…boy, this site (found through the Esoterica blog at Cnet News.com) seemingly dedicated to all the different types of cassette tapes sure brings back memories.

Of course, when I call it “old” I am also condemning myself to that same, dubious status. I recall well searching for a good brand of tape, and I also remember all the different techniques used to overcome the inherent problems with the technology, such as the brilliant idea underlying the Dolby System.

You don’t know what the Dolby System is if it isn’t referring to surround sound for movies? Well, someone (Dolby? I haven’t done the research) had the subtle but great idea to record the frequencies of music or other audio content for the tape that matched the frequencies of the background noise (or tape-hiss) louder than the other frequencies. Then, during the playback, the relative volume of the frequencies matching the tape-hiss would be reduced back to match that of the other frequencies, thereby reducing the relative level of the tape-hiss.

A simple idea, but it made a huge difference to the sound quality in those pre-digital days.

Then there were the different technologies used in the tapes themselves, metal tapes, high bias tapes, chromium dioxide tapes, Type I, Type II, Type IV (I never knew what happened to Type III), longer time tapes were thinner so they would fit, but they could stretch in a bad player and change the speed and tone of the music, wow, the complexity was dizzying.

And this doesn’t even discuss cleaning the tape heads and calibrating the speed of the player.

Nowadays, slap a CD into the computer and tell iTunes (or your favorite media software) to make a CD of your favorites, hit go, and you’re done.

No tape-hiss, no worrying if you have enough time on the side to finish recording this last song from the LP (the software tells you if there’s not enough room), no worrying about accidentally bumping the stereo and making the needle skip a groove, no worrying about if you have the recording level set too high for the Dolby noise reduction, no worrying if you need to use Dolby I or Dolby II, no worrying if you have the bias set for “high” or “normal” to match the tape you are using, and no need to write all of this stuff down sow you can set these parameters properly when you are playing the tape back.

I still remember back in 1982 or so, when I bought my first CD player, I thought about how the mechanical system underlying even the new, supposedly perfect reproduction inherent in digital technology was fundamentally unreliable, and I conceived of the idea of saving the music in a non-volatile, solid-state based memory would be the best system that avoided all the problems related to a storage system based upon physical motion (as even hard disk drives are, like CDs and DVDs). Of course, the volume of data even using all known compression techniques that would need to be stored in a non-volatile, solid-state memory was far beyond the technology of the time, not to mention the processing technology needed to decompress the music on-the-fly.

So, it was just a dream I had.

I should have patented that idea, darn it!

Ah, well… I’m just glad I have access to the technology now.

Geek cool. Eventually we all enjoy what the geeks find cool first.