This topic has to be free of comparison to each other for only the fact that none of the comparisons are apples and apples. The vinyl army goes on and on about the sound being better, but how does it do in your car? The 8 tracks split long songs because the segments of those 8 track tapes had to be 1/4 of the length of the tape with no ability to make one segment 3 minutes longer and the next 3 minutes shorter to compensate. It had to break songs or pad it with dead space. Cassettes were awful because of that awful 1 7/8 tape speed. When tape is on heads at that slow of a speed you aren't getting any highs at all. But again, when were car 8 tracks and cassettes in vogue?

I liken it to this. I once had a Compaq computer. I wanted to upgrade it to a faster processor. I looked and looked and finally discovered that the CPU socket on the motherboard did not allow for expansion. I wrote a nastygram email to Compaq and called them every name I could think of. Someone finally responded. That response included logic that made me apologize to them. It said (paraphrasing) "When that computer was built, the motherboard and CPU were the best available at the time. Now 3 years later processor speeds are available that were not available then. What you are asking from us is the ability to know what the state of the art will be 3 years into the future. Nobody can do that."

At our age we have lived long enough to see the evolution of sound recording. I was THRILLED to have an 8 track in my Camaro in 1969 and at the time the sound that came off those tapes was GREAT! 53 year older Eddie now understands analog vs digital and knows that what was great then stinks now by comparison. When you apply context and the whole "anachronism" thing, what we had and the changes we made every half decade or so meant we had the best available at the time.

Anybody else RAVE about their ADAT recorders??

Last edited by eddie1261; 04/07/22 04:51 AM.