Thank you for the friendly mention in the video :) This is a very interesting experiment. The difference between the new recording and the 1000th playback was minimal. What surprised me was the good quality of the new recording after the 1000 playbacks. I have very often noticed that new recordings I made on cassettes I got at flea markets sounded not nearly as good as the previous recordings that came on the cassette. It seems like somewhat worn out cassettes are more difficult to record on. But this was not the case in your experiment. The little boombox must be better than it seems. I have often noticed scratches or bends along the tape on cassettes I frequently played. The tape in your cassette looked very good even after 1000 playbacks. Maybe this would have been different with the thinner tape in a 90min cassette...

I love how passive-aggressive he is towards audiophile snobbery.

Whenever someone says they wore out a vinyl record or cassette tape, what they really mean is they didn't take care of it or store it properly. I can't imagine how one would ruin a record or tape through normal use.

Watching this makes me happy to know that my physical music collection won't lose its sound quality after only a few hundred plays.

If smoking in a car can affect cassette tapes so badly, imagine what they do to the lungs!

It would be interesting to see this experiment done with VHS tapes. Then you would not only have to consider the sound quality but also the visual quality.

I appreciate the work that went into making this video. Thinking back to the 70's and 80's most of us didn't take great care of our music. We'd grab records with our fingers on the grooves, leave them on the floor, leave cassettes in our coat pockets without the case and leave them in our cars for months. It's not that we didn't care, we just never gave it a thought. Dam teenagers. lol

The problems of cassette tapes were never what was claimed about them. The problems were in using cheap tapes that did shed instead of higher quality name brand tapes, in not cleaning the heads and pinch rollers/capstans on a regular basis, and the fact that tapes were subject to warping if left in a hot vehicle for serious lengths of time (which happened a lot). In reality, tapes sound pretty good for the range of sound that they can reproduce, they were fairly durable if just a little care was taken, and represented a good "bang for the buck" during the time they were widely produced as a consumer audio format. (BTW, I am speaking about using recordable cassettes, not the pre-recorded tapes that music labels put out. Those were often made to cheaper standards to keep costs down.)

I have cassettes I bought and recorded as long ago as the late 80s, and have listened to them countless times, and they still sound good. And some of them lived in various cars through the years (I don't smoke, so that isn't a factor), oh, and I lived in Florida without A/C in most of my cars. (brutal, I know). I have high regard for cassettes. They just aren't quite as convenient as digital. That said, my wife just recently bought a 2002 Honda with a cassette and CD deck, so I've had to pull our old cassettes out of storage so she can enjoy some of her favorites from years past. :-)

I would love to see a repeated test with white noise as a source, and comparing the resulting spectrogram/frequency response over time.

"ONE THOUTHANTHTH...ONE THOUTHANTSH" LOVE IT! Keep up the good work!

It's odd to see BOTH reals rotating fast I originally thought that it was running at 3 3/4" ips, then I realized that it's due to the short length of tape!

Tapes undeniably wear out when playing as there is friction. It just depends on your mechanism being functioning properly. The tape running across the head would be the least of my concern. Much more important is stuff like the pinch roller being clean as well as nice and grippy. If you have a track of crud around your capstan, it will run a groove into the tape (usually rendering one channel of both sides useless) or the pinch roller as lost its grip on one side and the tape slides off in one direction which crumples it. Make sure your mech is fine and tape path is clean and you should be good.

Being of “a certain age,” those Maxell television commercials amused me because they were so damned clever. Oh yes, I willingly bought and used their product(s); at one point Maxell offered a T-shirt with a print of the dude in the chair, replete with flying hair and necktie. The shirt was free, but mailing in X-number of proofs of purchase was the cost. I still have the shirt and after years of washings it was necessary to reinforce the seams several times . . . .

In the beginning I was scared he is going to do the 1000-times playback on the Denon... And yes, it is not the greatest cassette deck ever made, but it is still very good and torturing it like that would be a... sacrilege. Fortunately, Kevin was sane enough to do that part on a cheap boombox.

