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."
Hehe he ain't seen nothing yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
About giving him an 8 track cartridge tape ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_8 [wikipedia.org]
At least, there is only one side to those. I still remember listening to Pink Floyd "The dark side of the moon" and "Echoes" while cruising in my car. Even today, when I listen to it on more modern media, I still remember where the sound track would cut for a few seconds in the middle of a song in order to allow the player to change tracks. They did a fade-out in the middle of a song in order to make it sound more appropriated... ;-)
8-tracks came before 4 track mini-cassette :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Cassette [wikipedia.org]
For those who don't know 8 tracks, the tape is arranged in a endless loop so it was impossible to rewind the tape ;-))) I still have an 8 track recorder in the basement somewhere, I used to record my own tapes ;-)
Re:On the plus side... (Score:1, Insightful)
Surely you are trolling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Was that really written by a 13 year old? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surely you are trolling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse, the mere act of not using a cassette degrades it. Not even vinyl can say that. It just degrades in an analog way that will leave the tape technically playable for a long time. But it also starts with signficantly worse quality than either CDs or vinyl and goes downhill from there.
I can understand the nostalgic property of vinyl to a certain degree, but longing for cassettes is just pathetic.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
RTFM? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Low-slung... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Maybe because tape decks were in common use when you were a kid, and you saw them being operated?
I'm not sure it's fair to call kids "spoiled rotten" because they see the superiority of current technology over what was in use years/decades before they were born. Kids may have a hard time imagining life without iPods and the Internet, but many young adults have a hard time imagining life before TVs and telephones were in every house. Many of us have a hard time imagining life without electricity, automobiles, or indoor plumbing. Insofar as this kid is spoiled, we're all spoiled.
Re:Was that really written by a 13 year old? (Score:5, Insightful)
My favorite part is:
Furthermore, there were a number of buttons protruding from the top and sides of this device to provide functions such as "rewinding" and "fast-forwarding" (remember those?), which added even more bulk.
Emphasis mine.
That part sounded more like a nostalgic review rather than from someone who see the functionality for the first time.
Re:But could he... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see why not. There's only one official way to use a rotary dial phone. Dialing by fiddling with the receiver "off hook" switch was a pain, and only for those cases where you had to make a call when somebody put one of those locks on the rotary dial.
It's not at all physically obvious why casette tapes should have "sides". The answer is in the physical property of the media. The speed with which the magnetized tape passes the head determines the strength of a signal. One of the trade offs of the technology is that higher speed and overall tape length. Having two sides to the tape allowed the overall tape length to remain manageable while doubling the capacity of the cartridge.
Likewise with the "metal" button. His guess was actually quite clever, and not too far off the mark. "Metal" here is a ridiculous piece of jargon; all tapes use metals or mixtures of different metal compounds bound to a plastic substrate. "Metal" tapes have a mixture with different recording and playback characteristics than the older iron oxide tapes. How the hell is anybody supposed to infer that from a label on a button?
Judging from the picture, they game him a beat up old tape player. It's no wonder it didn't sound so good. He was quite observant to note that some of the sound problems he heard were a result of weak batteries driving the motors, which might be worse on an old device. The quality of the tapes he used could also be an issue. Old, worn out tapes would sound bad, and new tapes that weren't recorded properly in the first place could have problems too.
Back in the day, a really good "walkman" type tape device with a decent set of portable earphones and a good quality tape could actually sound acceptably good. Maybe not audiophile quality, but then again you'd be taking your life in your hands to walk around with anything "audiophile quality" on conspicuous display. Even today people listen to their MP3 players using earbuds. I would say that a portable tape player with everything in tip-top shape and a pair of decent over the ear earphones would give an iPod with stock earbuds a run for its money in terms of sound.
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Man this is just wrong. Yes, tape has a higher fidelity than your standard 128 kbps mp3. But not for long. You'll lose most of the highs from ambient electromagnetic interference over the years, unless you store it in a lead box or something.
Depending on where that MP3 is written, after some number of years the cassette may sound bad and the MP3 might be unplayable.
I wouldn't exactly call them durable either. You've never had a tape eaten by a bad deck? Or a little brother that decorated his room with the tape?
It's also very easy to damage a CD. It's easily scratched, CD-Rs don't like sunlight (and UV rays) and degrade faster than a tape. Tape, eaten by a bad deck can usually be saved. A broken CD cannot be fixed, however it's likely that the cassette you sat on contains a tape that can be moved to another shell.
I've got 80 year old 78's
I have one record that's 94 years old :)
Anyway, cassettes are usually more durable and last longer than CD-Rs.
Re:Surely you are trolling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here we branch out into technically superior and characteristically superior.
If you like the audio characteristics of cassettes, a digital audio file can reproduce every single flaw and bit of distortion. You could even apply filters to make brand new CDs sound just like an old cassette.
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:1, Insightful)
The cassette doesn't have artifacts on sibilants, but then again it doesn't really have any HF at all, so if, for example, you were listening to a compact cassette recording of an MP3, the HF artifacts would probably go away, because the cassette simply doesn't have the response to capture those frequencies.
Funniest Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
Aw, that's cute. We'll see what he says when he's forty and he gives his kid an iPod to play with.
Re:Low-slung... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Yes, you're very smart. Pat yourself on the back.
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Best part, you can use them to trade music with your friends, just like the Metallica guys did before they got famous.
Re:I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the writing style of an average 13 year old, but the average 13 year old, or even average much older person doesn't get to write articles for the BBC.
Re:Gotta love them cassettes.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with your comment (and I'm not picking on you, just stating a point) is that most people today who would burn a CD probably have another copy of the data at home. So, the tedious effort of repacking a tape just to play it again (I know I've had the pleasure of doing this....) is actually quite substantial when compared to smashing a CD-R of your favorite music and then spending all of 5 minutes burning a new copy.
I still have yet to convince my wife that she should not use pressed CDs in her car. First, they can be stolen. Second, as you state, a scratch will destroy them. One of these days she may learn her lesson on this - I typically don't care for the type of music she'd buy to listen to in her car, so I typically won't grab her CDs and put them out on our media server.... oh well.
Re:Surely you are trolling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital sampling works great however for modern largely electronic music. It's a shame that you can't really get analog recordings anymore... I miss real sound.
And yet, classical and jazz listeners were the first adaptors of CDs way back when, and are likewise the first/only adaptors of SACD.
Out of curiosity, did you ever happen to listen to the Telarc 1812 Overture [classicalcdreview.com]? This was one of the earlist digital recordings, but was set to vinyl. The cannon blasts were said to leave pieces of woofer all over the living room floor.
Re:Doesn't this say more about today's kids? (Score:3, Insightful)