AND THEN YOU GOTTA SLOW IT DOWN [416]

Marshall McLuhan is a name that has come up here a few times already, but I somehow forgot that the founder of what we call media studies had recorded an album. Released in 1967, and an LP version of McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s book of the same name, “The Medium of the Massage” is an audio collage about the effects of media on its consumer, the title’s pun on “message” becoming intentional following a typing error in the original book. 

With McLuhan’s assured tone as a lynchpin, the effect of the album’s sound is not too dissimilar to the later experiments it influenced, like The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9”. The intention of the album is to totally immerse the listener in a constantly changing landscape that utilises sound as an entirely separate medium of the printed work – this is no audiobook.

I found myself concentrating on the voices and sounds being sped up and slowed down. The collage is constructed of hundreds of pieces of spliced audio tape, played by reel-to-reel machines on top of each other, but the varying of their pace brings more attention to the physical existence of the tape, and how what you hear is essentially a result of friction, as magnetic tape is passed over a playback head. 

The speed of the pinch roller, feeding the tape past the head, can be varied to a desired effect, quite often comic, as anyone with a cassette player at home would find by pressing the “play” and “fast forward” buttons to make your favourite band sing even higher. The age and quality of the tape player, and the tape, also affects the output: you can tune your equipment to remove as much “wow” and “flutter” as you can, but there may still be imperfections in the tape, from its recording to their initial manufacture, to factors acting on the magnetism of the tape to affect its retention of a recording.

None of this is easily replicated digitally. Filtering audio could get close, like applying a “VHS effect” to video, but outright glitches need the original equipment, and both cassette players and “entry-level” Type I ferric tape are still readily and cheaply available. Best known for the vaporwave album “Floral Shoppe” under the name Macintosh Plus, Ramona Langley released “Big Danger” in 2017, under her usual moniker of Vektroid, which sounds like a found object: a sticky, muddy-sounding cassette tape in a damaged player that cannot play at the right speed, and that is the effect being sought – plying it back on a digital file is only the current method of delivering that particular sound.

YOU HAD YOUR TIME, YOU HAD THE POWER [389]

On the afternoon of Saturday 8th August 2015, I sent nine rubbish bags to my local recycling centre in what was, at the time, a very lucid and easy decision.

The bags contained over two hundred and fifty Video Home System (VHS) cassettes of off-air TV recordings I had amassed from 1997, none of which were able to be recycled at the time due to the black plastic used in their composition. I had intended to digitise their contents for future use, but after realising the size of the task, and that all I had recorded on them, from obscure films that helped with my degree studies to whole series of the BBC comedy quiz "Never Mind the Buzzcocks", will continue to be available online or from archives.

My habits with recording programmes to VHS also meant you were unlikely to find anything special. I recorded in Long Play mode, reducing the maximum 240 lines of picture quality to 230, something that made very little difference when recording episodes of “The Simpsons”. I also eliminated continuity announcements and advert breaks as much as I could, their comparatively ephemeral nature now making recordings of them more highly prized. Safe in the knowledge that nothing was going to be lost from the loss of my collection, it was easy to let it go.

The big regret I still have was getting rid of the VHS recorder as well, perceiving there to be no more use for it. The random analogue glitches of an authentic VHS recording are more acceptable than the hazy VHS-like filter that can be applied to a digital video file to produce a degraded or nostalgic effect, and because making videos was not a consideration I had at the time, I saw no reason to hold the recorder back. Not readily having the ability to recreate that prized look with authentic equipment was an oversight on my part.

Changing rituals from “time-shifting” by recording programmes to watch later, to streaming everything at any time, makes it easy to forget that VHS was once the only way most people owned moving pictures, other video tape and disc formats notwithstanding. This was mainly the result of the Japanese government attempting to force manufacturers to adopt a single consumer tape format, and by JVC providing their VHS format as an open standard others could use without licence, something Sony was not willing to do with their technically superior Betamax format, its smaller cassette size also limiting their available recording time.

While we have not lost the right to make home video recordings for personal use, the ability to do so has mostly been lost. There is no open ability to download and keep programmes from streaming websites, and neither would they accept that, and while my television can record off-air video to a USB stick, it will only play back on that one television. Very occasionally, a TV station may also show a programme that has been out of circulation for decades – I am still waiting for the BBC to show John Berger’s original 1972 series “Ways of Seeing”, never issued on home video to my knowledge, instead of relying on the tie-in book.

Attaching some sort of video capture device to my television is starting to sound like good proposition, especially now the bulk of VHS cassette storage can be avoided.

BREAK IT TO ME GENTLY NOW [331]

A while ago, I bought a cassette tape in a second-hand shop. It wasn’t for the album on side A, which was “Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places” by Kid Creole & The Coconuts – their most played songs, “Annie I’m Not Your Daddy” and “Stool Pigeon”, are on their following album “Tropical Gangsters” - but more about why side B of the tape was deliberately left blank.

In 1981, Island Records began a series of album releases on cassette titled “1+1”. The inlay card on my album describes it as a “revolutionary new concept… On one side there is a complete album by an Island recording artist. On the other there is a full side of blank tape. And it’s chrome tape to ensure top quality. What’s more it’ll cost you less than you would normally pay for a pre-recorded cassette. One plus one… one side what you like, one side whatever you like.” After a year, the “1+1” pattern on the packaging was minimised to a single logo at the bottom of the front cover of the cassette, which otherwise matched the regular release of the album, and would instead feature the title album in full on each side, giving you the option to record over one side. This series was discontinued in 1983, but continued in the United States by Mango Records, Island’s ska and reggae label.

