Audiobook DJ

Saving Old Friends

The Echo of One Hand Clapping: Notes on Audio Publishing and Production, by Brian Price

There are still a few places in this world where I listen exclusively to old audiocassettes:  In the garage when I’m working on something, on the road in the 1985 Volvo station wagon which only has a radio/cassette player, and in my daughter’s room when somebody’s feeling nostalgic for the BBC’s Narnia collection or Harry Potter, which we only have on cassette.

In the universe before iPods (fifteen or maybe even as few as ten years ago) quite a few books-on-tape only came out on tape (note the word “tape”).  Cassettes were the preferred mobile form of listening:  Walkmen, crappy boom boxes in the kitchen, and homemade mixes and collections and programs that we all handed around.

Better sounding LP records had been around since the 1950s and grudgingly gave way in the 1980s to the cassette tape.  The cassette dominance as a consumer product only lasted 10-15 years when the CD/personal computer revolution of the mid 90s arrived.  Cassettes were never meant to be the industry standard, but they did give us consumers something we’d always wished for—freedom to make and edit our own shows and programs.

I remember friends constantly passing around favorite compilations of Little Feat or bits of film dialogue.  For songwriters and budding playwrights cassettes were the best and, most importantly, cheapest way to record works in progress.

 So, I was in the garage and I slapped an old mix tape into an old boom box and it didn’t sound so good.  It sounded sort of ill.  A lot of audio information had to be put on a small amount of space on those cassettes, 1.875 inches per second to be exact.  Over the years tapes stretch, the magnetic coating flakes off, the plastic get brittle.  The legendary hiss gets louder.

 So, what does one do?  Well, I remember using scotch tape on a few of them and actually getting them to play again.  Unlike CDs which just have ones and zeroes ground into them, cassettes can be fixed or at least toyed with enough have their information transferred to a digital form.

 I was pleasantly surprised about how many companies there are on the Web that deal with repairing cassettes and/or transferring their information.  They claim to be able to deal with smashed, twisted and slightly melted cassettes (examples of which I can personally produce).  Anyway, there is hope out there.

 The problem is—in reality--how many of us are going to pay $19.95 per cassette to hear an ABBA tape one more time?  And how many of us are going to spend the time to transfer our old cassettes to digital form ourselves?  It can be done, but it’s the time problem again.  Real time.  A 90-minute cassette is going to take at least 90 minutes to transfer to an 80 minute CD—what a mess that little glitch in industry standards has created.       

I have a Xerox box full of old audiocassettes.  I can’t throw them away.  They bring back memories.  Many can’t be replaced.  They’re all my favorites.  I can’t choose. 

So, I’m going to do I’ve always done.  Go out to the garage and hope they play one more time. 

Brian Price
920 Creekside Lane
Plainfield, IN  46168
317/203-5044
check out:  http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com