to use the pencil to save batteries on ffwd etc. Minidisc was an ace format! I put a MD head unit in my car around 2001.

Minidisc was an ace format!

It was. Small, versatile, great quality, robust, cheap.

Just too late. 🙁

yeah, I thought mini discs were ace. I bought 3 virtually new CD’s, 2 joy division, 1 pink floyd, for 4 quid on mon 🙂

remember the days when the roadsides were littered with brown shiny tape, thrown out of cars by drivers in a rage after a cassette self destructed?

I was a poor school kid, and used to cut out the damaged tape off my own, then use splicing tape from a super 8 repair kit to join them back up. Sometimes it worked…

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFojIOL_qZc[/video]

Video cassettes were a nightmare to rewind by hand

My children saw one of these and both just pressed the numbers.

They were surprised and delighted when they found you had to turn the dial.

A mate had the Nakamichi Dragon; what an expensive bit of kit!

Widely regarded as being the best tape deck ever made.

I had a nice Sony tape deck. On a good quality chrome or metal TDK tape I could make better copies off CD than a commercially made tape. For use in the car, natch! 🙂

I still have a cassette player in my Van and the Vans not that old.

I had an Alfa Romeo GT Junior which had an 8track in it, Frank Sinatras Greatest Hits was in the player when I bought the car, was still in it when I sold it.. Amazing.

TDK C90s

No such thing. The entry level TDKs were D90s.

I used AR90s, cos I thought I was an audiophile (chrome / metal tapes sounded awful on my tape decks).

My gran used tapes as she’s nearly blind, and has them sent to her by a chairty that do speaking books. CD’s now

My cupboard drawer.

Anyone else discover that when making mix tapes, if you wound the tape back quarter of a turn with your finger, the tracks merged seamlessly?
Used to do that with all my John Peel compilations.

And Minidisc is (ok, was) so much better than MP3. Don’t need a bloody computer for a start.

CountZero – Member
My ’51 Skoda actually had a radio with a tape deck and a multidisc CD.

My Sis has an 05 Polo. The tight wads at VW have gifted it with a tape deck! In 2005!! HA HA!

Yeah – the cheapest cassettes to buy were TDK D90’s I reckon.
I used to buy some ‘Thats’ something or others from Richer Sounds.

I had a Panasonic Walkman that went through hell & high water with me, but kept on going. It think it only took one AA battery though, so FF/RW was strictly out.
I think a Bic pen works as well as a pencil for winding duties….

Still got an Aiwa ADF-450 tape deck that was quite well regarded in it’s day. Never use it though, although I did have some recordings off it (CD to tape) that sounded better than some original cassette recordings.
A mate of mine has some albums on CD that I had on cassette & we re-recorded my cassettes as the original sound quality was cak.

Wonder how many lofts are full of cassettes. We’ve got hundreds of the things and a 1980’s mini hifi to play them on. Doubt we’ll ever use them again but don’t want to part with them.