You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather... (1 Viewer)

[Ron1973]

No...it's backward.

The heads are only on one side of the player..coming in contact with the tape. When misaligned they would play part of the second track on the tape--backward-- because the head is coming in contact with the 2nd track which would be played when the cassette was flipped.

We're talking about two different things! I'm talking about 8-tracks. I've never had a cassette do that, but yes, on a cassette tape, it would.

 

[Stan]

Tonight, we played our NOTTING HILL (1999) DVD for the first time in many years (For me, at least!). On our older DVD players, there was always a very slight pause at the end of the scene in which Hugh Grant's William Thacker character is leaning against the stairwell of his flat just after Julia Roberts' Anna Scott character retires to bed. On our 4 year old Samsung Blu-ray player, there was no pause at all.

CHEERS!

I'd have to dig through the archives of my old DVDs, There was a film I watched and right in the middle of a major scene with important dialogue, the layer change happens. Lost about four seconds of the movie which I found out later had a lot to do with the story.

None of that "Formatted to fit your screen" garbage, it was just gone.

 

[Tony Bensley]

I'd have to dig through the archives of my old DVDs, There was a film I watched and right in the middle of a major scene with important dialogue, the layer change happens. Lost about four seconds of the movie which I found out later had a lot to do with the story.

None of that "Formatted to fit your screen" garbage, it was just gone.

My understanding was anything other than at most, a lengthy pause, wasn't due to the layer change, but something else. Missing four seconds seems fairly drastic; a manufacturer's defect, perhaps?

CHEERS!

 

[TJPC]

When I was at University, I found that a big music school had donated 1000 of classical 78s to the Good Will. There were hundreds and hundreds of these albums, and I picked up the entire collection for a song. They were perfect background as I studied and loaded them on my automatic changer that played 78. The only problem is that when I hear any of these pieces, which I played over and over for years, I can still “hear” the pauses as the machine changed to the next record every 4 minutes!

 

[BobO'Link]

A tad bit off topic, but I was a young genius

My dad bought 8-track tapes. Sad, but I remember the Streisand version of "Hello Dolly" from my childhood. Being an up and coming nerd, I had to see how they worked, so opened one up.

What a horrible format. So obvious that the tape would stretch and warp as it was played. I was eight years old and realized how awful they were. Went straight to LPs and cassettes when I got older.

I never opened one up but knew how they worked as my dad was Chief Engineer at the local AM station, I got my 3rd Class license as soon as I turned 14 (had to be 14 to take the test), and worked part time for the station. Commercials were played back via a "Cart machine" which operates almost exactly like an 8-track but it's 2-track stereo (or mono depending on your equipment). The 8-track was an offshoot of that format (the Fidelipac cartridge), ran at half the speed (3 3/4ips vs. 7 1/2ips), and had the pinch roller built into the cartridge (another point of failure). You can see the workings on those carts as the top is clear. They will only work for a time and, as you said, the the hub will stick/jam causing the tape to stretch or just lock up leaving you with an unusable tape. My friends all had 8-track players in their cars and constantly had problems with hubs, rollers, or just plain ole stiction due to the car environment. I avoided the format, as much as anything because of the tendency to interrupt a song in the middle - who thought that was a good idea?, and went straight to cassette, recording my own from the records I purchased (that way when the tape failed or was "eaten" I could make a new, cheap, copy). The mass-produced cassettes were just as bad as 8-tracks for longevity and dynamics.

My car had a Craig auto-reverse cassette deck (which had issues of its own due to the auto-reverse mechanism) and a Power Booster. Once, when having a party in a field row, a friend got in the car to pick the next tape, looked at the tape width, and exclaimed "Wow! All that sound coming from that little tape!!" I could never make them understand that the 8-track had the same tape width per track and an overall lower quality playback in spite of the cassette's slower (1 7/8ips) speed.

The insides of an 8-track (notice the built-in pinch roller - a point of failure):

The insides of a Fidelipac (has a better tape path although still pulls from the middle and return wraps on the outside - the hole is where the pinch roller from the playback deck flips up into the cart):

 

[Mike Frezon]

We're talking about two different things! I'm talking about 8-tracks. I've never had a cassette do that, but yes, on a cassette tape, it would.

Gotcha. I was wrong when I equated the two, Ron.

