Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

That's true. Now that I remember these were really low noise in fact they barely captured sound at all

 

I started buying them in 1987. I bought TDK SA and SA-X.

In the 90s, I had a Sony 5-disc CD player that could scan a CD to find the peaks so one could adjust the levels on your cassette recorder.

 

Ok. My memory is playing tricks on me. The type III ferrite chrome didn't appear to be a big seller after awhile. Quite a bit of overstock, perhaps?

 

This is a GREAT thread! The photos of the different brand cassettes and especially the portable cassette recorders bring back a flood of memories.

I looked through most of the pictures and hopefully I didn't miss it, but does anyone recall a brand of blank tape called "Irish?" It was a green case (go figure!) and you would typically see them in the department stores of the time like Two Guys, Korvettes and Great Eastern Mills!

 

I think the excitement in cassettes had moved to type IV and tapes like TDK SA were more than good enough with no special requirements

 

We certainly didn't have them over here! the term "Irish" should only be used for high quality products.

 

Never saw these before ... Is this it?

 

Here are some more very cool looking portables. I always hankered for one of these Marantz pro-recorders used by radio reporters...

 

A few more...

 

And some more... including one in avocado-colored plastic, and one by Lavis that is so square and has so much woodgrain I can only picture it sitting on the desk of a bank president, like Mr. Drysdale...

 

Laughed out loud. Brilliant!

 

And then there was the short-lived pre-recorded album with a blank side for home recording...

 

A friend of mine bought one of those 1+1s - a Grace Jones album but I can't remember which. I recorded My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts on the blank side but he was forced to erase it because it spooked his girlfriend!

 

You could do it in stereo with a quirky DIN headphone jack....

I did own one for a while for use in school.
If you don't know it, it's an ITT Studio 73 transportable stereo recorder with built in mono monitoring and auto Cr02 tape selection.

 

What's an AC/Battety?

 

An assault on the mains!

 

A Sony normal bias tape and the unit I recorded it on in the summer of 1975. The jambox which weighed a ton is long gone but I still have the tape and it plays fine.

 

Whoa! A rare typo that made it all the way into production?
Here's one with the correct spelling....

 

I remember being advised that any tape longer than C90 would be too thin and that loud music would somehow print to tape next to it on the spindle.

 

I recorded most of my radio shows on TDK D - Type 1 and the Maxell Equivalent. Slowly, I am transferring them all to digital.... 2o plus years later.

 

I still have a Technics CD player that does the same (peak search).....you could even hook it to a Technics cassette deck and it would synchronize/start recording when you started the CD. The CDP also had a function where you could program CD tracks for playback to fit the tape length (60 min, 90 min, etc.).

I mostly stuck with TDK SAs and Maxell XLII's (whichever was on sale).

 

Cool, so they remastered it. As is so often the case, I prefer the original!

 

I had that tapedeck! Got it for my 7th birthday, I think.

 

The Irish brand started around the end of the 1940s, manufactured by what originally was called Orradio Industries, of Opelika, Alabama. Around 1958 the company (by then called Orr Industries) was purchased by Ampex, and became its Magnetic Tape Division. Irish was the name for their top-quality merchandise alongside the phasing-in of Ampex as a tape brand across the 1960s and into at least the early 1970s. (Shamrock was their el cheapo brand, actually off-spec and factory seconds that also came to be sold by Radio Shack as ConcerTape starting in the mid-1970s.) AFAIK Ampex phased out the Irish brand by the end of the 1970s.

 

Imagine lugging this piece of furniture around.
I won't even get into the Freudian aspects of the girl's skirt riding up as she swings the case and approaches the guy who is holding the recorder that fits inside the case...