whathifi.com/News/US-NEWS-In-car-cassette-decks-bite-the-dust/
OK it's the US but, they're not quick to dump old technology are they? I guess it's an opportunity to squeeze a few more £s out of us in the options list so why offer something more up to date?. Cassettes. Good grief!
John
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The last US model to be fitted with a cassette deck was the Lexus SC430.
I'd a trifle miffed, I think.
Last edited by: Pugugly on Thu 10 Feb 11 at 19:00
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Possibly says something about the buyers? A bit older perhaps. Can't be doing with all this new fangled MPwhatisit? stuff? :-)
John
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Ooo eck, just reminded me, the iPod's been on charge in the car all day.
Hope it's not caught light.
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8 track. Mk 2 Granada...........Luvverly
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I've never owned a car with anything else.
Now, where's that Wishbone Ash tape?
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...Now, where's that Wishbone Ash tape?...
Wrapped around the deck's pinch wheel.
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You just beat me to it. One of the things that endered me to SWMBO when we were going out was the hole in the dashboard of her Astra. She'd taken the radio / cassette out as it was the easiest way to remove the remains of a mangled cassette. A very practical lady she is!
John
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>>One of the things that endered me to SWMBO
I can picture it now. o:)
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:-)
Of course if I could type, I would have put endeared. Which actually puts the sense the wrong way round. Still, Martin's version works.
John
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>> I've never owned a car with anything else.
The 406 estate I had for cabbing came with a standard CD player, until it broke. I replaced a few tape decks with CD players in cars in the early 00s, but haven't bothered with upgrades for a while because I don't spend long enough in the car any more.
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Mine has a CD player but no aux input. It is a annoying as I have to use an FM transmiter for spotify and it sounds crap.
Might have to replace the standard head unit with an after market one with an aux input.
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kids today dont know what cassettes are
seriously,they look at the player and ask what is it
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...seriously,they look at the player and ask what is it...
Some of the used stock past its first flush of youth, Bellboy?
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all my stock is past its first flush of youth iffy :-)
i collected a punto today and even that had a cassette in the dash,shocked me as i even thought it was a cd
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I miss cassetes there was something wonderful about making mix tapes. Used to spend a lot of time in the early 90's doing that.
I still have a nice 1978 vintage cassete deck, never use it though, just too scared to through it away.
I used to have a mid 90's Yamaha deck which had a nice sound to it on the right tapes - you could buy audiophile cassetes certainly sounded a lot better than minidisc. I regret selling it but sold it for £30 towards funds to see Morrissey in Dublin in 2004.
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Let me see. The last car of mine with a cassette slot was the 1999 Scenic. 11 years ago.
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Mine was my dads Fiesta Ghia, it was one of the last before the CD became standard. My 1999 Corsa had a CD player but it was an option. My 96 Fiesta had a CD player but it was aftermarket. The Panda Actives had cassete decks up until around late 2007.
I do miss them though.
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Last one we had with a cassette deck was my wife's 2004 Ka. The one the fire brigade cut the roof off this time last year...
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>> Let me see. The last car of mine with a cassette slot was the 1999 Scenic. 11 years ago.>>
Same year for the departed (still in use according to askmid) Bora. But I had/still have a considerable amount of music recorded on tapes and it was a great way of listening to them on longer trips.
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>> Let me see. The last car of mine with a cassette slot was the 1999 Scenic. 11 years ago.
My 53 reg Vectra had one, but it also had a 4 disc multiplayer as well. tinyurl.com/4dzk7j7
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>>My 53 reg Vectra had one, but it also had a 4 disc multiplayer as well.>>
In the case of my Bora, mentioned earlier, it had a six-disk CD multi-changer concealed in the boot - the Jetta has just a one-slot type in the dashboard head unit...:-(
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>> Let me see. The last car of mine with a cassette slot...
Was this the last thing you played on it?
tinyurl.com/4v4hk84
Link to Amazon.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Fri 11 Feb 11 at 14:01
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Our Golf TDI (2002) has a cassette deck, with a separate single CD player.
