Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Clark V Kauffman, Mar 23, 2014.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    It wasn't the heads they were matched to. There is a little bias adjustment inside your deck that allows you to tweak your preferred tape to the settings. Remember that most decks sold in the U.S. in the late 70s and 80s were from japanese manufacturers like Sony, JVC, Harmon-Kardon, Kenwood, TEAC, Sanyo, Sansui, and a few others. They all set their bias to the Type II tapes, not CrO2 tapes. Of course, many three-head decks made the bias user-adjustable. Anyone who liked to tinker could open up the cover and adjust the bias themselves, usually by ear if they didn't have the test equipment.
     
    PhilBiker and Stuart S like this.
  2. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Exactly. BASF was the only one I thought that produced true chrome tape, at least by the time I was buying "high-bias" tapes circa '83. The others I'd thought were all high-bias ferric formulations. I didn't realize Memorex during that era were also chrome. Is that so?

    It's an easy misunderstanding to have, since many decks labeled the bias setting for them as "Chrome" or "CrO2". But by the '80s - if not even earlier - most "high-bias" tapes weren't actually CrO2 but some combination of other stuff that included the same iron oxide found in normal bias tapes.

    So even though folks kinda rag on Sony for FeCr tapes, which combined iron oxide and CrO2 and never really caught on, the reality is that's kinda where the market mostly ended up - doing funky stuff to iron oxide-based formulations to make them "high-bias" and function a lot like chrome. If not actually better, since chrome legendarily had issues recording loud bass - why Sony cooked up FeCr tapes in the first place.
     
  3. JohnO

    JohnO Senior Member

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    You were lucky. I have a couple somewhere, they were all lousy. The FeCr or Type III setting and tapes were so bad, so wrong, that the concept was killed, and future decks then had only "Type I, II, IV" even though the FeCr settings and capability were still inside the units.
     
    Grant likes this.
  4. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    Memorex produced CrO2 tapes in the 70s. They ditched that for the HBII series in the 80s.

    Like I said, the Japanese deck manufacturers tweaked their decks for Asia and the Americas with the Type II tapes.

    The reason the FeCr tapes didn't work out is because they sounded terrible! And, people were confused by what settings to use. Besides that, metal tape came out in 1979. In the early 80s, the metal tapes weren't all that good yet, and not all manufacturers utilized the type, especially since it required a certain type of head to record and play them. It was bad enough that some of the cheapest decks had metal tape capability.

    Earlier, I mentioned the many types of formulations that TDK used. One I forgot to mention in that list was AD-X. Sheesh! Now, I liked their OD series, but it didn't catch on because of the name, suggesting an "overdose", as in drug overdose). :D
     
    PhilBiker likes this.
  5. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Metal tape definitely put a stake into ferrichrome tape - resolved chrome's bass issues and blew it and all the ferric high bias formulas away when it came to noise and high frequency response. Even if Sony had somehow improved ferrichrome's performance, it would have never stacked up to metal.
     
    GuildX700 likes this.
  6. PhilBiker

    PhilBiker sh.tv member number 666

    Location:
    Northern VA, USA
    Bias adjustment - my Denon has that. But how do you know what to set it at? How to you experiment? My 90s Sony ES 2 head auto reverse deck had auto bias feature. It sounded as good as CD with the auto bias and Dolby type S. But it was too little too late and I went to MiniDisc for recording.

    The Memorex tapes were pure chrome and sounded awesome and they were blue. However, about 1981 or so everybody's MRX2 and MRX3 tapes from the 70s were becoming unplayable because the pressure pads all failed, so EVERYBODY stopped buying them. This was when Memorex went from being a premium brand to a cheapo brand.
     
  7. McLover

    McLover Senior Member

    Not all Type II tapes are real CRO2, most are not. There's also a reason why. In Japan, Sony got the Japanese exclusive license for CRO2 from DuPont in 1970. Any Japanese tape company who wanted to sell CRO2, had to pay Sony a royalty due to that license. TDK, and Maxell also did offer CRO2 tapes. By 1974 or so, Maxell and TDK decided to develop a CRO2 equivalent tape formulation using Cobalt Doped Ferric Oxide to skirt the DuPont patents, and the Sony patent license. Which led to TDK Super Avilyn and Maxell's Epitaxial formula tapes by 1976-1977. And the rest of the Japanese tape manufacturers followed suit. Eventually by around 1980. even Sony developed their counterpart to these CRO2 equivalent oxides, to do the same thing. Which left Philips (PD Magnetics in the USA by then), BASF, Agfa, and ECP as the main CRO2 manufacturers making the real CRO2 formulas.
     
    PhilBiker and Grant like this.
  8. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Interesting background. Explains why true CRO2 formulas seem to have almost died out by the time I started buying anything other than normal bias tapes, circa '83.
     