In the early 1980s my dad recorded some of his LPs onto audio cassettes (things like ABBA and Mamas & Papas) so he could listen to them in the car. Even in the late 90s, those tapes were still going strong despite having been listened to hundreds or thousands of times in the car stereo! I have seen videos of background music systems in shops and such that used audio cassettes. The cassette was run on auto-reverse non-stop, all the time the store was open - and many of those have become damaged or noisy after so many plays!

This brings back memories of cassettes strewn all over the floor of my brother's car- we used to throw then around, step on them, leave them in the car in the sun...they still worked fine. I reallty miss the durability of analog cassettes. No cracked screens or file transfers then...

Just got my first cassette deck. Great format, love this channel.

This video is the perfect example of why this is my favorite tech channel on KZfaq. Great job Kevin. Appreciate the effort that went into it.

I have a 40 year old Country music tape in my collection that still sounds outstanding to me! I've also got surprisingly good home recordings on type 1 tape recorded on vintage Hi Fi equipment, such as Denon and Technics, that I own. Great video.

Absolutely fantastic show my friend. It is evident a lot of hard work went into this!

Great video on durability of cassettes. It's the media format I grew up with. Glad I'm back into recording & playing music on cassettes.

Love the channel and videos, always a highlight of my day watching a new upload. Comfy and informational!

The best channel ever. Technical, true, trust, every single second of my attention. Thanks man. The "Other" techo channel is just entertainment for me.

Your point about the robustness of tapes and tape playback is extremely well taken. I don't have a good tape deck, just a late-generation Sony Walkman that I keep held together with tape. And yet I have digitized 30-year-old tapes for several friends and family members with it, and the results are frequently astonishing.

I have tapes that I made of broadcasts 45 yrs ago from the University of Pennsylvania radio station when they still played classical music . They still play well

Your music selections are top notch as usual! Got a real kick out of the closing banjo piece!

Love this video. I have no pretentiousness about it, but I have been drawn to cassette recording recently and it's quite evident to me that their bad reputation comes as you said: from crappy and abused car players! Hoping to get a TASCAM 122 soon and make a similar but different video. Yours is very inspiring and love your work!

I love my cassettes. Thnx for another great video. You deserve so much more viewers.

Thank you for the exhaustive tests! That was a great deal of work. I have tapes from the 80s and not all of them are high quality media but they still work well. Notable cheapo brands that held up: Memex, Lasonic, and budget RS Realistic cassettes. I think proper storage is key here, but these have been exposed to a great deal of smoke, and not all of it from cigarettes ;)

The Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorder, marketed to kids in the late 1980s and early '90s, when it sold for about $100 in the U.S., records a low-resolution monochrome picture, with sound, on Compact Cassettes. If I remember right, one side of a C-90 tape runs through the PXL-2000 in play or record mode in 4½ or 5 minutes, so it was 9 or 10 times the playback speed of your typical audio Compact Cassette. Something about this machine and this way of using tapes meant that, in just ten plays, you could see a BIG drop in the quality of both the picture and a sound. In my experience, the only way to make PXL-2000 recordings on Compact Cassette last was to dub them immediately to VHS. You could also skip the extreme compression of recording on a Compact Cassette and instead feed the camcorder's live picture and sound into a VHS VCR and record there, with a hugely better initial result and hugely better durability.

I came to KZfaq with a question about cassette tape life, and you created this incredible video which answered it in more detail than I ever could have imagined... And given that you used a low grade tape in the demo means high quality tape would do even better. And then there's the car issues you pointed out. Well done, well done.

You are very good (and thorough) at these tests, your turntable tests and comparism videos I have watched more than once. Thanks for the window cleaner tip, I also follow Dr. Cassette.

What I found particularly interesting was that this video also seems to debunk the theory that reel-to-reel type tapes wear out quicker than "normal" ones due to friction on the tape edges.

This was a consistently entertaining video step by step and from start to finish, well edited and well done.

