one aspect of the revival of interest in cassette tapes in recent years that
has often been lamented is the high cost and scarcity of good quality newly manufactured
blank cassette tapes for example a 10 pack of these ones here will set
you back anywhere from around $40 to $60 plus shipping and We Are Rewind makers of this very
attractive looking but only mediocre sounding new stereo cassette player recently introduced
their own new blank cassette tapes at a cost of $70 for a pack of ten ouch!
and New Old Stock cassettes from the '80s or '90s that are still sealed are not necessarily
cheaper due to high demand and limited supply one suggested alternative are used cassette
tapes you can often get a bargain if you don't mind the cases being a bit scratched or beat up
or sometimes missing entirely and needing to erase someone's miserable recordings
but there's an even cheaper way to amass a collection of cassette tapes to make your
own recordings on: the Bible! at least here in the U.S. it's common to come across these book on tape
editions of all or part of the Bible in this case it's the New Testament of The New American Bible
on 16 cassette tapes in this binder I got this at a thrift
store and the price sticker says $2.99 but they actually had a 50% off sale on
green price stickers so I ended up paying about $1.50 for all these cassette tapes
I'm sure whoever originally owned this has since moved on to newer technologies to gain
access to the Good Book in fact there's an entire subgenre of tech products over the
years dedicated to the sole purpose of reading or listening to the Bible
so if you don't mind being a bit sacrilegious you can reuse these cassette tapes to make your
own recordings on but first let's listen to a little sample of what the narration sounds like
"Jesus said to his disciples I assure you only with difficulty will a rich
man enter into the kingdom of God I repeat what I said it is easier for
a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"
one of the first things anyone who used cassette tapes learned about them is how to tape over
a tape using a little piece of tape and of course you can do the same thing with these
I don't know if it's a sin to tape over the Bible but if it is:
"let the man among you who has no sin be the first to cast a stone at her"
you might think these would be poor quality cassettes because you don't need high fidelity
sound for spoken word content but if I use my official cassette tape winding tool to wind this
tape forward a bit to expose the actual magnetic material in them that actually looks very high
quality it's very smooth and shiny there's no wrinkles or lines in it and if I shine
a bright light on it it's not semi-transparent like a lot of the cheaper and thinner tape was
so let's hook up a cassette deck and listen to what kind of quality
we can get when making our own recordings on these Bible tapes
so I got my little piece of tape on it to allow me to make my own recording on it
and first I'll use some test tones to check how close the calibration of this tape is
to the IEC standard and this is a three head deck so I can either monitor the source which
in this case is a CD player or I can monitor the actual recording it's making in real time
so first I'll start at 400 Hz test tone at 0 dB and I'll start recording it to tape
and it's a little bit below where it should be but I can boost that up with this control
so just a little bit of boost there and now it's properly calibrated for level now to
check the bias I'll play at 10 kHz tone at -10 dB and I'll record it to the tape
and it's a little bit below that it's at -15 so if I bring down the bias I can bring it up to
where it should be at -10 dB maybe a little bit more and that's properly calibrated now
so to calibrate this tape we needed to increase the level and reduce the bias but it is within
the range of adjustment so it should be a pretty decent tape if it was a really cheap
tape we wouldn't be able to calibrate it even with these controls at their maximum settings
and what better song to use to tape over the Bible than
"Dinner with the Diablo" from the BackTraxx 2 Music Library
"on the Lord's day I was caught up in ecstasy and
I heard behind me a piercing voice like the sound of a trumpet which said..."
[Music]
"...dead but now I live forever and ever I hold the keys of death and the Netherworld"
I don't know about you but I think that sounded excellent especially for a Type I tape without
any Dolby noise reduction but when going through these tapes I noticed that while
most of them have a translucent leader this one has a clear leader which could indicate
that these were not all made from the same tape stock and that's a risk you get with
these box sets you don't know if they use whatever scraps of leftover tape they could
find so it's possible some of them could be very good quality and others not so much
here's that tape of the clear leader and when I calibrated it it did require slightly more
level than the first tape but the bias was the same so I'm not sure if that's
different tape stock or if that's just part of the normal variation from one tape to
the next and I recorded another track on it from the BackTraxx Music Library this
time "Cosmopolitan Blues" and this time I used Dolby B noise reduction on my Denon DR-M24HX
"Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians chapter one"
[Music]
another excellent quality result
another thing I notice about these tapes is that they're not all the same length
which makes sense because they're split up according to the books and chapters of the
Bible and obviously some are longer than others so using my Philips deck I fast forwarded all
the tapes from beginning to end and wrote down the counter readings and the longest
tape turned out to be the first one at 3262 and the shortest tape was number six at 2284
so I pulled out those two tapes and I played them in the real time counter mode and that
longest one is 42 minutes 57 seconds per side and the shortest one is 28 minutes and 44 seconds per
side which is not such a big deal if you're just making mixtapes or recording for the radio or any
kind of other general purpose recording but if you're planning to for example release an
album using these as your duplication cassettes that would pose a challenge although these are
screwed shells so you can open them up and cut the tape to exactly the length you need for your album
another thing you'll probably want to do when reusing tapes is remove the original
labels but that may not necessarily be so difficult because I noticed on this one it's
already starting to come off so probably just a little bit of heat and maybe some chemicals
it'll be probably pretty easy to remove the labels without leaving any residue behind
and of course there are non-religious box sets of cassette tapes as well such as this
one whose purpose is to help you learn Morse code and unfortunately didn't work for me;
No Code Tech was as far as I got you can see it has six cassettes in it and these also appear
to have pretty decent tape stock in them it's also nice and shiny and smooth generally mass
duplicated cassettes from the '80s and '90s and early 2000s they generally use pretty good
tape stock so almost anything from that period should make good recordings when you reuse it
so is it a good idea to reuse audio and video
cassettes? sure just don't do it without your friend's permission
"but we're friends" "friends!? you taped baseball over my yoga tapes!"