    McLover and PhilBiker like this.
  9. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    My JVCs also have bias adjustment. They also have a tone generator and 3-head, which allows you to adjust to a particular tape by just watching the two VU meters and turning the knob until the meters match in bias adjust mode. Otherwise, you can switch between input and recorded signal on 3 head with noise reduction off and tweak until what's recorded sounds identical.
     
    PhilBiker and McLover like this.
  10. no.nine

    no.nine (not his real name)

    Location:
    NYC
    Look what I found:


    [​IMG]

    This is the cassette I talked about in post#885, the one with a black shell on one side and white on the other. It's in pretty rough shape, but it's good to see it again! The text which is kind of reddish used to be black, obviously faded now.

    In my other post, I said that I didn't remember a brand name. You can see that's because there's no logo, but among the text is "Audio Magnetics, Corp.", so that's now a solved mystery! Above that, it says "AV/Educator Premium". A specific non-consumer line, I guess?

    And finally, it's a good thing that huge yellowed masking tape was put over the record tab, because if you look closely, you can see that the label has separated from the shell. Without that tape, it would be long gone; indeed, there's no label on the other side any more!
     
    Last edited: Dec 16, 2017
  11. PhilBiker

    PhilBiker sh.tv member number 666

    Location:
    Northern VA, USA
    Cool follow-up. Audio Magnetics made the TRACS cassettes. I had a few they were complete crap - came in 3 packs or in uber cheap single cassette packs. Exactly what this thread is all about. Here's the Audio Magnetics logo on the TRACS cassette:
    [​IMG]
    Here's a better copy I found on an online auction of how they were packaged - they didn't even have a case:
    [​IMG]
     
  12. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    [​IMG]

    Ah yeah! You found an image of the exact second cassette tape I ever owned as a kid. I can hear it now!
     
    PhilBiker and Rupe33 like this.
  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Used to record audio letters to a cousin in Oregon on these, and also episodes of TV shows like Space:1999, back when I was around 7 or 8.
     
  14. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I used them to record my favorite songs off the radio. They didn't sound all that good, but they were durable, at least for me.
     
    SonyTek likes this.
  15. Chooke

    Chooke Forum Resident

    Location:
    Perth, Australia
    Remember the endless loop cassettes?

    I went through a phase as a very young kid playing these tapes with repetitive sounds just to annoy people.
     
    Donniej likes this.
  16. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    I have a cassette deck that would allow you to adjust the bias for the specific tape you were using. The process was fairly simple and easy:
    • Put the tape in and hit the bias adjust.
    • The level meter would show two bars, one for each channel.
    • Adjust the bias level (it was a knob on the front) until the length of the two bars matched.
    Once set, you only had to adjust it again if you changed the type of tape you were using. I'd adjust it every time I changed the brand and/or type of tape (including different Type II tapes from the same manufacturer).
     
    JP Christian and Grant like this.
  17. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I even adjusted the bias for each side of the tape because the tape skew and direction changed the settings a bit.
     
    ShallowMemory and JP Christian like this.
  18. JP Christian

    JP Christian Forum Resident

    My Sony TCK-611S has that feature - I found it invaluable - it's a shame the format was getting better and better technically just as it became obsolete - that Sony deck was an award winner across the board and deservedly so.
     
    Pinknik and Grant like this.
  19. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    For sound quality, the 90s-era ES Sony decks are the best i've ever owned. But, they had cheap mechanical parts that just didn't last. That was part of Sony's downfall.
     
    PhilBiker and JP Christian like this.
  20. Rick Bartlett

    Rick Bartlett Forum Resident

  21. kBear

    kBear Forum Resident

    Location:
    Central Vermont
    Started out with XLII-S or SA-X but after reading something in the Sunday NY Times about these Sony's I switched until the end of the cassette era
     
    PhilBiker likes this.
  22. Solitaire1

    Solitaire1 Carpenters Fan

    I was never a supporter of auto reverse, and one of the reasons I purchased the deck I had was that it did not have auto reverse.
     
    PhilBiker likes this.
  23. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I never mentioned auto-reverse, and am not a fan of it either,

    Whenever I turned the tape over to record the second side, I ran the bias calibration again. That is because the properties of the tape path change.
     
    PhilBiker likes this.
  24. As an "ASMRtist" myself, I really appreciate this. Thank you for sharing it.
     
    PhilBiker and Rick Bartlett like this.
  25. Rick Bartlett

    Rick Bartlett Forum Resident

    I just thought it showed the enthusiasm that relates in this thread. I still get a buzz myself when I find
    NOS tapes unopened. This is how I feel. The whole quality thing is very interesting for me, some were poor,
    but some were fantastic too. Great memories just the same, especially having so many cassettes in my youth.
    I actually miss the days of using cassettes as a popular medium. The older I get, the more I appreciate how much
    fun I really had with them for better and worse.
     
    Donniej and letmerollit like this.
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine