Home taping is killing music
Posted by Radiocafé on 13 Mar 2009 at 10:48 am |
Category: 1. General Music
Do you remember when albums contained the deadly skull and crossbones warning symbol “home taping is killing music”? This was one of the biggest myths of the day, as it was home taping that actually kept a lot of the music alive at all.
Here’s how home taping would ordinarily work. You would buy a pack of TDK D90 cassettes from Woolies, load one up into your Amstrad twin cassette tower system, and tape your favourite show off of Radio 1 (or in my case, also Radio 2). You would listen to the recording you made on your Sony Walkman and identify the tunes you needed to go out and buy. You would then head off to Our Price and purchase the album. You might copy the album using your dad’s better quality separates system (with belt drive automatic turntable) and give the cassette of the album to your mate. Your mate would then listen to the tape you did him on his Panasonic Way, and love the new music that you provided to him so much that he would go out and buy the 12 inch of the lead track, and probably the album too. He’d then do you a tape of one of his records and you’d then need to go down to Our Price to get hold of some 12 inches and singles and albums of your own. And so it goes on.
Taping off the radio was something that most of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s did. I probably now have a thousand tapes from Radios 1 & 2, pirate radio and local radio and am still trying to hunt down many of the tracks featured on the shows I recorded. I am very sad that the compact cassette has now come to the end of its life span - you won’t find a new, decent single cassette deck these days anywhere, nor for that matter a Woolworths in which to buy one.
Most people will not lament the passing of the tape deck, but apart from the brilliant minidisc, nothing has since come along to replace the lowly cassette. Who records off the radio nowadays? And even if you plug a wire into your PC, how do you get your recording from your computer to your car in less than around five separate stages? The cassette will be in your Blaupunkt long before you have saved and edited your MP3 file onto iTunes and your iPod and then plugged this in awkwardly to the ugly slot on the front of your Clio’s fascia.
And let’s put another myth to rest: “cassettes were terrible quality”. Yes they were, if you bought a Kisho player from Argos and used the ferric tapes you bought up the market. But take a classic tape deck like the Yamaha KX580 Special Edition (”Special Edition” meaning it was tuned especially for the British), use a decent TDK SA cassette, record your best Steely Dan LP from your Rega turntable, and you would be hard pushed to tell any difference in sound quality from a CD. Pure analogue heaven. Compare this to the best quality MP3 and when played through decent gear the “lowly” cassette will win the sonic battle hands down.
The iPod has its place, and does many things brilliantly. It is convenient, amazingly well designed, has supermodel looks, and holds a British Library quantity of tracks. But be honest, it doesn’t do some things all that well. It looks silly when it is plugged in to one of those plastic speaker docks. Podcasts are great, but will you really be playing your favourite podcasts in the car in 10 years or giving these to your mates to have a listen? And who decides which podcasts you can get, you and the timer-record setting on your Pioneer Midi System, or the broadcaster? And do you really want to have to plug your music into your car’s stereo with a wire every time you want to listen to your favourite collection of tunes? Plus, no-one ever had trouble moving their entire cassette collection to their new Walkman.
Yes, cassettes wore out, snapped, the cases smashed violently when you dropped them, and those TDK engineers must have been football referees as for some strange reason the cassette world existed in two halves of 45 minutes. But these failings aside, the little cassette is a wonderful thing that deserves more credit for what it actually did for the music industry.
Home taping was never killing the music industry, it was helping to keep it alive. The real irony here is that it is the music industry that has in fact killed home taping. And it is the iPod that has in fact killed music. Between the old, illegal version of Napster and other such file swapping sites, and Skydrive these days, so many of the iPod generation have acquired what seems to be just about every track in the world - for free.
So where are the stickers on our CDs these days proclaiming “home MP3ing has killed music”?
Langers @ Radiocafe
March 2009
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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“I probably now have a thousand tapes from Radios 1 & 2, pirate radio and local radio and am still trying to hunt down many of the tracks featured on the shows I recorded.”
Bear in mind that- almost certainly for most of the pirate stuff, but also likely for some of the Radio 1/2 shows- you may well have the only copy in existence.
I sometimes wonder if the modern age has too much obsession with recovering and keeping material that was only ever intended as ephemeral. Still, my gut reaction is that little enough of that stuff probably survives and it’s probably of enough historical interest to make it worth making the effort to keep.
I’d keep- and digitise- those tapes.
“Who records off the radio nowadays? And even if you plug a wire into your PC, how do you get your recording from your computer to your car in less than around five separate stages?”
My TV card has a built-in FM radio, though I have to confess that I’ve never really used it. Or you could capture the stream from online Internet radio.
