I’m taping (copying) vinyls to empty audio cassettes to not wear out the orginial audio cassette releases. My audio cassette deck with which I’m doing to copying has some kind of a Doly Atmos noise filter which is supposed to suppress hiss and whatever. So I decided to use it. For good measure, I also wiped the vinyl with some isopropyl alcohol which not only removes stains but also - supposedly - reduces static discharges, which of course makes popping sounds. All this in preparation for an hour long bus ride.
Results:
- the noise filter just added a ton of treble, making the music unbearable to listen to. Like needles in my ears.
- the isopropyl alcohol just made loose grit and shit, which the needle collected (well done needle, in ANY other situation…), which distorted the sound even more.
Only 45 minutes left on this God awful bus. 🥲💔❤️🔥💀
the noise filter just added a ton of treble, making the music unbearable to listen to
AFAIK that’s kinda how tape noise “filter” technology works, the idea is to make the signal louder than the noise by (mostly) boosting treble and then use equalization on the playback device to make it sound normal again (i.e. your portable cassette player needs to support Dolby). And the fucked up thing is that new audio cassette devices don’t support it, because Dolby is proprietary af and AFAIK the manufacturers also need specialized parts that aren’t easily available anymore.
Wooow. Thanks! That makes so much sense! My portable player is some cheapo from China:
My deck does have a treble adjustment knob though. I’ll give that a try later. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge! 😊The Dolby name is trademarked so nobody can use it without paying some kind of licensing fee. But the technology behind Dolby A and B noise reduction is brutally simple by modern standards, extremely well understood, and trivial to perform with current electronics. Any patents on it would have also expired decades ago since these were introduced in 1965 and 1968, respectively.
I think this is yet another one of those cases where we’re in the situation we’re in because nobody can be bothered.
Vinyl records have big, pretty album covers.
Cassette tapes were made to make listening to music more convenient in a world where we just had records and 8-track tapes. I like tapes. They’re classy. Audio quality is kinda shit though.
Look. Get you an old Android phone that has a memory card slot and a headphone jack. Or a new one — I want the Fairphone 6+, but I can’t justify it. I previously thought it was a violation of international law to make a phone that green colour since nobody’d done it before. Plenty of blue hues but green? Extremely rare. And they got pretty damn close to my favourite shade. I should buy one, but I really can’t afford one, and I’m not going into debt to buy a toy I don’t need. I have a Galaxy S10 that suits my needs. Anyway, get CDs or download FLACs of your records and tapes. Use a program called fre:ac to convert them to “low-complexity AAC”. The resulting format will be .m4a. At the highest bitrate, they’ll be a hair bigger than mp3 320k, but have twice as much fidelity. It’s absolutely the sweet spot between filesize and audio quality. Also, M4A and AAC are commonly associated with Apple. Apple is on the committee of the organisation or whatever that governs the format, but they do not own it. They use it for Apple Music, but they don’t use the highest bitrate. Close but not quite. Now if we’re talking Dolby Atmos/Spatial Audio or Lossless (ALAC), that’s another story. If you’re gonna stream, use those, but if you’re streaming, you’re renting your music. I do, because I love music and I think it is worth paying for. I also archive music, and I keep a backup on an old Android phone. So I have about 120GB of music (mostly M4A) on a 256GB memory card. I also have the collection streaming, so I can get it on my main phone (an iPhone) via an app called PlexAmp. (Plex is kinda hot garbage, planning on moving my music to a different streaming self-hosted server soon.)
CD is kind of limiting in music, too, but it’s what most of us are used to as the “prime” quality. Worth noting, when the RIAA went to Philips et al to design the “Red Book” audio CD standard, they detailed the quality they wanted, and were told they could get 8 minutes per disc. The same size disc. The CD size was finalised, but the Red Book standard was not. They said 8 minutes isn’t enough. They pushed for 60 minutes. They got 80. So the quality is roughly a tenth of what they originally wanted back in the 1980s. So when DVD and Blu-ray came out and we got way more storage, new audio formats opened up that had even higher fidelity, but they never caught on with the masses. “CD quality” remained the gold standard for all but the most discerning audiophiles. These days, you can buy 24k lossless on sites like Qobuz, but even that, I don’t think, is as high of quality as you can get. Remember that the DVD only held about six times as much data as a CD. Dual layer got that up a bit higher. But Blu-rays can hold over 100 times as much data. Nobody’s really using Blu-ray audio, but it does exist, and if you have high end enough equipment, you might even notice a difference. I do not think that I would, but as someone who does dabble in audio production (if only for archiving and streaming my personal collection), I do respect it.
Oh. I have seen FLACs of vinyl. Some people like that. I actively avoid them. I don’t want to hear the needle. I do not want analogue distortion. I just want the music. Like film grain and motion blur in gaming. Miss me with that crap. I don’t wanna feel like I’m watching a movie on a shitty TV, I wanna feel like I’m there. For music, I want that clean sound.
Thanks for all your input. I don’t have the emotional capacity to react to all of it at the moment, but I can say that I disagree on the vinyl FLACs. It depends on the very track/song itself, if you ask me. Sometimes, but not always, on the genre too. Those pieces that I want to enjoy clinically pure, I listen to in bit perfect mode through Tidal on USB Audio Player for Android with my Sennheiser IE900s. Such would be Diana Panton’s album If The Moon Turns Green. If I want to enjoy the entirety and general feel of the soundscape rather than the individual instruments, ambient sounds, overtones and frankly speaking noises, I listen to it on vinyl or audio cassette. Such would be Cyndi Lauper, Blondie, Madonna and the lesser known Patty Smith.
I’m with you on vinyl FLAC. Even when done perfectly, there’s just too much artifact that carries over. And not the good kind, the warmth and spatial sense that a great record can have, just the shitty stuff you mentioned.
