Hi-Fi Fashion

I wonder when Audio Cassettes will come back into fashion. I still use them in one of my older cars. I can't be bothered to plug in a MP3 adapter. The cassettes sound perfectly all right in the car. I no longer play original pre-recorded cassettes because they have all deteriorated so much that they they are unplayable. All of my music is in digital format, except for a small number of 45 rpm records,  so I have converted everything on LP, Audio Cassette and CD to a WAV file on a hard disk. It is then easy to make cassettes for the car.

In their hey day every one used cassettes to create party tape mixes especially during the 70s, 80s and 90s. It was a way of making sure that your LPs did not get scratched at a party.  An Audio Cassette can sound very good if you use good equipment but from a technical point of view it cannot compete with a CD. The Audio Cassette is a very convenient method of play back and ,of course, the Walkman was the forerunner of the MP3 player.

The other day I was rummaging through some old cassettes which I had stored in the garage and found an 80s recording of Van Morrison with the Chieftains; it still played almost perfectly so I digitised it straight  away. How did it survive all that time? This is the wonder of cassettes sometimes they last for years and sometimes they break the second time you play them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Heartbeat

Some people love them but when I retire my older car I shall ditch all of them; they hold no sentimental value for me. However it is quite likely that like vinyl LPs Audio Cassettes will make a comeback when the fashion for turntables fades. There will be people who prefer the sound of a cassette and I must admit it is rather easy to distinguish between they sound of a cassette from the sound of its CD or LP equivalent. When they do come back into fashion some people will claim that their analogue sound will be of higher technical quality than  a CD. The forums will be full of discussions about all this.

My advice to young person who is tempted is to buy a good quality cassette deck is to digitise any cassette that you buy immediately. You can buy cheap USB converters that will do this for you. Just connect the USB stage to the line outputs of your cassette deck (or at a push you can use the headphone output- but not too loud). Audacity is reasonable software to use on your laptop or PC to convert the USB input  into a WAV file. Audacity can also be used to remove noise and hiss from the tape. Audacity cannot correct distortion caused by a stretched tape, some second hand tapes may suffer from this so buyer beware. Some tapes also get tangled up when you play them and you may have to re-wind them manually by using a pencil inserted into the sprockets. If you digitise your tapes the music will be preserved almost for ever and it is easy to make a tape from music stored on a hard drive. You can use the line outputs from your PC or Laptop to make a tape recording.

The fashion for LPs and turntables is still growing even though it never went out of fashion for me. The convenience of Audio Cassettes is missing and it is difficult to run around from place to place with your album collection and a portable record player. The one advantage of listening to LPs is that you have to sit down to listen and must get physically involved in changing the music. LPs can also sound almost as good as their CD equivalent unless you are listening to classical music recordings. Perhaps, they have become more fashionable with people that want to slow down a little bit and appreciate being in one place to enjoy their music. You can do all of this with a CD or other forms of digital music files provided you sit down and relax. When I listen to an album I like to play the whole of the work in the sequence that the producers intended. The LP system more or less forces you to do this; but if you chop and change tracks a lot then you risk damaging  your LP from excess handling. My advice to choppers and changers is to digitise your LP as soon as you buy it, then you can chop and change as much as you like. With a digital version and you can easily carry your music around so you get the both of both worlds.

Even though I do most of my listening from digital sources I shall not get rid of my LPs in a hurry. I like the art work and putting on an LP on a special occasion even though an LP sounds slightly inferior - even with a pristine copy.

I can see a day coming when the CD player will become obsolete, as most of us will be listening via computers, solid state drives and such like. Some people, exclusively, will use Spotify and other forms of streaming service. A CD is after all just a means of storing a digital media file; there is nothing special about this compared to a hard drive or thumb drive.

