Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

Sorry for the confusion. When you mentioned "tape skew" and "direction" I thought you were referring to auto reverse.

 

I miss cassettes. Just something about the whole process of building a play list and recording to tape brought such pleasure. Kind of weird I guess.

 

I had a mid-90s Sony ES deck with auto bias - you just hit a button and it optimized. It also had Dolby S, but unfortunately it had auto reverse. IME auto reverse never worked well. My current deck is a dual deck from Denon with no auto reverse. It's rarely used and only the playback deck works but it's very nice.

 

This the exact, same one I have. Sounds fantastic...except, it doesn't work. One day, i'll open it up and attempt to repair it. Again, this was around the time Sony started using cheapo parts.

 

Found another cassette tape storage unit recently. Made to look like a turntable/cover. Holds 30 tapes in their cases or 48 w/0 cases. No company name but made in Taiwan sticker on bottom. What bothers me is I recognize the 'scruffy bird' TM on the cover but can't remember what company used it? Any guesses?

 

Disclaimer: I don't read or understand Japanese, and I must apologize for the quality of the photos.

I took a chance recently and ordered the below book titled "Cassette Tape Complete Guide" from cdjapan.co.jp.



The book has 194 pages and is beautifully printed. Almost every page has a photo. From what I can gather, there is a multi-page brand history section for each of these brands....TDK, Sony, Maxell, Fuji/Axia, Columbia/Denon, and That's. Smaller half page brand history were done for Scotch, National/Panasonic, Victor, and Konica. There's also a year-by-year breakdown on which blank cassettes were released (the photo below from the year 1987)....



There is a history of each brand of blank cassette, each section featured a timeline of when a specific blank cassette was introduced (the below photo came from the Denon section)....



Towards the end of the book, there's a section of the many models of portable cassette players released by Sony, Aiwa, and Panasonic (the below photo is from the Sony Walkman section)



I believe there are a couple of articles on people who still record on cassettes.

Interestingly, on the inside of the front cover, there's an ad from Aiwa for its small CD/cassette boomboxes.

The book cost about US$12.00. Highly recommended!!

 

That book looks super cool thanks for sharing! I would chance a guess that it doesn't contain much in the way of Certron, TRACS, K-Mart, and other low quality junk cassettes that are the crux of this thread.

 

No. The book, for obvious reasons, concentrates on the cassettes available in the Japanese market. Therefore, there are photos of many blank cassette tapes we don't get in North America or elsewhere.

 

When you're a kid in the early 70s and don't have access to a lot of money and exposure to quality hi-fi gear, all you know is what you call junk.

 

Had a few of these...normal bias infused with cobalt. Not half bad sounding.

 

Awesome Thanks!

 

I remember very dimly using 3M Scotch cassettes sometime in the early 80's and these were the worst I ever used. They didn't look like the picture you posted, IIRC mine were made with black plastic...or was it smoke plastic with a black label?

 

IIRC, these were the initial versions of the HE formulation, and in my experience worked rather well for a normal bias tape. Scotch tapes from the 1980s were definitely a different beast as compared to the earlier generation of Highlanders and such, and I will agree that they were not as good overall. I stopped using new Scotch tape stock around 1981 due to my disappointment with their performance.

 

Super cool, but these are kind of off-topic here. We're really more interested in stuff like this:

 

Not off topic at all. Go back and read the first post. I do remember the Kmart tapes, though. I probably bought my share of them.

 

Those K-Mart tapes bring back memories, as those Aidio Magnetics/Tracs tapes do. No, they weren't hi-fi, but with a good deck, I surprisingly was able to eek out some half-way decent sound from them. I made a lot of radio tapes with them all.

 

Thanks for this. I had to order one.

 

MAXELL (UD)XL-II; a roughly complete set from 1978 through 2000-ish, with "Sakura Kinomoto" on board;

 

My new to me car is a 2005 Ford Taurus with a cassette deck?! So, I’ve been listening to tapes lately. I was writing up labels and an insert for a tape I’m making and remembered: I’ve always been a slob at doing that. My dad and granddad were both good at making neat and tidy handwritten inserts and labels, but mine always suck. So much so, that when I had a real typewriter, I would sometimes prepare my labels on it. Good times.

 

Anyone weirdos here like me who save these pics of tapes so he can reminisce?

 

I sometimes used a Smith Corona electronic typewriter to do my cassette labels - even got so skilled that I could make a Dolby logo using square brackets, a capital D and a few other tweaks. - See Elton John label.

Then I started using a Unix terminal to create J cards - Eurythmics label.

A few years after that I got a Windows PC and did my labels in CorelDraw - Fleetwood Mac label.

 

Bookmarking the thread would seem less stalkerish.

 

I ran many dubs on these Kmart tapes with decent results -- the shells were good quality with real turning idler wheels, and the tape stock was dark and decently shiny (as opposed to the usual Certron LN light brown matte finish stock). Still have a few of these that play just fine. The main downside with these and many other cassettes is that over time, the glue holding the white pressure pad gives out, making it necessary to reattach or replace the pad. I seem to remember Memorex using a foam-based pressure pad arrangement that eventually decomposed altogether -- had to crack open and rehouse a few of those tapes in order to preserve them.

My best at-home results always came from using either Maxell or TDK tape stock, in their various formulations. BASF was used when available, which wasn't often. Scotch tapes were usually disappointing, as were Capitol blank cassettes -- oxide shed for days. White shell Ampex 350s were good too, but not always available. Audio Magnetics and Tracs cassettes were relegated to voice-only recordings.