LOL! I forgot about the calibration process. Brings back memories. Sitting here at work with my earbuds in and I almost jumped out of my chair during those dynamic parts of the music. 😅 Well done V!

Even at twenty minutes per play and with auto reverse, I have to admire your dedication to this. Philips' claim that 8-tracks can only be played in certain orientations and angles seems like something that ought to be tested. As long as the rubber roller is driving the tape, I can't see it making any difference in whichever plane someone's playing an 8-track. (I've not tried it.) Something else that might make a difference is transport quality. I'm sure a lot of car cassette decks were very well made, especially the better models from all major automakers, but then there are the ultra cheap and anonymous models that probably aren't precisely engineered enough to treat a tape well. Most of my mixtapes and home recordings (those not subjected to equipment mishaps) still seem to sound as good as the day I made them (recorded on both decent and dubious equipment). It seems much easier to find commercially produced tapes that are worn out, and I wonder if the difference is in tape quality. Some say the record labels used excellent quality tape stock and others not. (I think it varies with time, the label and maybe even the artist/genre.)

Nice video! Interesting to hear same recordings after some time (one year, maybe) to compare

great work! always been something i wondered about. I no longer have a tape collection but proves, if they are looked after they last!

Wow...what a detailed and we'll executed video! To my ears, by 1000 plays there were some small drop outs and a little loss of HF but the recording really stood up well.

This video is absolutely hilarious! Love it!

17:21 - I couldn't help but notice that crescendo sending the level seriously into the red! Even that cheap Laser tape tolerated it!

That stereo separation on "... Four-Leaf clover" is amazing. Sounds great even for compressed KZfaq.

that moment i realized he actually played 250 times.. subscribed. seriously, someone so dedicated to prove something i could tell from experience (didn't reach results yet still anxious to see conclusions). thumbs up.

Now that's a super effort video! Awesome. I would say, that yes - there is an audible degradation at the snip section 14:07 with the high frequencies. It would be cool if you could check the spectrum of each of these snipies/samples in audacity (analyze>plot spectrum), and post the images in the community section for comparison. I would say that the degradation from 0>500>1thousandths is quite linear. Cool stuff.

Nice a tape related Video again Kevin you make good stuff and really interesting as ever

This was brilliant. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics will get that tape in the end! We had a Le Corbusier chair in the listening rooms of our London hi-fi shop along with a Breuer Wassily chair to the point I still get confused which one was used on the ad. (Le Corbusier).

Especially the ‘endclap’ comparisation in the beginning revealed some pretty loss in high frequencies. But maybe it’s not due to the wear of the tape, rather than the partly erasure of the tape due to magnitized heads and capstans… People often clean the tapepath, but forget to demagnitize. Pretty good video, though! Also, it depends wich tape after all those years are still playable. Some of my tapes sound horrible. Others (like the TDK SA-X) I could have recorded yesterday…

Nice video! I do not know why, but I have always liked Cassettes. Nostalgia may be an (small) factor (today) of course. Listening to old radio-recordings I did in the 90s I just found, was very enjoyable. Ironically enough back then I did try to not record the talking part of the radioshow, just the music inbetween, but today I more appreciate the times I did not care and just recorded the whole show, that hits in the right place, strangely enough I recognize most of it straight away, it reminds me of another time.

Keep up the good work! Really enjoy your video.

Thank you for your Experiment. In 1986 I tried this with a 120 min. tape from BASF ferrum. I used that tape to record a weekly radio chart show. But I remember that after half a year the soundquality was completly gone. The seperation between a side and b side was‘t there. With other words. The tape was ruined and I threw it in the bin. Keep up the good work. Nice to hear that you learned something from Dr. Cassette.

Love your vids! I learn so much about old tech!

bravo..well done vw! In addition to the environmental affects of playing tapes in 70s & 80s cars, the other bad thing was the bouncing up & down while driving which would cause tapes to take-up unevenly. This would lead to binding & negatively affect tracking.

Wow… I used to have the same Emerson boom box! Awesome video as usual!!!