Cassette is one medium even my most rose tinted nostalgic glasses can't make me miss. Yes, a Nakamichi CR-7E or even a Dragon using a good quality metal tape could produce some impressive results, and it was easy and fun to tape the Top 40 off the radio on a Sunday night as a kid, but the whole concept was flawed. Noisy, fragile, slow to access what you wanted, and prone to physical wear in both medium and player.
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>> it was easy and fun to tape the Top 40
>> off the radio on a Sunday night as a kid, but the whole concept was
>> flawed. Noisy, fragile, slow to access what you wanted, and prone to physical wear in
>> both medium and player.
>>
Careful, DP, you'll get the Performing Rights Society chasing you for the artists cut!
A very flawed medium - but we were happy, weren't we?
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"Ooo eck, just reminded me, the iPod's been on charge in the car all day."
Mine won't charge anything unless the ignition or accessories are switched on and neither will any of the new cars I've rented while on Holiday in the last two or three years. It's irritating because often when you're away, the car is the only place to charge it up so you have to do a ten mile drive every day whether you want to or not, just to make sure there's enough juice in the ipod for when you're fishing or sitting on a sun bed.
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...Mine won't charge anything unless the ignition or accessories are switched on...
The sockets in Fords are wired direct and always on.
I thought all cars were made this way, but I found out in another thread on here that is not the case.
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I've solved the problem by copying cassettes onto CDs.
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I wonder if any car ever had a reel to reel tape player?
Or a record player, come to that?
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>> I wonder if any car ever had a reel to reel tape player?
>> Or a record player, come to that?
Indeed they did
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0hRzEihsR4
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Strangely my hi-fi record record deck has a 12v power socket as well as normal mains so it can be used in a car.
I can't attach any negative to casettes really as the ability to record your LPs and play them in the car during the early 70s was a turning point in listening anywhere else other than the house.
Home recordings onto decent tape were far better than commercial casettes... and at least when they were swallowed by the player you could just record another.
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My friend's car had a record player in the dash about 40 years ago. It only played singles and you posted them in a slot. God knows what damage it did to the records.
The Beast has a Dolby auto reverse cassette with music search as well as CD and I find it easier to carry a few suitable tapes than fiddle about with the stacker thing I. The boot and the menus on the little screen. My son was deeply impressed back along when he started the car and a few seconds later it burst into 'The Dambusters March'.
I still have a three-head Aiwa AD-F850 I bought s/h years ago. I still record with it and - maybe because my ears are now shot - it still sounds a treat.
Last edited by: Mike Hannon on Fri 11 Feb 11 at 10:42
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The Compact Cassette will be missed. As Fenlander said, it provided a music mobility like nothing before. It developed the need and market for CD and MP3 players.
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>>The Compact Cassette will be missed
Those Philips Compact Cassettes and the equipment for recording on them and playing them were developed far beyond what had been envisaged. They actually became hifi. By the 90s decent cassettes and decks had the fidelity and dynamic range to be indistinguishable from a CD, to the untutored ear'ole at least, and the successive versions of Dolby NR effectively eradicated hiss.
To cavil about access times, rewinding etc. is a bit like saying the Mini was rubbish because it had no airbags. Both in their day were revolutionary innovations.
Last edited by: Manatee on Sat 12 Feb 11 at 21:28
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I agree, my Yamaha 380 something cassete deck had a really nice sound to it, it easily equaled my old Sony CD player, but it would not be a patch on my current Marantz CD6000 OSE LE.
We laugh now but ten years ago the cassete offered a very easy solution to recording music. How many people can record of the radio now so easily?
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cassette decks never equaled hi fi and to say so is im afraid rubbish
i have the last of the best cassette decks by my side a sony, it cost me a pretty penny nigh on 15 years ago and was even better than the best nachamichi it even has dolby c
its not a patch on a proper reel to reel
and its not a patch on a proper vinyl disc
my ears aint what they were but i still know hi fi from low fly
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>>i have the last of the best cassette decks by my side a sony,
and I have a Technics of the same era, with Dolby HX Pro wherever that sits in the pantheon.