A decade or so after the demise of the CD player this old form of technology will come back into fashion. Some people will start buying players again. There will be some who believe that a CD will sound better than a 24/96 music file even when all other factors are equal. They will be wrong of course, as it is not possible for a CD to sound better even if it does not sound worse. Mathematics, physics and biology mitigate against this. But not psychology: some people will believe that a CD sounds better and therefore it will sound better - to them. Rationality will not convince them: so good luck to them for it is their prerogative not to believe the evidence.

Digital music is not going to go away unless someone can invent a completely analogue system which offers the flexibility and quality of digital media. To achieve this an economic system of using analogue computers will need to be invented and deployed. In the near future this will not happen. We will have to be content to use turntables and cassette decks - modern music recording equipment is digital based, however.

Running in or breaking in new cables etc

I recently read an article in a Hi-Fi magazine advocating that enthusiasts should run in or break in their new cables  for hours using pink noise or such like. This idea is implausible. The magazine offered no "before and after " measurements to help prove their assertion. Also they did not publish the results of double blind listening tests probably because they did not do any. Not only do they suggest that an audio enthusiast should spend hundreds of pounds per metre for cables that do not perform any better than standard cables costing tens of pounds, they also try to fool you that running the cable in will improve the sound when it will not.

I have never heard a difference in any Hi-Fi equipment after playing it for many hours not even in electro-mechanical devices such as turntables and speakers.

I can only think that the idea of running in Hi-Fi equipment came from the era of valve amplifiers. When you first switched on a 1950s radio or amplifier you heard nothing because you had to wait for the valves to warm up before they worked. After they had warmed up no improvement in audio efficiency was discernible.

Running in cables is just another myth and a case of the "Kings New Clothes".

Technical Developments and New Technology in Hi-Fi

Someone reading these pages might get the impression that I am opposed to new developments in technology and that I do not believe that we will be able to improve sound quality. This is not so. I am all in favour of new recording and sound reproduction techniques which will enable us to achieve improved Hi-Fi performance.

It is obvious that current Hi-Fi recording techniques and sound reproduction are unable to  exactly duplicate the original performance whether that is in the studio or live. This is especially apparent when  related to classical music. For many reasons including microphone placement, transducer performance and listening room acoustics a sound recording cannot exactly duplicate the original music. We are able to reproduce a flat frequency response. We are able to reproduce musical frequencies well beyond the bounds of human hearing. Likewise we can record  and playback music which has a very wide dynamic range beyond even the loudest and softest notes that a full orchestra  can manage. We can playback music at loudness levels which can easily damage human hearing.

We can do most of this with a humble LP and a CD can achieve this easily. There is no need for "High Resolution" digital music files which can push the parameters further than CD. It is absolutely pointless to reproduce frequencies above the ability of any human to hear i.e. above 20 KHz. It is equally pointless to enable the playback of music files which allow for a dynamic range of 140 db or more. To exploit this would damage reproduction equipment and worse of all would permanently damage the hearing of the listener in short order.

Manufacturers are leading us up a stereo dead end and playing a numbers game. They have the right to claim that their equipment is better but they have a moral duty not to mislead the public.

Manufacturers are being supported in this numbers game by Hi-Fi magazines whose reporters claim that they can hear sounds and quality differences which science says they cannot. I believe that they are being disingenuous. Add to this the comments  and exaggerated claims which are made on some Hi-Fi forums for turntables, cables, "Hi-Res" versus Cd etc. and we are in a sorry mess.

There is room for improvement in sound technology but based on scientific and engineering research which can identify genuine improvements which can be made to inter alia:

microphones and their placement,

loudspeakers,

room acoustics

and computer generated surround sound systems.


We will never progress while false and unverifiable claims are made for 24/192, DSD sound reproduction. No improvement will be made whilst some "audiophiles" believe that electrons somehow follow the  arrows printed on expensive cables - they do not. Electrons flow from negative to positive polarity.

How can we progress when people believe that hanging little rocks from line input connexions can improve sonic performance.

The time has come to stop all the myths and apply some genuine science and sound engineering to solve  Hi-Fi problems.

It is a pity that Hi-Fi magazines feel that they cannot support science and that most reporters are only interested in playing the numbers game.