Another fine, well thought out, and executed experiment!

Those audio clips you use never dissapoint, good job 😀

I can appreciate the level of detail and thought you put in this.

They certainly are better than you don’t remember.

Excellent video Kevin. I am particularly impressed with your Denon cassette deck.

I think time is a greater enemy of magnetic tape versus mechanical wear. I have open reel tapes that are 60+ years old that still play fine, but being acetate based, are rather brittle and easily snapped. But the physical appearance of the oxide side of the tape shows remarkably little wear, and these tapes were played dozens of times over the years. So the fact that tape can last 1000 plays doesn't amaze me at all. It's all in the care the tapes receive and the maintenance of the deck. At any rate, this was a very impressive demonstration! Thank you!

Cassettes are one of my favorite audio mediums. Still have several which play just fine after decades of use.

And here we go again, awesome topic as usual :) I always wanted a cassete tape that looks like a reel to reel like the one in the thumbnail.

Excellent demonstration you did there to prove the durability of cassette tape. That C10 cassette did very well considering it was for computer use only. I enjoyed this video very much. Thank you for sharing this experiment on KZfaq.

As teenagers, my friends 1968 Impala (whale) had a tap deck with the cassette stuck inside. All year long, we got to hear Night Ranger over and over and over.

This was a very interesting experiment!! This reaffirm my passion for tapes!!!

Another brilliant video! I couldn't help noticing the amount of drivel manufacturers printed on their stuff back then. ,"Precision Audio Technology", "High Quality Sound"... And I wouldn't have had a clue why I didn't hear loud clunking noises or why those lights were flashing to indicate the music level if it hadn't said "Silent Mechanism" or "Fluorescent Peak Meter"!!!

Thanks for the extensive testing. Just shows most people didn’t take care of they equipment back in the day . My hat goes off to you very nice 👍

Awesome video VWestlife! :) Needed a video topic of this. Fan greetings from the Philippines!

That was Excellent, thank you for all your efforts I love my cassettes especially using DBX, the dynamic range that comes off cassette tape is remarkable. I mainly use TDK SA/SAX and of course it has to be Technics 👍. I also have got a lot of Technics tape, manufactured by TDK. Thanks again 🇬🇧. You and Techmoan👌G

vwestlife: going the extra mile to prove rumors wrong so you don't have to!

Hi Kevin I really enjoyed the video. Your Denon cassette deck has very good sound quality. Thank you.

Super experiment and the conclusion is spot on - moisture makes the biggest difference and the quality of the tape. Coming from costal south India, with absurd high moisture, I can vouch for this. Moisture and dust kills not just tapes, but speaker suspensions, mechanisms and the like. In VHS tapes, the moulding of tapes was so visible we had to regularly spool them using a so called 'video cassette rewinder'. In case of audio cassettes, the degradation is highly evident, especially with pre recorded cassettes. If you really wanted long term qualirt, had to use a Sony, Maxell or TDK cassette. Last but not the least, the deposits on the magnetic head was plenty. Requiring frequent cleaning. Thanks, this experiment bought back a lot of memories.

Great video, it brings back so many memories about for me.

This is the kind of video that I'm glad youtube exists...

I have recorded cassette tapes that go back 40 years ago which still play crystal clear today. Temperature and humidity conditioning are the most critical factors for a cassette tape. Love your video!

I have that Denon cassette deck and it absolutely rocks!! Nice that you did the test I've been wondering about for so long on the deck that I use so I know all the variables are the same more or less :)

Conclusion: Philips invented a pretty decent system. Makes me proud as a Dutch citizen.

Your pretty smart, You've given me so much information I wish I new 20+ years ago. Thanks for your great video's

Very interesting video as always! I had an AIWA ADWX808 with bias control, dolby B, C and DBX, and it produced endless high quality recordings in normal tapes. The only bad thing was compatibility: you had to listen to the tapes with the same gear used for recording.

