So Rush has been making the rounds of the collective unconscious recently. Never really having listened to Rush much, I was hoping to make this post a roundup of first impressions of the band from listening to four tapes I bought at a yard sale a few years ago and never really played.
2112, A Farewell to Kings, Permanent Waves, and Grace Under Pressure
Well, first of all, I can tell you that, natural affinities notwithstanding, I don’t like Rush. But, although I made it through 2112 and A Farewell to Kings, neither of which I thought was much good, I wasn’t really able to listen to Permanent Waves or Grace Under Pressure because the goddamn tapes wouldn’t play correctly in my car. Grace Under Pressure is so muffled that I can’t barely make out the contours of a song, while Permanent Waves makes this horrendous screeching sound whenever it’s playing. Therefore, I can’t really form much of an impression of these records. So instead of a post about not liking Rush much, I am instead going to write a post about completely hating cassette tapes.
- Tapes are inconvenient to listen to. You cannot skip to a particular track on a tape. I do not regret the loss of the repeated-fast-forward-to-get-to-that-song experience.
- Tapes sound like crap. I know there are people who claim to like the way tapes sound. My brother is among them. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that, in some situations, a brand-new or well-preserved tape can sound acceptable. However, I don’t believe that tapes sound better than a high-quality mp3 played through either a good-quality tape adapter or an FM adapter, and they certainly do not compare to the sound of a CD player.
- Tapes are physically inconvenient. Compared to CDs, they are physically bulky and awkwardly shaped. The cases break at the drop of a hat, which is a problem because:
- Tapes are fragile. You can’t keep them in the car because they’ll get damaged by the sun (I managed to listen to my Wild America tape ONCE before it got damaged). They can come unraveled in your player- this once happened to a copy of The Many Moods of the Vindictives that I borrowed from a friend, and I ended up completely destroying the tape trying to get it back together. I don’t know what happened to my copy of Permanent Waves, but at least if it was a CD I could have looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s scratched,” and saved my quarter. You can rip a CD five minutes after you buy it and then run the disc over with a car and you can still listen to the music.
Now wait a minute. LPs are even more inconvenient than tapes, and lots of people do vinyl-only releases. In fact, Mr. Mee, haven’t you yourself bought 20 or so LPs this year alone?
Yes, I have, but the only things that LPs and cassettes have in common is that they’re analog media that have been supplanted as the primary method of distribution for music. Vinyl records have a number of advantages that are not provided by tapes.
- Superior sound quality. I’m not an audiophile, but I’ve heard people who are claim that vinyl records sound better than any other medium. I can’t say the same for tapes (my brother is not an audiophile).
- Collectability. LPs hold value better than any other medium. You can buy old tapes for a quarter.
- Sex appeal. I dare anyone to tell me a tape is sexy. LPs may not be sexy either but at least it’s debatable. Call it “fun” if you prefer.
- Historical connection. Wax, vinyl and lacquer discs were the standard in the record industry for sixty years. Tapes were a convenience product.
Despite all this, like Rush, cassette tapes have recently undergone something of a resurgence in popularity. To prove it, here are some of the releases that I have acquired on tape in the last year or so:
Muhammidali/ Black Congress, The Teenage Kicks, Mammoth Grinder, Wild America, B L A C K I E
So if I hate tapes so much, why did I buy these? Because they were cassette-only releases. (The Teenage Kicks records did eventually come out on LP, and I happily bought it again!). Is that a price tag on the BLACKIE tape? Why yes- I paid SIX DOLLARS for that cassette, which came wrapped in a folded-up piece of paper.
I do not understand the comeback of cassettes. Tapes were great in the ’80s when there was no other way to listen to music in your car, and in the ’90s when CD burners were a specialty product and CD-Rs were 5 bucks a pop. For many people, a tape player remains the best option for playing an iPod in the car. But jesus, in this day and age, we’re doing new releases on tapes?
I recently ran across a couple of cases that represent, to me, the pinnacle of the tape movement. First, I got the following press release from Polyvinyl records in my e-mail:
Joan Of Arc Limited Edition Cassette Box Set Due September 14, 2010 On Joyful Noise Recordings!
Joan of Arc are great, and I understand that the ongoing slo-mo implosion of the business model for rock music has led people to scramble for creative ways to sell shit to their fans. But a Box Set of Cassette Tapes? WHY GOD?
Second, the Houston band Young Mammals recently released a remastered version of their LP Carrots on cassette (it’s also available on the web). My question here is, why pay good money to master a record if you’re just going to put it on a fucking cassette? Why not just dump the mixed record onto cassette with the gain turned up? You’ll get sufficient compression just from that, which is one of primary goals of mastering anyway. I mastered my first band’s first record using this method. I went back and listened to it last night, and while I’m not going to pretend that anything on that record sounds *good*, it is sufficiently compressed for comfortable playback.