This would have been particularly attractive at the time to people who made copies of their vinyl albums for home use, or on their recently-acquired Sony Walkman, as the forty-minute duration of the average LP meant two of them could fit onto a C90 cassette. The attraction of buying an album on higher-quality tape stock, and adding another of your own to take advantage of the same tape, will have made “1+1” a sensible option at the record store. 

However, with the marketing blurb mentioning that its cost would be lower than usually expected, I originally thought “1+1” was a novel way of packaging album re-releases. But 1981 was the year “Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places” was first released, and the “1+1” version was simultaneously released alongside the standard cassette format which, in being able to use both sides of the tape, used half the amount of tape. Meanwhile, chrome tape didn’t cost much more to buy than standard ferric tape, but its use as a selling point is more interesting today.

 

In 2017, I wrote that many of the advances in cassette technology, from types of tape used to Dolby noise reduction, are no longer available to new adopters of the format [link]. Buy a new blank cassette, and it will only be standard ferric tape, otherwise known as IEC Type I, which was established once new formulations of tape were created by manufacturers like BASF, that turned Philips’s original Compact Cassette from a medium for dictation into a higher fidelity format suitable for music. However, Type II chrome, Type III “ferro-chrome” and Type IV “metal” tapes, using different compounds to increase dynamic range and fidelity, haven’t been made for some time, although you now have the option of paying premium prices for the “new old stock” that remains...

 

...provided your cassette recorder can make use of the different tape formats. With the “Tanishin” China-manufactured cassette mechanism being effectively the last remaining cassette mechanism still being manufactured, and the only new cassette recorder I can find that still currently manufactured to record to chrome tapes, while also accounting for the maximum output levels, bias levels and time constants of different tape types, turns out to be the professional-grade Tascam 202MKVII and its TEAC-branded consumer version, costing from £400 to £600. In short, making serious use of cassettes as a recording medium in the way it used to be requires you to invest in old equipment that can take advantage of the advantages chrome tape could offer, and probably old tapes as well.

 

Side B of my copy of “Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places” is still blank after forty years and, unless someone buys me the Tascam unit, that is how it will have to stay.

HIT IT, PAUSE IT, RECORD AND PLAY [82]

Modern-day ingenuity means that popular forms of old technology can have their useful lives extended far longer than ever intended. For example, I have a 1983 BBC Micro computer, sadly no longer working, which could connect to my TV via a SCART lead, and could save BASIC programs to an SD card.

Likewise, improvements in sound recording and playback mean we can play new vinyl records that sound as good as CDs, through heavier records, cutting the groove at a slower speed, and direct-drive turntables. Even CDs sound better through 24-bit mastering not available when they were introduced, meaning my 2015 copy of David Bowie’s album “Never Let Me Down” sounds louder, more dynamic and clearer than my 1987 copy, which I only bought because Bowie hated his song “Too Dizzy” enough to delete it from all future reissues.

However, with retailers now offering more cassette players and blank tapes for sale than seen in the last ten or fifteen years, including various devices to copy cassettes to MP3 format, I must point out the new players and tapes will sound WORSE than what you threw away, or gave away, all those years ago, because the improvements made to cassettes when they were popular are no longer made.

When Philips introduced the Compact Cassette in 1962, the virtue of its compactness – the earlier RCA tape cartridge, as well as Sony’s later Elcaset, were the size of a VHS cassette – was outweighed by its lack of actual sound fidelity. Running at a quarter of a speed of then-conventional reel-to-reel tape, and on tape about half as wide, the iron oxide-coated “ferric” tape rendered only enough to use in dictation, and little else. The introduction, in 1972, of tape using a chromium dioxide coating, known as “chrome” or “Type II,” began the slow replacement of pre-recorded 8-track cartridges with tapes that could would be wound backwards as well as forwards, while 1979’s “Type IV” or “metal” tapes, using iron or chromium instead of their oxides, meant you could start approaching CD quality – “Type III” was a combination of the first two types by Sony, which did not last beyond the mid-1970s.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous hiss of tapes could be reduced if your recorder incorporated Dolby Noise Reduction, with Dolby B being the first consumer standard introduced in 1968, followed by Dolby C in 1980, and Dolby S in 1989, just as CD sales began impacting cassettes. Unlike the industry standard Dolby A and SR, Dolby B and C were directed at the higher and lower frequencies at which the hiss would be heard, but Dolby S improved the whole dynamic range.

For anyone in the market for a new cassette player, I can now tell you that just about EVERYTHING I have just told you will be unavailable. Unless you can find someone selling unopened old stock, you will only find the base level Type I tapes available, for only these are still made. Even worse, Dolby stopped licensing their noise reduction systems a number of years ago, concentrating their efforts on digital and home cinema systems instead. Even worse, because modern hi-fi systems are not concerned with including cassette players, you can expect the overall quality of the players themselves to be less than before, although making sure the playback heads are clean and aligned always help. Playing back a Dolby-encoded tape will still work, but you just won’t get the benefit.

If you are prepared for the expense of matching the cassette experience you remember having, you may well have to buy your old system back from eBay – you may find me there, trying to buy a replacement BBC Micro.