Great video man, I remember being worried about my tapes, as a kid, that replaying my tapes was wearing them out! I especially enjoyed the comparison between Direct vs Tape. The only thing I heard was a bit of "softness" on the higher bands on the tape copy, but it was so subtle that I think it could be chalked up as that "soft analog sound" that tapes dynamically had. But other than that, both sounded amazingly well! Such a shame that tapes got a horrible rep for being "inferior" to CDs. (I'm sure due to misinformation being spread, and a lot of people just not properly maintaining their tape players.)

"Shedding Oxide" is the name of my new album

I'm young enough that my only experience with Memorex is buying computer mice and USB keys from them that inexplicably still had the "Is it live or is it Memorex" slogan, and having no idea what on earth that was supposed to mean.

I’ve been wondering myself. Great video!

What a great video - channel earned my subscription!

VWestlife, I purchased that exact Denon Deck in January this year. It's brilliant; my first three head deck. Took me 35years to get there, though.

The short leader is so you can start saving programs without having to manually go past the leader. Same with loading, you'll save a few seconds of your life.

Wow thats incredible, the high end is completely gone and the lower voices are more audible, who would have thought. Really cool experiment

Another superb video from VWestlife. I have tapes I recorded from vinyl from 1978 (on my then new Sharp music centre, which as a teen I thought was the pinnacle of fidelity) And they still sound great. (Maxell UDs)

I give major props to Maxell for still making magnetic tape media. I still buy it! I used to pick up and fix cassette tapes found along the side of the road! So many idiots threw away expensive music they paid for!

3:45 - You forgot "well calendered"!

That was fun, I think you had a lot of fun with it too. Every once in awhile I get out an old cassette that I carefully recorded on the best deck I had at the moment. I find even after years of storage some sound amazingly good. However I am very glad to be in the digital age eliminating all hiss. At my age I’m sure the old ears are missing some high frequencies.

Brings back memories. I had that same Laser tape to back up programs from my TRS-80 color computer in the 80's.

I have a cassette that is over 50 years old and still working. 14:03 "One thousandth" without teeth.

Cassettes are largely affected by how they are stored, and to a degree, how they are handled. And if you use them in cheap equipment, with a poorly aligned transport path, this can also damage the edges of the tape as it travels along the transport path, resulting in the edges curling over, or being chewed. I have cassettes from the 70's and 80's which still play fine. But recording technology back then, tended to give pre recorded cassettes a bass heavy characteristic, which is quite different from cassettes recorded to the latter half of the 80's and early 90's. And actual tape quality peaked towards the late 80's, to align with the sound quality of CD's, so your home recordings sounded as good as possible, and as near as possible to the original CD. But again, results largely depended on the quality of your recording equipment. But if used on Good quality equipment, with a well aligned transport, and correct storage, cassettes can potentially last a lifetime. However, I was never a lover of Dolby C, to me, recordings can sound a little compressed, and un natural. But Dolby B is a good compromise. Some say Dolby S is better than both Dolby B & C, but I have yet to experience Dolby S personally.

thank you for answering the important questions! ✊

I see you visually rickrolled us, good one! Also loved this video and it is good to preserve media, it's part of our history.

Awesome video! Considering a computer tape can last this long, then normal audio tapes are definitely going to last!

"Kids are gonna buy this cruddy turntables theyll play Darkside of the moon 5 times and the grooves will all be chewed up and say this a stupid hobby why did i get into this" 👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻

Dude... your crazy!!!! Loved that video

It is definitely the storage/environment and maintenance of the equipment that affects the life of the media. I’ve never had any tapes wear out, and I still have all of my original cassettes from back in the day. I’d seems like any wear is superficial and not really noticeable. But the same applies to video cassettes. Never had any of mine wear out, and still play perfectly after all these decades… The issue there is rental tapes: those go through VCR hell with machines that destroy tapes over and over again due to something being wrong with the machine. That’s why I hate when people assume (and use filters to simulate) VHS dropouts and noise like that is the norm. Or storing tapes in an attic for years The try to play them… the results are not very good. But anyways, fantastic video as always :3