13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week 354
BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
Re:On the plus side... (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need iTunes to put music on an iPod, either.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:3, Informative)
there isn't?
http://www.avguide.com/forums/turntable-isolation-platform [avguide.com]
Re:Low-slung... (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps it's because I'm quite bright, but apart from the metal switch, I never had any of those questions when I first picked up a tape deck.
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:2, Informative)
4 track audio actually wrap around the capstan and pinch-roller, the tape is only 'dragged over' the head, meaning crap on the head can scratch the tape surface, but there's not really any way for it to tangle there. Any sticky crap on the capstan/rollers would cause the tape to adhere to the, and any problem with the take-up reel (like too much dirt in the cassette) would cause slack to build up after the rollers, which would go for quite some time before being detected in shoddier tape decks. A good tape deck will notice the take-up reel not "taking-up", and shut down. Autoreverse decks seemed to be the worst for chewing in my experience. Auto cassette decks were also quite bad, it's hard to clean them with anything other than a cleaning cassette - I always preferred the manual approach of running the tape deck while rubbing the moving parts with clean paper soaked in isopropyl.
Re:not so naive (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Surely you are trolling. (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, I think you're failing at Nyquist, because the HF response of analogue cassette was nowhere near what a CD can do, and by the sampling theorem, a waveform under half the sampling freq is reproduced perfectly -- I hope you don't labor under the impression that the signal comes out of the speakers steppy, because it doesn't. I think the best high-end you could get out of a player was a 2 inch machine running at 30 ips, and even then you're only going to be able to squeeze 30-40 kHz bandwidth out of it, most of which is going to die in your amp and monitors. I will grant that induced dither has the effect of mushing up the high-end transients, particularly on earlier recordings that didn't used noise shaping, and this doesn't particularly cover strong-3rd-harmonic sustained-envelope sounds, like strings.
But in theory your issue could be addressed if you were to listen to some masters at 96k or 192k, or a 3 Mhz DSD record, and some people report these recordings having being "airy-er" or having "more space in between the instruments," and being able to describe the space in terms of which instruments are sitting in front of others, etc. But, a lot of this is more dependent on miking, and again, nobody has ever been able to get the "warmth" that a good phono or tape recording had. I think the consensus at this point is that it was induced distortion, and didn't actually reflect the signal inputting to the system.
Re:Hehe he ain't seen nothing yet... (Score:4, Informative)