Jazz's Transition to CDs

[Scott Dolan]

1 hour ago, Stonewall15 said:

To me the greatest invention after the CD is the CD recorder. I have digitized about 400 LPs to CDR. I have worn out 3 CD recorders, 1 Philips and 2 Sonys. Most of these LPs have never been released on CD so my collection includes some rare jazz music.

Agreed. The Sony DAT was really amazing, but the format never took off. 

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

15 hours ago, Stonewall15 said:

To me the greatest invention after the CD is the CD recorder. I have digitized about 400 LPs to CDR. I have worn out 3 CD recorders, 1 Philips and 2 Sonys. Most of these LPs have never been released on CD so my collection includes some rare jazz music.

I agree entirely. I have a Sony CD recorder - an RCW-W100, which I got in 2003. I can't organise my study to record direct from the music equipment to the computer so I have to make R/W CDs in the CDR then rip them to the computer.

Don't know how many LPs and K7s I've done through it but every one of the K7s has never been issued on CD. It's all West African stuff; never even been issued in western society's business.

Ripping from a K7 is a pain in the arse, though. At least when you're ripping an LP, you can see how long before you have to press the tit for the end of the present track, and guess whether you've enough time to nip outside for a cough and drag, or make a cup of tea. Can't see that when you're playing tape.

MG

[Big Beat Steve]

2 hours ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

Ripping from a K7 is a pain in the arse, though. At least when you're ripping an LP, you can see how long before you have to press the tit for the end of the present track, and guess whether you've enough time to nip outside for a cough and drag, or make a cup of tea. Can't see that when you're playing tape.

MG

Reminds me of my days of copying music from radio (and VERY cocasionally from LP) onto K7. To know how far to wind the cassette if I wanted to listen to specific tracks or only parts of a side of a cassette I always indicated the starting and ending numbers as shown on the counter of my cassette deck while the cassette ran form start to finish. Worked OK, though of course only exactly for the particular deck in question, and if you had reset your counter to zero in the meantime and started at zero at the beginning of a track in the middle of the cassette this count only told you a track went on for 25 digits in the count.
So if you make a note of these figures when playing your cassette all the way through you should be able to see where you are at any point (even during a track) while the cassette is running when you rip the contents somewhere else (provided the K7 runs on the same medium - having a counter - that you used when you played the K7 to note down the counts).

Just an idea ... (a very old-school one, I know, but as long as there are K7s ... )

[JSngry]

Where does all this "K7" come from? Keep hearing it on here and no place else.

[aparxa]

It comes first from France (7="sept") and has l8r conquered Europe.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

18 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Where does all this "K7" come from? Keep hearing it on here and no place else.

From the web: 'K7' was an abbreviation often used for tapes. The origin is the French pronunciation; 'Kah-set'.

[JSngry]

K9 I get. K7....guess you had to be there.

[Big Beat Steve]

18 minutes ago, JSngry said:

K9 I get. K7....guess you had to be there.

Maybe easier for Europeans because "cassette" is and was the word throughout. Including in many non-English languages where the pronounciation is more or less the same. Less ambiguous than the US "tape" which often is NOT used in its full form "cassette tape" and in itself does not tell you if you are talking about "reel to reel" tape (very widespread before cassettes came along and even for some time afterwards so if somebody had told me he copied it to "tape" in the 70s or 80s this might as well have meant he copied it to reel-to-reel tape), 8-track cartridge "tapes" (culty retro items now, maybe, but never really got off the ground in Europe) and the fairly long-lived "cassettes", i.e. CASSETTE (or K7) "tapes".

[JSngry]

I've called them "cassettes" since, jeez...1969? That's what they were always called here, best as I can tell. Never heard "K7", though.

"Tape" can mean any damn thing, as you say.

"Records & Tapes" - LPs, 45s. 8-Tracks, 4-Tracks, cassettes, reel to reel (although that was more or less gone by the time I started shopping, still hi-end audio shops would sometimes carry a few. Superscope had a line in the very early 70s, iirc.

[Scott Dolan]

As a teen in the 80’s, “tape” meant cassette and nothing else. So it’s probably a function of age? Yeah, we had 8-tracks in the 70’s, but they went away almost as quickly as they arrived. So when my buddies and I said “tape”, there was no question what we meant. Now, had we been born a decade early? Maybe there would be a question. But only between 8-track and cassette since reel-to-reel simply wasn’t a widespread format. 

All of that said, K7 is also a new one to me. I blame 80’s internet. 