This brings me to another point, which is that I need to say “thank you” and “I’m sorry” to anybody who listened to that record and/or watched that band play, because there is some really terrible stuff on the record. In addition, if anybody out there has ever listened to anything I’ve done since then and remembers it as anything other than an embarrassing waste of time, they need to be thankful that I was able to have the experience of being in my first band in college, because they have been saved from something that really, really sucked.
. . . but not as much as tapes.
(P.S. One of the first songs that that band played was “Closer to the Heart,” by Rush.)
Permanent Waves makes this horrendous screeching sound whenever it’s playing
That’s just Geddy’s voice. It’s much worse on the early albums than on the later albums, when he dialed back the screeching a bit. Anyway, the problem with your particular collection of Rush albums is that it doesn’t include Moving Pictures, which walks the line between their early noodly inclinations and their later overproduced pop songs. There was a time when I thought I liked Rush and a time when I swore them off, but now I listen to them only occasionally, mostly owing to nostalgia. I wouldn’t really be surprised if you never figure out what appeal Rush holds, since you don’t have any memories attached to hearing the intro to “Limelight.”
I agree with all your points on cassette tapes. I hate them. And I earned that hatred, because until the mid-90s, there wasn’t really an inexpensive way to record things. You pretty much had to put up with the cassette’s noise and limited dynamic range if you ever wanted to capture something of your own, instead of listening only to the things the music industry foisted on you. Mind you, the industry cared not a whit whether the music they were selling you came on substandard media. The pre-recorded cassettes (as opposed to blank ones) were always of the lowest quality, both in tape composition and shell construction. I almost never bought new albums on cassette, because I could get something that sounded better and would last longer by buying a record and recording it onto a higher quality blank cassette. It was a pain, so I have no idea why people are nostalgic for them. Then again, I don’t understand the proliferation of Sally Jesse Raphael glasses the kids are wearing these days either. So yeah, nostalgia: another parallel cassettes have with Rush.
Also, I scaled your photos. 565, people. 565.
I echo Justin’s 565, and reiterate some advice I gave earlier. If you’ve got a Windows machine, install Windows Live Writer. It’s the easiest way to insert videos and photos and make your post look exactly how you want it to look. Since I don’t use Mac, I can’t offer a similar tool. But I’m told this is one of the rare areas where Windows software outdoes anything Mac offers.
To insert these photos, I used WordPress’s built-in Flash uploader with the default settings for “Medium.” If someone could explain which part of that needs to be done differently, that would be very helpful. The page loaded and looked fine in my browser after I inserted the photos, so “565″ doesn’t really tell me anything.
The problem is the uploader doesn’t know anything about the theme we use and if you post something that is bigger than our theme’s center column, it spills over into the right column and looks really stupid. Just remember that if your image or embedded video’s width is greater than 565, it’s going to spill over. Also, if it’s much less than 565, you might get a bunch of whitespace. The latter is far preferable to the former, but since it’s easy (and fun!) to scale images, there’s no reason our images shouldn’t be like the third bowl of porridge: just right.
Since this micro-thread has exceeded the 5 comment limit, I’ll add here that Danny’s point is that he probably would like to know how to scale the photos. Okay, I want to know. Sure, the uploader is pretty dumb, but then again, so am I.
Ah, okay. To scale a video or image, look at the HTML tags. You will see something like:
‹img src=”http://someimage.com” width=”999″ height=”888″/›
Anything with “xxx=’yyy’” is a parameter in an HTML tag. The “width” and “height” parameters are used to define how big an image is on the page. Sometimes those parameters won’t be in the tag at all, and in those cases, you can just add the “height” and “width” parameters. To scale an image, you want to change “height” by the same ratio that you change “width,” otherwise the image will look stretched. So, in the example above, we want to change a width of “123″ to “565,” so we find a ratio there: 565/999=.57. Next we apply that ratio to the height: .57 x 888 = 506. The new tag will look like this:
‹img src=”http://someimage.com” width=”565″ height=”506″/›
When scaling embedded videos, note that you will usually need to change the size in two places. Here actual YouTube embedding code:
‹object width=”480″ height=”385″›‹param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/uwXjnVICb3I&hl=en_US&fs=1″›‹/param›‹param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”›‹/param>‹param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”›‹/param›‹embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/uwXjnVICb3I&hl=en_US&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”480″ height=”385″›‹/embed›‹/object›
In practice, the second set of height/width parameters are the ones that actually have an effect on how the video looks, but go ahead and change them both. The scaled video embed code looks like this:
‹object width=”565″ height=”453″›‹param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/uwXjnVICb3I&hl=en_US&fs=1″›‹/param›‹param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”›‹/param>‹param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”›‹/param›‹embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/uwXjnVICb3I&hl=en_US&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”565″ height=”453″›‹/embed›‹/object›
So yeah, nostalgia: another parallel cassettes have with Rush.
