If the track played though a cassette is that much of an improvement, couldn't you have a mastering step that runs the track through a cassette player? Or is there a je ne sais quoi that even that would fail to capture?

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Aldipower 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

There are quite some good tape simulation VST plugins outside, but as they sound good, they sound like the plugin sound, not like my very own tape deck sounds. Sure, I could master with my very own tape deck, but then it sounds like my tape deck and not like yours, if you are playing the tune.

There is something very special, if you put the cassette into _your_ tape deck and run it.

You cannot replace this with something digital/virtual.

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bryanrasmussen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I suppose whatever you send to Spotify will then compress more the tape compression making it sound worse? Also reminded of that recent thing about AI improving YouTube videos. I wonder if Spotify would do that about certain things - small creators, concerts, other live performances.

At any rate I don't think Master - Tape - Spotify would be likely to sound better than just Master - Spotify.

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Aldipower 3 days ago | parent [-]

Spotify itself does not compress luckily. They just do loudness normalization, which does not affect the audio quality in itself.

But the codec used for streaming does some quality degradation that is for sure.

So yeah, it is always better to listen to CD, Tape or what not then to some streaming codec music.

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jdalgetty 3 days ago | parent [-]

Spotify does not sound as good to me as a high quality/bit rate mp3.

	▲	Aldipower 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Makes sense, because Spotify free has a bitrate of 96-160 kbps and "hq" mp3 has 320 kbps.