My wife certainly couldn't tell you whether it's a cassette recorded on the same machine that's playing or a CD (decent Marantz CD player, Technics SUA900 + B&W speakers). Not a high end system, but you have to compare it with the rubbish that most people listen on now- and that cassette deck is way better than the iPod played through the same system. That's hifi to most folk.
There's absolutely no doubt that the development of compact cassette went way beyond what it was originally conceived for, and machines like the 3 head Nakamichis were most certainly sold, and bought, as hifi even it it didn't compare with vinyl on your Linn ;-)
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I've still got a Hitachi D75, the company's very first metal tape cassette deck.
The sound was OK, but it was a method of music reproduction that relied on too many compromises to be other than that.
In some ways I'm not all that enamoured with Philips' realisation that developing the sound side of Laservision, with substantial help from Sony and Taiyo Yuden, in the form of the Compact Disk was all that significant for quite some time afterwards.
Once the electronics had been developed to make the most of the digital advancement, the story was different.
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>> cassette decks never equaled hi fi and to say so is im afraid rubbish
>>
I agree, one the one hand folk moan about CD for (amongst other things) being brick wall filtered above 20KHz, no cassette deck ever managed any sensible frequency response above 10KHz at any sort of high level. Dolby B&C magnified any frequency response errors. As for wow and flutter, orders of magnitude worse than CD.
Yes it was a medium engineered well beyond its original design targets, but it was no more HiFi than 128K MP3s (which are good enough for me most of the time TBH)
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"How many people can record of the radio now so easily? "
Odd how there was never a radio equivalent of the VHS recorder. Now we have Freeview recorders that will record radio too and the iPlayer, but no one ever produced a radio with a timer and a recorder. That I know of. No doubt you will now point me at scores of such!
John
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There are DAB radios which can pause, rewind and record live radio and these features have been around for quite a number of years...:-)
One such model was the Roberts Gemini 11 from around 2005. Other Roberts models:
www.robertsradio.co.uk/Products/DAB_radios.htm
Some DAB radios will record to SD cards...
Last edited by: Stuartli on Sun 13 Feb 11 at 17:32
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>> "How many people can record of the radio now so easily? "
>>
>> Odd how there was never a radio equivalent of the VHS recorder.
>
I had an early 'HiFi stereo' VHS VCR, a Ferguson 3V43 (600 quid in 1986!) which I used to use for radio recording, 6 hours of continous recording at better than compact cassette quality was handy for live gig broadcasts etc. Provided I remembered to switch the FM tuner I had connected to it on before a timer recording started anyway.
My DAB mini system does record from the EPG or manual timer set up, on to SD card, but I can't recall an FM radio with timer record features.
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>>I had an early 'HiFi stereo' VHS VCR, a Ferguson 3V43 (600 quid in 1986!) which I used to use for radio recording>>
You've reminded me that my Mitsubishi H85 Nicam stereo all singing, all dancing VHS VCR (shop cost was £545 in 1993) could record up to 18 hours of hi-fi standard audio...:-)
Fortunately I won it at the time, rather than bought it. It was more expensive that the 21in Nicam Toshiba TV I bought in 1990 for £499.99 (it was Toshiba's first Nicam television).
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"Strangely my hi-fi record record deck has a 12v power socket as well as normal mains so it can be used in a car."
I would speculate it is so that it can be used in, say, a caravan. Iffy's may have all mod cons but it's not so long ago that you only had what could run off a 12v battery and a calor gas bottle. Which reminds me of Hancock going over to gas and asking where the gas tv was.
John
Last edited by: Tooslow on Fri 11 Feb 11 at 13:08
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...Strangely my hi-fi record record deck has a 12v power socket as well as normal mains so it can be used in a car."...