“The cassette will be in your Blaupunkt long before you have saved and edited your MP3 file onto iTunes and your iPod and then plugged this in awkwardly to the ugly slot on the front of your Clio’s fascia.”
Yes, but to some extent you’re hobbling the iPod’s case by tying it to the cassette way of doing things. In reality, for the majority of cases you’d download the podcast, and you probably don’t need to edit the MP3 file if you start and stop it at the right time- just like you’d do with the cassette!
“And let’s put another myth to rest: “cassettes were terrible quality”. Yes they were, if you bought a Kisho player from Argos and used the ferric tapes you bought up the market.”
Hey! I liked my Kisho cassette deck. Even if the quality wasn’t **** hot in retrospect
“Compare this to the best quality MP3 and when played through decent gear the “lowly” cassette will win the sonic battle hands down.”
I agree that cassettes have been unfairly maligned, but so- to some extent- have MP3s, on the back of some poor-quality 128 kbps transfers done using primitive early encoders. 256 kbps VBR with a good encoder? Might not be quite CD quality, but it’s not going to be bad either.
“Podcasts are great, but will you really be playing your favourite podcasts in the car in 10 years or giving these to your mates to have a listen?”
Why not? I’m sure that you see these things as ephemeral, but so was most mainstream use of cassettes- and they were seen that way- regardless of what the higher-end tape/deck combos were capable of.
You could honestly imagine ’70s LP owners saying the same about cassettes.
“And do you really want to have to plug your music into your car’s stereo with a wire every time you want to listen to your favourite collection of tunes?”
That’s more a problem with the fact that many cars still in use only have tape decks.
“Plus, no-one ever had trouble moving their entire cassette collection to their new Walkman.”
Not a problem if you stick with “real” MP3s! The trouble lies with Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the likes of iTunes and- worse- MS’s multiple half-baked incompatible schemes. But even iTunes are supposedly getting rid of DRM on music.
“And it is the iPod that has in fact killed music [..] so many of the iPod generation have acquired what seems to be just about every track in the world - for free.”
The record industry had the chance to move with the times when Napster rose to prominence almost ten years ago. They resisted for years, moving from ignoring it to being outright hostile to launching limited online schemes that had PITA DRM and were mostly inferior to the “illegal” services (*not* counting the price). One almost suspects that these schemes were designed to fail so they could use them as an example.
Meanwhile a generation got used to getting their music for free.
It’s desirable that artists should be able to make a decent living recording music, and I don’t like the idea that recorded music should be reliant on being a free promo for live concerts in order to fund itself. Still, the existing (”old”) recorded music industry was always an abusive, exploitative and unfair system loaded in the big companies’ favour, and they made plenty of money from their position.
No-one owes *them* anything.
You make some excellent comments, Michael.
“I sometimes wonder if the modern age has too much obsession with recovering and keeping material that was only ever intended as ephemeral. Still, my gut reaction is that little enough of that stuff probably survives and it’s probably of enough historical interest to make it worth making the effort to keep.”
The problem here is that much of the material I have recorded over the years represents music that you will not find being broadcast these days: light music; what used to be know as “popular music” - now labeled as crooners or easy listening I guess; dance bands - these have little to no airplay these days. And what is also lacking is broadcasting talent. I grew up listening to presenters such as Alan Dell, Steve Race, Ray Moore and Benny Green and I would much rather re-listen to these shows than the celebrity faces that Radio 2 mostly comprises these days. Yes, Stuart Maconie is a very good broadcaster; but what if I prefer something other than rock and pop and dance music, where do I find an alternative? Gladly, through my tape collection.
I have resorted to digitising the collection, but it is a slow process. It amazes me how many companies have got on the “digitise your tapes” bandwagon, offering dedicated USB cassette decks (and same for records players too). But all you really need is a twin phone to 3.5 lead and you can plug this directly into your PC and do the exactly same. Why pay £100 for one of those plastic Ion cassette decks when you can get the Yamaha one I mentioned for about £20 off eBay, albeit second hand? The quality will so much better from the used, three head Yamaha.
But the problem with digitising the sound is an inevitable loss in quality. Even at 256 kbps there will be a big loss of original material, which is why analogue wins the battle over digital every time. It kind of has to, since the very nature of any digital source is that it samples parts of the original, whereas analogue gives you the whole lot. Therefore, what you hear is all to do with the equipment you put your recording through. For the most part, using an iPod and an average pair of headphones you probably will not notice. But while a decent amp and speakers will always magnify the failings of the sampled, digital recording, it will explore and enhance the equivalent analogue original.
