I got my first tape recorder in 1962.

I’ve owned ten reel machines, four 4-tracks (3 TASCAM 3340s, a 40-4) and a 70-8 8 track with an integrated dbx NR rack. (I have no real idea how many cassette decks, certainly over 25. (The last cost the equivalent of $1500 when it was new in ’94.) I’ll be frank: coming from reel machines, my opinion of cassettes as a music medium is that they were convenient and cheap. You could put a couple in a shirt pocket. You could afford to record hours off the radio or all of band practices. The big problem was the horrible fidelity, high noise, high distortion — and, to me, the worst: terrible time domain accuracy — horrible wow and flutter. I hated the way acoustic guitars and nice pianos sounded on cassette.

I’ll be frank, while I get the ‘unintimidating’ factor and convenience — and I well understand that many interesting projects have been done on cassettes¹ — as someone who spent roughly a decade in and out of commercial studios in the 1980s as a freelance engineer and producer, and who ran a small project studio² for around another decade where at least some of my business revolved around remixing and extending 4 track cassette projects, I really have no fondness for trying to get even semi-serious recordings out of the format. (And, yes, I’ve heard Nebraska. I think it benefitted from being a mostly individual project, but if it’s to be held up as a fidelity standard, I’m unpersuaded.)

I’ll admit, my path and history has bent me to seek fidelity in the tools I commit to use. It was an intense struggle trying to get decent sound without spending a fortune when I was a kid, just as a listener. When I started playing music in college and then drifted into engineering (after ‘returning’ to a local two year college to go through their music department’s then-existent music production program), it was the punk rock era. Money was tight in my circles. You had to really scheme to get a decent sounding record, but if you worked hard, worked creatively, you could.

And, for sure, at first I was highly skeptical of digital. Right off, I thought going with the 44.1 kHz sample rate as a standard for the proposed CD standard was too low. (Professional digital audio for video was already established at 48 kHz, allowing a reconstruction filter band of around 4 kHz above the 20 kHz upper limit of human hearing, which, because of the filtering technologies of the time, was generally considered as making it easier to implement brick wall filtering by the so-called Nyquist point.)

¹ And that there is a certain, thinks-they’re-hipsters, science-and-measurement-denying contingent who maintain religiously that any form of analog is better than any form of digital (and will cite a lot of serious nonsense, often fixating on the so-called ‘stairstep’ appearance of wave form representations in DAW software displays while going blank eyed if one tries to explain the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem or how reconstruction filtering works in the output of DAWs)

² After I could not keep the previously mentioned 8 track running, I bought my first ADAT in late ’92, added another, extended that into a computer-based DAW in ’96. Not everyone remembers ADATs fondly, but, for me, they allowed me to take the quality and capabilities of my studio up multiple notches with stunning quickness. But, as mechanical devices — with the same type of rapidly rotating heliscan heads found in VCRs — they did not last forever. Still, even after the transports began failing, I was able to continue using each deck’s bank of 8 ADC/DACs. (However, due to the design and throughput limits of the old ADAT lightpipe interface, you could only send and receive 8 simultaneous channels at once.)