[JSngry]

Yeah, age. I actually was around when 4-tracks were popular. And then 8-Tracks. Actually had a 7th grade math teacher who brought in her brand new Muntz(?) 4-Track player to class one day in 1969 to play the then brand new Blood Sweat & Tears album for us under the guise of "study time". She came from a family with oil money, drove a Jag, and shopped in Dallas every weekend. She was a "flashy" figure in little ol' Gladewater, but there was never any scandal around her. Mrs. Daniels was her name, and overall, she was cool.

Anyway, yea, stores who changed from just "Records" to "Records & Tapes" pretty much went with the times as far as what that meant..

[Dave James]

On 10/27/2018 at 10:48 AM, Kevin Bresnahan said:

As an LP buyer in the late 70's and through the 80's, I welcomed CDs with open arms. No more paper thin LPs, off center spindle holes, chunks of paper embedded in the vinyl, warble, skips in brand new records, crackles in brand new records... the list went on & on. In the beginning of CD, a lot of people jumped in with both feet. And while I still prefer CD for my listening, I find myself buying more vinyl because many modern CDs have been digitally manipulated to sound like crap.

Kevin - Word !  Years ago, I returned six warped copies of an RCA recording of Brian Auger & The Trinity to Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon.  It was one of RCA's new "skinny" LP's.  The guy at MM finally said, "Why don't you just pick out some other album and we'll call it even."      

[Kevin Bresnahan]

48 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, age. I actually was around when 4-tracks were popular. And then 8-Tracks. Actually had a 7th grade math teacher who brought in her brand new Muntz(?) 4-Track player to class one day in 1969 to play the then brand new Blood Sweat & Tears album for us under the guise of "study time". She came from a family with oil money, drove a Jag, and shopped in Dallas every weekend. She was a "flashy" figure in little ol' Gladewater, but there was never any scandal around her. Mrs. Daniels was her name, and overall, she was cool.

Anyway, yea, stores who changed from just "Records" to "Records & Tapes" pretty much went with the times as far as what that meant..

Um, Jim... is this a Texas thing? Because where I'm from, all "8-track tapes" only had 4 tracks. We never had "4-track tapes" or "8-track tapes" with 8 tracks. Ever.

And FWIW, I almost bought a used reel-to-reel machine but I didn't have the room for it. Those suckers were huge!

I hate to admit it, but I almost bought a DAT recorder several times. Thank god I never pulled the trigger as I've read the horror stories of people's entire collections becoming unreadable with time.

Edited October 29, 2018 by Kevin Bresnahan

[Scott Dolan]

47 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Yeah, age. I actually was around when 4-tracks were popular. And then 8-Tracks. Actually had a 7th grade math teacher who brought in her brand new Muntz(?) 4-Track player to class one day in 1969 to play the then brand new Blood Sweat & Tears album for us under the guise of "study time". She came from a family with oil money, drove a Jag, and shopped in Dallas every weekend. She was a "flashy" figure in little ol' Gladewater, but there was never any scandal around her. Mrs. Daniels was her name, and overall, she was cool.

Anyway, yea, stores who changed from just "Records" to "Records & Tapes" pretty much went with the times as far as what that meant..

Another potential factor, and my memory is very fuzzy on this one, but 8-tracks and cassettes didn’t share much overlap, did they? It seemed as though 8-track close up shop the day cassettes hit the market. 

Kevin, I take it you’re joking about the 4-track/8-track thing? 

[Chuck Nessa]

And then there were Quad 8s.

[JSngry]

3 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

Another potential factor, and my memory is very fuzzy on this one, but 8-tracks and cassettes didn’t share much overlap, did they? It seemed as though 8-track close up shop the day cassettes hit the market. 

No, there was an overlap for a few years. The death of the 8-Track was accelerated once cassette players on cars became dominant, and finally killed with the Walkman.

But there for a while, believe it or not, there was resistance to cassettes because of their slower sapped, like 3 3/4 IPS was hi-fi.

15 minutes ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

Um, Jim... is this a Texas thing? Because where I'm from, all "8-track tapes" only had 4 tracks. We never had "4-track tapes" or "8-track tapes" with 8 tracks. Ever.

 

Hey, I didn't name the formats. Actually, it's a California thing, Earl Muntz, to be specific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo-Pak

[felser]

The evolution of dolby also helped kill 8-tracks (four stereo tracks, so 4x2=8 tracks).  Cassettes were incredibly hissy at first, leaving a brief window for 8-tracks.  I never much did either while vinyl was still available, only cutouts and cheap used.  I taped a lot of my vinyl onto my own cassettes in the 80's, so I could play them in the car.  Didn't have a car CD player until much later, and remain unwilling to play CD's of any quality/value in the car, I burn them to CD-R's and play those in the car.  Too much damage occurs from the car player and my handling of the discs in the car.