It is sad to say that the spiritual 21st century replacement for my Yamaha cassette decks has also been discontinued. The marvelous Yamaha HD-1500/1300 hard drive recorder is able to digitise at CD quality levels and even improve on CDs (it stretches the data of the CD to get more info out of it, it’s all very technical), or can do a straight analogue recording. No sampling or loss of quality or need to turn on your PC. But the PC rules these day, and the Yamaha deck is also confined to hifi history.
It seems that these days convenience and style take priority over quality. This seems to be true not just of the media on which we listen to the music, but also the source material itself.
FWIW, regarding your recordings of old shows, I was thinking more from the point of view of archiving things for posterity rather than personal use. Of course, your argument is perfectly reasonable, it’s just coming from a different perspective.
“Why pay £100 for one of those plastic Ion cassette decks when you can get the Yamaha one I mentioned for about £20 off eBay, albeit second hand? The quality will so much better from the used, three head Yamaha.”
Well, yeah. Most people who care about this will already have a cassette deck anyway, and probably a better quality model than one being sold for £100 or so with the intent of being used a few times then put away.
It’s being sold as an “all-in-one” convenience, but if someone is converting their collection with the intention of using the MP3s (or whatever), then they’ll have a *second* unused deck (or video recorder or record player) to stick in the attic beside their current one.
The other silly thing is that the Ion is being sold as a solution for transferring music, so why did they bother including *2* decks?
“The marvelous Yamaha HD-1500/1300 hard drive recorder is able to digitise at CD quality levels and even improve on CDs (it stretches the data of the CD to get more info out of it, it’s all very technical)”
You can’t really stretch more info out of a CD than is already there, it’s just that a very clever machine and well-designed machine can make it seem like that. Which is what it’s all about in the end!
“…digitising the sound is an inevitable loss in quality [..] analogue wins the battle over digital every time [..] since the very nature of any digital source is that it samples parts of the original”
Here’s the problem- while that’s true in theory, it’s not very helpful in practice.
(Apologies in advance, some of the following is a bit longwinded and badly explained).
While a cassette deck may be analogue- it (or indeed any analogue recording device) cannot, no matter how good it is, perfectly record and reproduce an analogue input.
There are limits inherent in the physical and electronic design of (e.g.) cassette tape and decks that restrict what they can do in terms of copying and reproduction.
Yes, digital- or rather the initial digitisation of a signal- is inherently an approximation. However, this only has to be done once, and then it can be copied *perfectly* an arbitrary number of times. This irony is that it’s precisely because digitisation approximates a signal to a finite but *clearly defined* level of precision that this can be done.
No matter how good you think your analogue copy is, to be exact it has to match the original signal to an infinite level of detail. Which is of course impossible, because no machine can be perfect and there’s no way of checking for and correcting mistakes to infinite precision. Think you’ve got it good enough? Look closer. Good enough? Look closer. Good enough?… etc.
In truth, the issue is whether a particular form of digitised signal is better than a particular form of analogue signal (still an approximation of sorts for the reasons mentioned above).
Some would argue that (e.g.) vinyl is better than CD because CD’s sampling rate and resolution aren’t *that* high. Whether or not that’s true, it only covers one particular digital format vs. one particular analogue one, not the general principle of digital vs. analogue.
You might lose quality when *converting* the digital signal to another format- e.g. MP3 throws away some information, so *will* lose quality over a CD- but you don’t *have* to convert it. And once converted, you can still copy it over and over again without losing quality further.
Going back to the original topic for a moment, I would concur 100% that home taping was not killing music, if anything as previously suggested the recording of radio shows in particular often led to the purchase of records. It would be very rare that the person making the recording would otherwise have bought every song played on the show, but very likely that he (or she) would want to buy the best tracks to play on vinyl (or CD) rather than fast forward and rewind the cassette tape to find them. Also, a song can be a “grower” and playing the tape through several times would bring familiarity to the tracks possibly resulting in a purchase. The record industry is to blame for the decline in record and CD sales by its unfair pricing strategy that forced the closure of almost all our local record stores to make us buy from big chain stores like HMV, Our Price and Woolworths. No more can we pop into the local shop in a high street and make a purchase from the knowledgeable person behind the counter, we have to park in a pay and display shopping centre car park and hustle shoulder to shoulder with grocery and clothes shoppers to get to a huge department store where the sales staff are on work experience or working to pay off their student loans and know nothing about music. Want to listen to some CD’s before you buy? Forget it! After making buying a record a day’s outing with a packed lunch, they didn’t want us to download it either! Had they embraced the Internet from day one, it may not have saved the record shops, but it would certainly have made buying music easier and more attractive. I am far more likely (and do) buy a dozen downloads from Napster or itunes from the comfort of my home than spend two hours searching through endless racks of CD’s at HMV and end up walking out in frustration!
