Quite a bit of wow and volume instability on these tapes. Wonder if this is due to the cassette player quality or the tape being worn.
yes. cassette tape was a shit format. the longer the cassette, the thinner the tape itself was. the type of tape formulation also played into this. the more brown the tape was, the lower quality. higher end tapes were much darker nearly black.
tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.
I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.
A once common sight lost to time is the cassette tape that got eaten by someone's car stereo and thrown out the window (presumably in anger). In later years, broken CDs sometimes made an appearance but nowhere near as frequently as strung out cassettes.
I couldn’t afford too many cassettes growing up. I managed to save a few roadside discards and add them to my collection. I distinctly remember being introduced to Whodini that way while living in the farmlands of Michigan.
we used to collect the AOL CDs and make different art projects with them. from simple hanging mobiles to catch/reflect light to melting them with torches and other ways of using them in random ways.
can't forget the tying cassette tape to your antenna as a streamer. kids today look at cars and ask what's an antenna. no, i don't mean the sharkfin for XM radio.
I think it's interesting how they've worn.
> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.