Does anyone remember dubbing a cassette or two in real time?
Back in the day, this band I liked played very frequently, many times at venues around the Bay Area. Before a set of shows, 4 or 5 friends would drop their cassette decks and a box of tapes with me. Each night I'd get home in SF 12-1, unpack my D-5M, and put it on top of a tower of decks that were daisy chained together. Loaded them all with blanks and put them in record/pause. I could unpause 4 at a time, then unpause my D-5M for playback plus any other recording decks. Would usually get at least first tape dubbed before sleeping then wake up and finish.
Friends all committed to make at least 5 copies for others in the tree, so we could get shows circulating without a whole lot of muss/fuss. I was running km84i's and that was somewhat unusual, so there was interest in the recordings.
Beta decks were more expensive, so we only had 2 SL-2000's at our house in Oakland, making
offsite backup sharing a bit slower.
Mostly used Panasonic home DATs and Sony portables. No flips made it easier, but the thrill was going.
Now I seed torrents and have a dropbox archive for file sharing, and clone and mail hard drives full of shows. Very efficient, but somehow less satisfying for this dinosaur.