Release Time! Ep. 06: Cassette Tape!
I love doing mastering work on cassettes for lots of indie artists! Vibey, and a great way to offer tangible items to your fans for a very reasonable price. But, there are some compromises when it comes to making cassettes that you should know about, before putting in that work order.
Cassette Tape as a Playback Medium
Cassettes, in many ways, were the cell phone speaker of their day. This technology was originally designed as a tool for executives to dictate written material to their secretaries, and only later was appropriated by the music industry. Cassette tapes were revolutionary as an easy, cheap, portable, and convenient way for lots of people to share music with their friends, while putting together a personal collection of stuff they think is cool. And they still fill this niche today!
This medium was designed from the ground up to be cheap. And, to be easy to produce as a mass market, low priced item. The concept of a “hi-fi” cassette player isn’t really a thing, because the audio played through a cassette was never intended to listened to at super high quality. Most cassettes were/are played on cheaper boom boxes, Walkmans (!), or other tape players with small, cheaper built in speakers. Cassette tape, as a medium, wasn’t ever designed to be a highly accurate listening experience. It’s easy, convenient, and cheap, and that’s good enough in a lot of situations.
This means that cassettes color the playback of your music, and you’ll never get to the same level of detailed quality as a digital file can provide. Often times, this is perfectly ok! Certain styles of music are flattered by the natural dynamic compression and noise the cassette medium imparts. Some rock music, indie music, and garage-y lofi styles come to mind.
But, if you’re listening to something like a Mozart symphony, you might notice this quality difference as more of a negative. Kind of like how classical music heard on AM radio is pretty bland, compared to the real thing.
This is an important item to consider when deciding if it makes sense to invest in tapes. The medium has to fit your style of music.
Mastering for Cassette Tape
It is possible to master for cassette, in an attempt to optimize your music for that platform. But, it’s extremely convoluted, not cost-effective, and I really don’t recommend it. Similar to vinyl, every individual cassette manufacturer does things just a little bit differently. Unlike vinyl, there’s not really any sort of cutting engineer in the process to optimize for the medium or perform quality control, beyond a very cursory level.
So, to master for cassette you’d have to do a series of single test pieces, going back and forth between your cassette manufacturer and the mastering engineer. If that’s something the cassette factory will even do for you. This isn’t really practical for something that’s going to be played back on a cheaper set of speakers, that can’t recreate all that nuance you’re spending time on anyway. We’re fighting with the medium a bit here.
A better approach is usually to just accept that cassette tape is a lofi medium, and that it won’t sound quite the same as your CDs or digital files. It’s ok for your cassette versions to sound a little bit different! That’s not a bad thing in a lot of situations and it’s kind of expected on a vintage medium like cassette. Your music should obviously still sound good on cassette. We want those vibes, ya know? They just come with some minor sonic compromises in this medium.
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A high quality digital master, properly done, will transfer well to a cassette. You may experience some or all of the following:
-increased noise (tape hiss)
-increased compression, and less dynamic impact as a result.
-increased low mids-cassette tape naturally rolls off the highs.
It is usually worth it to pay a little more for the nicer chrome tape stock for lower noise, and a better frequency response!
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