Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

Looks like you got into my box of tapes.

 

Nice pictures.LOVE the older versions of the tapes.I still have a lot of the late 70s early 80s brands of cassetes

 

At Sam's Club, my mom bought me a whole bulk case of these guys:

 

...but I always preferred these:

 

Here are a few bizarro brands that I picked up at a flea market. It was a whole bushel of recordings people had made of themselves driving around on vacation, visiting their old hometowns, refinishing a basement...
This first tape, labeled "Trip to folks" is two old, old guys driving around their parents' hometown in Iowa, commenting on how much everything had changed since the 1930s. At one point, they pull into a gas station and it's full service!

 

A couple more Maxells. I always loved the sound of the XLI-S tapes. The metal Maxell Capsule tapes were cool looking ...

 

I agree. Those latter-day Memorex tapes were terrible.

 

Yep. Got 2 cases of Maxell tape, sealed, and a nice Denon 3 head deck that's waiting for a "rainy day"...

 

The booklet that comes with Nirvana's With the Lights Out box set has some photos of Kurt Cobain' cassettes. Those pictures took me back... and now here's this great thread. Since I didn't buy CDs until the '90s I used cassettes for a long time.

 

Memorex sucked. I was mostly a TDK/Maxell guy. I remember the days when buying a chrome tape was an important decision. Metal ones were something like a once in a lifetime investment.

 

I remember these appearing in my area towards the end of my cassette purchasing days... early 90s.

 

C-180? Dude, you were tempting fate by using those in the first place.

 

Whoever made these were too ashamed to put a brand name on it. I used to see them for 3-for-$1 at department stores.

This is one I used to record a late-night blues show off the radio back in the '80s. Back then I would regularly just put a tape in, hit record, fall asleep, and see what awaited the next day. This one ended up being a favorite of mine, someday I'll transfer it to a digital file.

 

Ah, TDK SA-90s. The go-to tape for the young home taper circa 1982-1988. I still have scads of metal and classic rock albums on SA-90s, taped off friends in junior high and high school...

 

A few more from the 1970s...

 

And some Radio Shack Concertapes...

 

When I was 12 and had a paper route and my own money I used to buy 3 packs of these at a Rexall drugstore for $1.49 0r $1.99.
Absolute cheap crap, some had no leader others got stuck or spilled. I always though the trademark was a upside down rip-off of Westinghouse Broadcasting's Group W logo.
In time I discovered it was worth it to pay more for Scotch/3M, TDK and Maxell.

 

I loved that "SIDE_____________________". We'd write stupid stuff like "skid" on one side and "mark" on the other to see if people would catch it. Those tapes sounded bad.

 

My collection of Cassette Deck Tech Maintenance Tools that I dug up today ...
( I wonder if they still work? )

 

And a few more... including the Silver Shadow!

 

The early Memorex tapes (MRX 2 Oxide with the white wheel hubs pictured on page 1 of this thread) were very good -- several notches above any of the other commonly circulating brands. They had quality tape and very high quality mechanics. But then there was that precipitous fall from grace in the early 1980s. They definitely became the brand to avoid. Sad to see an industry leader reduced to putting out such poor quality product...

 

I used to use these by the truckload for copying CDs from my local library! My mum would get them regularly from the hospital she worked at, they'd all have odd bleeps and tones recorded on them (some sort of odd data storage?!) and they seemed to be used once before being ditched.
TDK SA90 were my go to for my Tascam for 4-track recorder and I have crates upon crates of them. Was heartbroken when I decided to pull the Tascam out for a recording session and found that fresh, sealed TDK SA tapes had all but disappeared from retail!

 

Had one of these... lost it... desperately need another to degauss my Tascam