I'm afraid we're not talking about the same thing. First off, BoC seems to have been very careful about compiling and mastering tracks right from the start, since those tapes do sound surprisingly homogenous and clean. I don't think they'd be that careless about levels and such. Secondly, the frequency spectrum covered by a track has nothing to do with recording levels. "Louder" doesn't necessarily mean "more frequencies". It is true that cassette tapes don't have a perfect frequency response and there will be distortion and loss of frequencies, but they won't be consistent with what you get from MP3.re-phaelam-ed wrote:You do know that tape offers a kind of free compression. you can go hot without the shitty clipping digital crap. (fuck digital). so, speculating, if this is just stuff done for fun and friends...the tunes are most likely not mastered and may have diff levels. i don't know if your from the day of mix tapes made for the girl you were after...but those would have tracks that were louder than others or mixed real shitty.
(and I may be alone in this, but I love digital. I'm all for digitising the hell out of everything)
Yes, tapes can be unreliable, but I think that those kinds of problems would lead to clearly audible artifacts, like the music going on hyperspeed for a fraction of a second, stuff like that. The thing is, the FLAC files do not only sound consistent to MP3 files in general, but they sound consistent to the specific MP3's provided on a dependable source, which are the highest quality collection available so far.re-phaelam-ed wrote:and sometimes tapes got caught or twisted and you'd get little gaps or stutters. tape was so far from perfect. but perfect sucks (over compressed garbage).
I also think you're seriously mixing up concepts there. I'm not aware of anyone that associates overcompression with perfection, or vice versa. Instead, dynamic squashing is fiercely fought by music enthusiasts today. Personally, I'm not really concerned with the idea of "perfection" in music, because it doesn't exist, neither in the analogue nor the digital realm. In fact, in that sense, analogue and digital are very similar: both introduce distortion, artifacts and overall loss of quality if they're not used very carefully. But still, I'm all for having music in the highest quality, or at least closest to the source material. That's why I really wished these tapes were legitimate.