Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

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

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  1. Izozeles

    Izozeles Pushing my limits

    This thread has some of the most beatiful pictures ever. What a nostalgic mist around those little rectangular things.
     
  2. K7's have an appeal that CDs and even vinyl doesn't, being little mechanical contraptions with moving parts and all. Not exactly the most user-friendly things (having to fast fwd to get to tracks, snags, breakage) but cool all the same.
     
    CDV and no.nine like this.
  3. Peter_R

    Peter_R Maple Syrple Gort Staff

    Location:
    Montreal, Canada
    These are the ones I used to record The Lost Lennon Tapes off the radio:


    USXPro90a.png

    I then switched to these:


    USXPro90b.png


    Still have them. They still sound great. I've been meaning to digitize some of the highlights & wipe out all of Elliot Mintz's annoying banter.
     
    Jon H., Simon A, Jerry and 12 others like this.
  4. Peter_R

    Peter_R Maple Syrple Gort Staff

    Location:
    Montreal, Canada
    Is K7 something that translates below the 49th parallel?

    I thought it was a French thing...
     
  5. no.nine

    no.nine (not his real name)

    Location:
    NYC
    Great seeing all these old tapes... brings back a lot of memories. I'd love to see more of the real cheap off-brand ones! For some reason I find them particularly intriguing. I can picture in my head a couple of them which I used to have; I'd try to find photos on the net to post here but I'll be damned if I can remember the brand names!
     
  6. Craig

    Craig (unspecified) Staff

    Location:
    North of Seattle
    Part of my still sealed collection :wiggle:

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
  7. sgtmono

    sgtmono Seasoned Member

    Me too, though I distinctly remember the look of this 90 minutes variety. I went through cases of these things as a kid in the late 80s, recording stuff off the radio, dubbing vinyl, and making my own recordings:

    [​IMG]
     
  8. Perhaps, but I've seen it used occasionally among English-speaking music geeks as well. If folks here don't get it, well, then maybe this will be the new thing they learn today!
     
  9. I had a few of these as well, mainly used for car listening. I knew they weren't the best, natch, but the price was right and I kind of liked the Miami Vice-ish colour scheme.
     
    905 likes this.
  10. moople72

    moople72 Forum Resident

    Location:
    KC
  11. BNell

    BNell Forum Resident

    Location:
    South Norwalk, CT
    Seeing that Tower sticker makes me sad.
     
  12. Clark V Kauffman

    Clark V Kauffman Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Des Moines, Iowa
    Yes, there's something about watching the spinning, white teeth on the wheel hubs, like a car in motion, and knowing that even as the tape moves forward it's preserving what just came before. You can watching the tape in 'play' mode, and see it flowing like liquid from the left-hand reel to the one on the right. You can hear the little guide-rollers in the lower corners shepherding the tape along its path....

    The various brands seem to have personalities all their own. You look at a Maxell XLI-S with that soft-sheen silver reflective label, spot-varnished to a high gloss in a few places, and you marvel at the elegance of the design and attention to detail. But for me, the cheap cassettes had the real charm. After all, the expensive, high-grade tapes were typically commissioned to record a store-bought LP through a component stereo system anchored in someone's living room. They were designed to carry the voices of people you never met. But the lowly three-for-a-buck cassettes -- with names like Audio Magnetics, Certron, Sunshine, K-Mart, Tonemaster, Highlander, Osco, Playtone, etc. -- had a higher calling. They were the tapes typically used to preserve the ambient sounds of real life, often through a battery-powered portable recorder from Sears, Montgomery Ward or Radio Shack.

    Those were the tapes that would record and retain the voices of friends and family members, some now gone, or the local disc jockey who actually played your requests before the station was bought out by a faceless conglomerate. Those were the tapes that served as an informal audio diary for families, capturing, sometimes in disjointed, overlapping layers, the bark of a newly adopted puppy, or the family singing 'Happy Birthday,' or the sound of dad's new station wagon rumbling down the interstate on the way to Wall Drug. Whenever I see a bunch of used cassettes at a thrift store or a flea market -- usually 10 cents each -- I ignore the Maxells and Sonys and Denons and look for the cheapies that were designed for portable recorders with little plug-in microphones. That's where the real gold is.
     
    Jon H., CDV, Max Florian and 20 others like this.
  13. Bob Dobalina

    Bob Dobalina Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Used to buy boxes of TDKs at Uncle Steve's on Canal St. in NYC...

    Must be one of those colorful Memorex cassettes featured here:

     
    Mylene, Miche and Sneaky Pete like this.
  14. Izozeles

    Izozeles Pushing my limits

    I think what happens is that this little things remind us some of those intimate moments on which you were on your own, selecting the track order and figuring out the many improbable circunstances that a song sequence could have created. Tapes are capsules of time not only for being an abandoned audio format, but mainly for the memories they are attached to the moments we spent listening and recording around them.
     
  15. Terry

    Terry Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee
    What is an avocado memory?
     
  16. sixelsix

    sixelsix Forum Resident

    Location:
    memphis, tn, usa
    I did that a bunch, too.
    Taped a LOT of stuff off the radio from roughly '82 to '88, using many of the tapes pictured in this thread. (Mostly Maxells.) Most of them were in a big box at my folks' place. Of course, I suspect they were thrown out years ago.
     
  17. Picca

    Picca Forum Resident

    Location:
    Modena, Italy
    Wow...74 minutes
    C-74CDIT1C_m.JPG
     
  18. Larry Geller

    Larry Geller Surround sound lunatic

    Location:
    Bayside, NY
    I have the 1978 Yankee-Red Sox playoff game (Bucky effing Dent) recorded on one of these. You could actually see through the tape, it was so thin.
     
  19. Larry Geller

    Larry Geller Surround sound lunatic

    Location:
    Bayside, NY
    Me too. That's where I got all my tapes, in bulk. They were the cheapest in NY. "Helllloooo New Yawk'---This is your Uncle Steve"
     
  20. athensdrums

    athensdrums Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ohio
    While cleaning out some closets at work (radio station), I stumbled upon 300 unopened TDK cassettes. No one else wanted the tapes, so I took them home (the look on my wife's face was priceless). Hey, I'm bound to find a use for them eventually, right?
    photo.JPG.jpeg
     
    Mordax, Jon H., Aftermath and 19 others like this.
  21. JP Christian

    JP Christian Forum Resident

    well if you want to lose a few, lose 'em in my direction!

    Loving this thread - I've got some great stuff on tape - you can still picked up sealed blanks of decent makes on ebay - sometimes they go for silly money though - especially the metals...

    I have two cassette decks a Sony TCK611-S and a Denon MX-30, both are 3-head machines and I still use the Denon frequently. It still, after all this time amazes me when I switch between the source and the playback while recording, just how little difference there is (if you're using a good chrome or metal blank) - and to think this thing is running at 1 & 7/8 inches per second...
     
    GyroSE and Max Florian like this.
  22. JP Christian

    JP Christian Forum Resident

    ... sorry Denon DR-M30HX is the model...
     
  23. Beatnik_Daddyo'73

    Beatnik_Daddyo'73 Music Addiction Personified

    I was a mix-tape junkie as well. Loved me some TDK 120's. A WHOLE HOUR ON EACH SIDE! YES! ahhhhh memories...:pleased:
     
    adriatikfan likes this.
  24. intv7

    intv7 Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    Okay, so I'm not the only one?? :confused:
     
  25. JP Christian

    JP Christian Forum Resident

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