I have brought this up in comments before, but I was introduced to the Sony Walkman and Rush’s Moving Pictures at the same time in junior high and was completely blown away both by the album and the technology. This bit of nostalgia comes to mind all the time – especially several years back now when people started wearing white ear phones all of a sudden on train commutes as if the idea to have music in their ears was invented by Apple.
We wore the ribbon right out of all our tapes back in the day. Re-recording over cassettes we thought sucked by putting tape over the protector holes; using jam boxes to record our farts; using two jam boxes to “multi-track.” But barring the introduction of the Walkman and the ability to jam a tiny speaker in your ear, cassette sound quality was not something you heard many people holding in high regard. I guess all the fond nostalgia of this technology is solely centered around the culture of mix tapes –the “read my blog” of my generation.
I’m amused by the cassette “comeback” as well as the SJR glasses and the high waist “mother” pants. it seems very predictable and an obvious result of kids trying to reach into the darkest corners of pawn shops, thrift shops, and their parents garages and closets for the cheapest most offensive crap they can find so that others will just say, ewww, i never thought i’d see THAT come back – cassettes, SJR glasses, parachute pants (in the 00s), bell bottoms (in the 90s), 8-tracks (in the 90s), etc. 78rpm records and/or piano rolls are next, mark my words.
For my part i’m trying to find some music that is unreproducible, a one of a kind music box type thing. the cassette seems to have a hint of that to them, but only because who the hell owns a cassette deck these days? All i have is crappy handheld one and a broken one in the car.
oh and echo Justin on Rush, Moving Pictures is where it’s at, though one may need to be a teen when first listening to it, not sure.
Verily, I too hate K7s. Like you say they were a convenience format and with the advent of MP3s they are merely an annoying retro-format. I don’t buy them because I never much cared for them and secondly my car doesn’t even have a K7 player anymore. The few times I’ve bought them in recent years they have merely caught dust.
That said Rush’s Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves are my faves. Plus how would we toboggan safely without Geddy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwpGXfHmY-A
I just read the lyrics to “The Trees.” Fuck Rush in the eye.
oh no, you have to avoid the lyrics as much as you can. on that note I once had a waitress (at Baba Yega’s I believe) quote me from Free Will upon my expressing my inability to decide what to order. ewww.
Ha Ha ha No way! That is awesome. I’d tip extra for Rush quotes!
K7? Really?
I was wondering if anyone was going to give Ramon a hard time about that.
Dude you speak French, it reads Kah-sette. You know that. I’ve used that abbreviation for years.
I know it, yes, but I still think it’s hilarious. I just never knew “cassette” needed a cute catchphrase tacked onto it. You’re so cute!
I think the only thing that never scored one was the 8-Track but that’s because it’s name is so cute to begin with….No wait, the Edison Wax Cylinder really needs something less cumbersome and cute.
Let’s call the wax cylinder the Cee-Lind.
Easily the most pompous thing he’s said in the last, uh, 5 minutes.
Or is that, “Sept mee-noots”?
The one album that sounds better to me on tape than on CD is the original Island release of Wedding Present’s Bizarro. Hearing it on CD, it sounds like a tinny mess.
Haven’t heard the remastered Bizarro, though.
This is interesting. If I were to guess, I’d say it was mastered to compensate for some of the high frequency deficiencies of cassettes and then was never re-mastered for CD. So you’re hearing the exaggeration. Again, this is just a guess.
That makes sense. It did come out in the 80s, and I’ve heard a lot of albums then were mastered to sound best not just in cassette decks, but on car stereos.
“There’s a whole underground hipster scene for cassettes,” Garza says. “In Brooklyn there are maybe two or three cassette-only stores.”
AAAAAAARRRRGHGHGHGHG
Are you really surprised?
It’s the job of every new generation to shake up the previous generations. Usually they do this by offending their mores, but what happens when the previous generation is practically impervious to offense? It seems the response of this generation is to be the most annoying twits that they can be.
Didn’t see that coming.
The floorboard contents of my 97 Golf could be a goldmine. I’ve actually been thinking about doing a podcast made up of songs from cassettes in my car.
Ok OK enough of the cassette bashing. It’s obvious that you all never heard a well recored cassette. I agree with most of the comments on cassette resurgence (hipster BS), but a well recorded cassette on good tape stock is at least as good as CD and often better. Not as convienient to skip songs, but IT IS ANALOGUE. I still think LP is best if the recording’s audio chain is all analogue, but hey, that’s me.
Problem is, most of the people writing here have crappy tapes and are listening to them on crappy equipment.
A couple of years before cassettes went defunct, Dolby came out with Dolby “S” which gives cassettes a S/N ratio of around 84db; VERY close to that of a CD and still analogue. Granted these cassette decks cost a fortune new, they are quite cheap now and the performance is very good. Stay away from Sony though… Never liked their sound.