I never opened one up but knew how they worked as my dad was Chief Engineer at the local AM station, I got my 3rd Class license as soon as I turned 14 (had to be 14 to take the test), and worked part time for the station. Commercials were played back via a "Cart machine" which operates almost exactly like an 8-track but it's 2-track stereo (or mono depending on your equipment). The 8-track was an offshoot of that format (the Fidelipac cartridge), ran at half the speed (3 3/4ips vs. 7 1/2ips), and had the pinch roller built into the cartridge (another point of failure). You can see the workings on those carts as the top is clear. They will only work for a time and, as you said, the the hub will stick/jam causing the tape to stretch or just lock up leaving you with an unusable tape. My friends all had 8-track players in their cars and constantly had problems with hubs, rollers, or just plain ole stiction due to the car environment. I avoided the format, as much as anything because of the tendency to interrupt a song in the middle - who thought that was a good idea?, and went straight to cassette, recording my own from the records I purchased (that way when the tape failed or was "eaten" I could make a new, cheap, copy). The mass-produced cassettes were just as bad as 8-tracks for longevity and dynamics.

My car had a Craig auto-reverse cassette deck (which had issues of its own due to the auto-reverse mechanism) and a Power Booster. Once, when having a party in a field row, a friend got in the car to pick the next tape, looked at the tape width, and exclaimed "Wow! All that sound coming from that little tape!!" I could never make them understand that the 8-track had the same tape width per track and an overall lower quality playback in spite of the cassette's slower (1 7/8ips) speed.

The insides of an 8-track (notice the built-in pinch roller - a point of failure):

The insides of a Fidelipac (has a better tape path although still pulls from the middle and return wraps on the outside - the hole is where the pinch roller from the playback deck flips up into the cart):

I was forever rebuilding carts in my radio days, Howie! It was usually the tension pads which went bad first. We still have some stacks of carts in my current workplace. Haven't used any in years. Just a "throwback" kind of thing. Fun to reminisce about.

 

[TJPC]

You are right about cassettes. I had a huge collection. 10 years ago when I transferred them to CD-R, I discovered that a good 1/3 were unplayable due to the glue coming off the pinch pads etc. BASF were particularly bad, although I had thought they were a premium one. Strange to relate, the “3 for a dollar” ones from Kmart tended to be perfect.

The “good” ones had screws and I took them apart to transfer the tape to a working shell to play one more time to make a wave file. Most commercial ones were glued together and had to be pried and broken apart with a screw driver.

 

[Ron1973]

Cassettes have never given me an issue except for a few of the old white shell ones. For some reason, those were so prone to dragging and horrific sound quality.

On the 8-track side of things, I have yet to have a problem with ones from RCA Music Service. I have some my parents bought new from the club in the 70's. I've not had to change a pressure pad or fix a splice. While I certainly wouldn't equate them to CD quality, the RCA tapes don't sound too awful. They also don't have the crummy foam in the middle, but tension pressure pads attached to a copper base.

 

[Stan]

You are right about cassettes. I had a huge collection. 10 years ago when I transferred them to CD-R, I discovered that a good 1/3 were unplayable due to the glue coming off the pinch pads etc. BASF were particularly bad, although I had thought they were a premium one. Strange to relate, the “3 for a dollar” ones from Kmart tended to be perfect.

The “good” ones had screws and I took them apart to transfer the tape to a working shell to play one more time to make a wave file. Most commercial ones were glued together and had to be pried and broken apart with a screw driver.

To go even more off topic

Back to Nerd City. I was one of the fools who chose Betamax over VHS when the technology started, obviously we all know where that went.

Just did a quickie search and according to Wikipedia, Beta survived until 2015. Have no idea who was buying it, vanished here in the early '80s.

To date myself even further, I was one of those guys who did the audio/visual stuff in junior high. Have no idea what equipment I was using, but ran video tapes that were maybe on ten inch reels, with the tape being maybe an inch. Things have changed a lot.

 

[MatthewA]

In addition to a Umatic player and some tapes, I think I still have an EIAJ videotape machine and some tapes for that at my Mom's house. The machine I found at a Duke University surplus store that no longer exists. The tapes I think I got off eBay. Never did manage to get a picture, just sound.

 

[Stan]

My understanding was anything other than at most, a lengthy pause, wasn't due to the layer change, but something else. Missing four seconds seems fairly drastic; a manufacturer's defect, perhaps?

CHEERS!

Maybe a little exaggeration. Good grief, I was an early adopter, so this was 21, 22 years ago? Brain cells start to fade