As far as formats are concerned I agree that the cassette was capable of excellent reproduction, I was lucky enough to be able to afford a Nakamichi BX300 and a Denon DRM-650S (which I still have in my studio). I also could afford TDK SA tapes, however, compatibility between machines was a major issue. Such factors as head alignment (azimuth), bias and eq settings meant that a recording made on the Nakamichi only sounded great if it was played back on the same machine… and the car tape player was a whole different story again. At 1 7/8 inches per second speed on 1/8″ tape over 4 tracks (2 for stereo in each direction) there is no way the cassette was ever going to sound like the master recording made on a 2″ tape at 30ips! It just isn’t possible in analogue. Then there were the various types of Dolby noise reduction, B, C and S. None of which were compatible with each other and each requiring accurate calibration of bias and Dolby levels to work correctly. TDK SA may have been very good tape, but if the manufacturer of the machine set the bias for Maxell or other tapes, then the TDK would not perform correctly unless the machine was re-calibrated to the TDK bias level - and the Dolby also required re-calibration! For this you need all manner of expensive test equipment and an engineer to do it!
and finally… did anyone ever own two cassette decks that ran at the same speed?!! Phew! Sorry, but our ears can deceive us. Just because it is possible to good get results, there are too many variables for the cassette ever to be a truly dependable hi-fi format.
At least with mp3 our digital recordings and players are compatible. Use a high bit rate and mp3 beats cassette every time.
Another factor to consider is the choice of compression. Let’s not forget that MPEG is not the only option. I recently carried out extensive tests between various types of compression and bit-rates and found that ogg.vorbis, bit rate for bit rate is far superior to any MPEG format. Ogg.vorbis uses a “Q” or “quality” setting rather than a specific bit rate. The scale is set from Q1 to Q10, Q1 being the lowest quality and Q10 the highest. At Q7 it uses a variable bit rate (VBR) of around 192kbps, but this rate increases or decreases automatically according to the complexity and detail in the recording and uses a higher or lower bite rate accordingly. Overall at Q7, the file size is a bit larger than mp3 at 192kbps but out performs mp3 set at much higher rates. My solar radio show is compressed using ogg.vorbis at Q7 and sent via an ftp server to the radio station and the results are superb making it hard to tell the difference between a live studio broadcast and my recording. Of course an ogg.vorbis encoded file has to be decoded by an ogg.vorbis decoder, but if you really want near CD quality in manageable files, it is the way to go.
On a final note about analogue vs digital, it is fair to say that a cheap CD player will always sound better than a cheap turntable. Let’s not also forget that almost all recording studios are digital, so the audio signal is “digitized” at source, long before you place your analogue vinyl disc on your Linn turntable. Rather defeats the object I think? I own a very good analogue turntable and I consider myself to be an “audiophile”, not an expert I hasten to add, but certainly I understand and appreciate elements such as sound-stage, depth and detailed definition of sound and whilst I get fantastic results from vinyl, my Arcam CD player out performs my £1500 turntable / arm with its £400 phono preamp in almost all comparative tests. I mention the prices not to show off, believe me the system is quite modest compared to some high end kit available, but it serves to demonstrate that at all price levels digital offers better pound for pound results than analogue.
A very interesting read. I do agree that the cassette suffered from its drawbacks, but also that it didn’t sound as bad as it is percieved. On the whole, a decent Yamaha deck and AD90 was probably superior to an MP3 at anything below 128kbps. And we usually played our cassettes through quality hi-fi gear and car stereos, not these awful plastic ipod docks and radio transmitters. But yes, cassette did have serious failings too.
The main problem these days for me is the requirement to turn on my PC to access my music, record radio shows etc.. The hifi manufacturers have been slow to come up with viable and compatible alternatives that connect to the internet and bypass the PC.
Pure’s new egg shaped internet radio sensation (see this month’s What HiFi) and the ipod Touch are the notable exceptions, plus also the AE/Magicbox Imp Internet radios which are true innovations.The Connects2 kit for my car is also brilliant, as I can connect my first generation Sony MP3 player (which ironically won’t play MP3s, only ATRAC) to the head unit via the CD changer lead and operate it directly from the main display, with all the info from the player.Yes, ATRAC is the Betamax for the 21st century, but like Ogg Vorbis at highest quality setting it sounds superb.