Some separates had manufacturer-specific power inputs to enable a stack to be run from one mains lead and a series of fly leads.
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It would be quite reasonable to think that but I have the instruction book for it and the power supply section does tell you how to connect it in a car! I'm sure the speakers would fall off the dash when cornering though.
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I miss the cassette tape players.
Ahh the joy of driving along and the tape gets chewed up !
Then trying to eject the tape and having magnetic spaghetti everywhere while changing gears and educating other drivers with the proper hand signals !
Yes those were the days ...
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Don't see so much of it in hedges and gutters nowadays either!
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Kenny Everett used to do a piece on his Saturday Capital Radio show, where people sent in roadside tape, he had it spliced up and played it.
Hilarious
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Having now been able to get on a computer that will run youtube I see my friend's in-car record player was definitely the Philips. I'd like to get one now and take it apart to see how they arranged the pick-up. Years ago my sister asked me to repair a 'laughing bag' - honestly. When I opened it I was amazed to find a complete phonograph - a little record played by a pick-up and powered by a rubber band.
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I remember the 'record your own record' machine at Paddington Station.
Didn't try it, partly because it was expensive, although I cannot remember how much.
An early 50p coin, perhaps.
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>> I can't attach any negative to cassettes really as the ability to ... play them in the car during the early 70s
Luxury. Dad had company cars when I was growing up, the first one with a cassette player (indeed the first one with FM on the radio!) was a C-reg Escort in 1985.
Last edited by: Dave_TD {P} on Fri 11 Feb 11 at 14:01
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Bah. Reel to reel? Record players? The true musical experience in a car shouldn't be filtered like that.
www.soviethistory.org/images/Large/1956/time_13.jpg
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This old girl was determined she could hear her latest Beatles records in the car...
www.corbisimages.com/images/67/142D5D29-D4CE-48B5-8068-F7E848493C1D/HU053178.jpg
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....This old girl was determined she could hear her latest Beatles records in the car...
She'd not be fazed by a CD player, would she?
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That pic has just jolted the memory of my worst ever motoring purchase, an Austin Cambridge!
I have a radio cassette in the caravan. I don't have anything to do with music but the thought of never hearing "Tales from a long room" or "uncle Mort's north country" again would be hard to bear.
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Rubbish acoustics with the roof down :-)
John
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...Rubbish acoustics with the roof down :-)...
No, just different, actually.
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When my 12 yr old Mazda Xedos departs the driveway in he Spring the new owner can have both the aftermarket CD player (Kenwood) or the manufacturer's original cassette radio (Panasonic)
The cassette deck is excellent quality and the radio has one of the best FM tuners that monitors/changes frequency almost imperceptibly.
You also get the original electric aerial that rises from the rear wing - how many cars have electric aerials these days - a "status symbol"? well maybe not.
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>>When my 12 yr old Mazda Xedos departs the driveway in he Spring the new owner can have both the aftermarket CD player (Kenwood) or the manufacturer's original cassette radio (Panasonic)>>
Surely you are meaning one OR the other?
I liked the Xedos - excellent car. Is it the 6 or 9?
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The buyer can have both - no good to me - Kenwood CD is fitted with an adapter kit so remove that and attach the cassette player to make it more original.
1998 Xedos 6 - 57,000 miles - I have had it since Sept 1999 when it had 2058 mls on the clock.
It is a 2nd car and was used by SWMBO say 3 days a week x 15-20 miles and for the odd trip North on a monthly basis to see grandchildren.
Internally mint - no sticky fingers / no tears, scrapes.
Externally 2 parking dings and a bit of rust on OS rear arch - I will get it fixed in May before selling - nice buy for a Xedos lover - 99% of people would not know of a Xedos or care.
I have spent about £500 on repairs in 11 years - pulley, AC, antiroll bar, discs, handbrake cables (Oct 2010). Flew thu' MoT again - no advisories
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No more cassette decks - R.P.
