Tape Eater
I had a CD skip once briefly last night because my son had gotten a hold of it and greased it up with his fingers. I cleaned it off and it played fine after that. However that brief when it was sounding bad reminded me of a cassette player I had back in the mid-1980's. I couldn't afford a stereo and my parents got me this small boombox for my 15th birthday. It worked fine for a while, but then every once in a while it would eat a tape. I would hear this gurgling as the tape was being devoured. I would frantically try to rescue it, hoping to stop it and get the tape out before it got shredded. Yet I buying cassettes for years, but that's because I didn't have a turntable yet. A shame I didn't get a turntable earlier or else I would have even more cool albums instead I own some of albums and have a bunch of useless cassettes.
posted by Metal Mark at
12:45 AM
3 Comments:
I was always a vinyl buyer, so I don't have many prerecorded cassettes (that I bought myself anyway), but I do remember tapes I made getting eaten sometimes. Cassettes were a terrible format. It's true they were portable, but they didn't hold up, didn't sound good and you were hard-pressed to find the song you wanted if you didn't want to listen to the whole album. CDs, while still vastly inferior to vinyl, are a huge improvement over cassettes.
I'm late to this quick post here, but I had to laugh out loud when I read it, remembering that "gurgling" sound emanating all too often from my first tape recorder. I don't know how many times I tried to tape splices back together again, actually making things worse in the process (Scotch tape rubbing across the magnetized head is NOT such a good idea).
When I got my first turntable (a shiny plastic affair), things didn't get much better. That thing was sensitive to any movement within a three-mile radius and whenever my little brother decided to once again bounce about the house, the "gurgling" noise of former times was replaced by a loud and eardrum-piercing "screeeeech" as the needle skidded across one or t'other favorite LP of mine ... while I was blasting it at full volume, of course.
Yes, those were the days.
Today I just have digital glitches in some incorrectly ripped file, but the sound is equally jarring. That just proves that a) history does repeat itself and b) that nothing really ever changes.
Cheers!
Bob-I love vinyl except that they seem so fragile. I have always been so afraid of scratching them or messing up the cover.
Volkher-Thanks for stopping by. I tried fixing tapes too, but usually it didn't help and I was out of ten dollars.
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