What do the other physical audio formats sound like?

[ChildOfTheMoon]

So most of us have CDs, I'm sure some of us have vinyl and cassettes, with CDs  sounding the best out of the three in most cases. For my collection, I don't have anything beyond those three formats (except for the one Tesseract Blu-ray) and I've always wondered wat an 8 track or a reel-to-reel, etc sound like. I imagine somewhat like a cassette with less hissing?

[andrewilley]

Analogue reel-to-reel covers so many variations, from quarter-inch to two-inch tapes, running at assorted different speeds (basically the faster the better for quality) and with anything from mono up to 24 tracks for a studio master.

8-track took one of the smaller tape sizes and assigned eight channels (giving four stereo recordings) per cartridge. It was a constant loop, so never needed rewinding at the end. Slow tape-to-head speed though.

Cassette tape probably won out as more R&D went into it, with better tape formulations coming along to compensate for the slower speed, and Dolby Noise Reduction lowered the audible the tape hiss (basically by boosting the frequencies in the music where noise also occurs, and then attenuating those frequencies down again during playback, correcting the music again and at the same time reducing the tape hiss).

Andre