Bottom line… Good analogue so far always beats digital. Our ears listen in analogue; that may have something to do with it.
But why listen to me… My system uses vacuum tubes from the 1930′s throughout the signal chain; I am a luddite I guess. But it sure sounds nice!
Daniel
I don’t find the argument “analog is better than digital” particularly compelling, but it is interesting to hear about Dolby S. Although considering that you can’t buy a Dolby-S-compatible cassette deck for your car (at least as far as I can tell), I still don’t see what advantage it offers over digital media in terms of convenience, or over LP in terms of analog fetishism.
I’ll go to my grave arguing that the problem with CDs is that when they were released, and for the next decade after that (and arguably even now), digital mastering was in its infancy, at least relative to analog mastering, which has been around for the last hundred years or so, in some form or another. I’ve compared CDs released in 1986 to remasters of the same albums in 2006, and 20 years makes a HUGE difference. There’s nothing wrong with digital recording, it’s just taken some time for the mastering techniques to catch up.
Jeez… Y’all are holding me to task…. And I thought that my “because I said so” argument would be compelling enough of an argument against digital. OK.
1st of all, CDs have way too low of a sample rate, 44.1 Khz. This is barely over twice the frequency of the upper limits of human hearing. 44.1 Khz is all good and well for bass and mid-frequencies, but when it comes to high (treble) frequencies, it is grossly inadequate. Think of the sound of cymbals being hit on your favorite CD. They don’t sound “right”. The decay of a cymbal on a CD is terrible.
2nd, sound (music and voice) is mainly comprised of sine waves or several sine waves superimposed upon one another. Digital reproduction is the integration of those sounds. IE. They are a integrated reproduction of those waves. Remember, digital is bianary, “ones” and “zeros” of data. Ones are “on” and zeros are “off” (or maybe it’s the other way around). There is no mid-way. So when the data on a CD is turned back into music, all those “ones” and “zeros” are assembled back into the approximation of the sine waves that comprise music at 44,100 times (samples) per second. Not the best explanation here, but people who have taken Calculus will know what I am talking about. Problem is, each of these “samples” are square, not curved like a sine wave. If the squares are small enough then they will “fit” neatly into the sine waves, but at 44.1 Khz, the squares are too large to fit neatly into musical waves, especially the high frequencies.
SACD was a good attempt at fixing the problems of CD shortfalls as SACD has a sample rate of like 2.8Mhz, if I recall correctly. At 2.8Mhz, the sampling “squares” are so small that any discrepancy is not picked up by the human ear. Unfortunately, SACD never really took off in the consumer market.
And Charlie is correct with the assertion that digital mastering left a lot to be desired in it’s infancy. Anyone remember the ZZ Top “Six Pack”; their 1st 6 albums that came out as a boxed set on CD? What a pile of CRAP that was, because of the remastering. But now, where some aspects have become better in digital mastering, now engineers are making all the levels maxed out to make the music seem louder or whatever. And this has been getting worse as of lately.
Anyway, I don’t buy much music anymore like I used to… But if there is something I really like, I will go out and buy it. My 1st choice is always LP but if it’s not available, then I will get it on CD.
Daniel
Oh, one more thing about Dolby \S\… Yes, no car stereos where made with Dolby \S\, but Dolby \S\ is \backwards\ compatable with Dolby \B\ which most car decks came with.
Daniel
I don’t agree that cymbals sound bad on digital media compared to the tapes that I used to buy albums on. Or objectively for that matter. In addition, the reality of the limitations of a 44.1 sampling rate is much more complicated than I think you’ve made it out to be. For example:
http://stason.org/TULARC/entertainment/audio/pro/5-12-How-can-a-44-1-kHz-sampling-rate-be-enough-to-record.html
In any case, it’s misleading to discuss the limitations of digital media outside the context of all the other limitations on sound quality that exist for all the different recordings that we listen to in all the different contexts in which we listen to them- the technology that was used to make the recording, the quality of the D/A converter or tape head, the properties of the membrane that turns the electrical current into sound, ambient noise, etc. I can’t listen to an LP while I’m doing the dishes, or riding my bike, or in my car, and in those contexts, the combination of average fidelity and convenience delivered by digital media far surpasses that delivered by cassettes, regardless of whether the small number of recordings that are available on very-low-noise cassette have slightly more information than the digital versions of those same recordings.
Therefore, even if it is true that very-low-noise tapes have comparable or even slightly superior “sound quality,” defined as perceptible information about the original waveform, to that of CDs, they are still a product whose time has passed. They were there when we needed them- but now, people ought to stop putting their records on them!
Furthermore, those ZZ Top remasters weren’t bad because they were digital, they were bad because whoever mastered them decided to add things like extra compression and gates for effect.