[JSngry]

As I recall the format evolution(s)...cassettes were for a long time used mainly for recording voices, dictations, birthday parties, speeches, meetings, that type of thing. They're weren't viewed as "acceptable" for commercial music presentation because of the narrow tape and the slow speed.

4/8 tracks were the big car formats and had begun to be popular-ish in standalone portable players. 4-Tracks were, iirc, inflexible in terms of rewinding/etc. 8-Tracks brought that, how/why. I don't know. But 8-tracks killed 4-tracks rather quickly as far as consumer popularity. There were 8-track recorders, which as you can imagine, were a big hot mess.

Besides the advent of cassette car players and the Walkman, the other thing that made cassettes really viable was Dolby. I myself never really got that much out of it as a consumer, but anyway...

Reel-to-reel hung on for a while as a recording medium for schools/etc. who wanted quality recordings of their own internal activities. Once cassettes got Dolby-ized and all that, home studio/etc. that was that.

Interestingly, perhaps, The Recovery Room, the Dallas club where Marchel Ivery played for years, would record nightly on and 8-track recorder. They did this for years.

[medjuck]

21 minutes ago, felser said:

The evolution of dolby also helped kill 8-tracks (four stereo tracks, so 4x2=8 tracks).  Cassettes were incredibly hissy at first, leaving a brief window for 8-tracks.  I never much did either while vinyl was still available, only cutouts and cheap used.  I taped a lot of my vinyl onto my own cassettes in the 80's, so I could play them in the car.  Didn't have a car CD player until much later, and remain unwilling to play CD's of any quality/value in the car, I burn them to CD-R's and play those in the car.  Too much damage occurs from the car player and my handling of the discs in the car.

Which reminds me that before cars had cd players they usually had cassette players.  You could buy a portable cd player and attach it to a device that somehow wired the player to a cassette mechanism that you then inserted into the cassette player to listen to the cd.  Anyine else remember these? 

[mikeweil]

12 minutes ago, medjuck said:

Which reminds me that before cars had cd players they usually had cassette players.  You could buy a portable cd player and attach it to a device that somehow wired the player to a cassette mechanism that you then inserted into the cassette player to listen to the cd.  Anyine else remember these? 

Yup - the car I use at work now has a CD player, but the old one I had to use before still had a cassette tape player. Finally I could make usage of the cassette tape adapter to hook up a CD player I had bought years before for my private car (which was soon replaced with one that had a CD player). After I got tired of all my old cassette tapes, that is.

Edited October 29, 2018 by mikeweil

[JSngry]

You guys are young! All the cars I rode around as a teen in had cart players.

[felser]

17 minutes ago, JSngry said:

You guys are young! All the cars I rode around as a teen in had cart players.

Mine had AM radios, a la "American Graffiti".

[medjuck]

19 minutes ago, JSngry said:

You guys are young! All the cars I rode around as a teen in had cart players.

Wow. No one's accused me of that in a while. 

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Well I'll be... so this "4-track" tape, or Stereo Pak tape, only had 2 tracks that had to be switched manually? Were they the same size as 8-track tapes?

I used to have an 8-track recorder. The biggest PIA was that the splice couldn't be recorded on, so when you recorded something that jumped across the tracks, it had a glitch in it. I remember recording Jim Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" and the track changed right after Jimi sang, "All along the watchtower" and before "princess kept the view". To this day, when I hear that song, my mind expects that little jump.

I also had the Cadillac of car 8-track decks, the Pioneer TP900:

Edited October 29, 2018 by Kevin Bresnahan

[Big Beat Steve]

56 minutes ago, medjuck said:

Which reminds me that before cars had cd players they usually had cassette players.  You could buy a portable cd player and attach it to a device that somehow wired the player to a cassette mechanism that you then inserted into the cassette player to listen to the cd.  Anyine else remember these? 

Yes, about 1998. a friend had one in his car. the first time i actually had one. I found this very practical and I still used cassettes in my cars then (until I bought my current car new in 2012, in fact). I still play cassettes - to a limited extent - in my late 50s cars, BTW, but do figure shifting to CD players).

As for the launch of those K7 ("compact cassettes" as they were originally called), the first ones were marketed here in 1966 according to my catalogs, including playback units and recorders. Add-on devices to be connected to the car radio to be able to play the cassette via the car system were also available from that time from a scant few manufacturers (Philips was among the first). Car radios with an actual built-in cassette slot (as produced up to much more recent times) were listed from 1969.
But reel-to-reel playback devices were still FAR more numerous among home audio devices then and for several years afterwards. Cannot find many traces for those fat, huge 8-track cartridge tapes in these catalogs, though. They really must have been a niche thing over here.

 

Edited October 29, 2018 by Big Beat Steve