Cassettes... is there a difference btwn CLEAR and WHITE tapes?

I have two copies of Wilco's A.M. on cassette. Both are from the same year and same label but one tape is WHITE and one tape is CLEAR. Is there a difference in quality?

 

Are you sure the white one isn't the tape leader?

 

Maybe OP is talking about the cassette shell?

I dunno...

 

no.

 

Cassette shell color should make no difference in sound. Some labels went from colored shells to clear starting in the mid 80's IIRC. Cassette manufacturing quality and proper care is what's important.

 

I always thought the clear looks neater. Or the the reel to reel looking ones!

 

They do look neat to see all the parts inside. But the smell of them is terrible. A sick sweet smell.

 

I love that smell. I think I'll dig through my box of dubbing cassettes right now for a little "tape high".

 

My experience has been that I have had a LOT of poor quality tapes that were in white shells, but most clear ones are high quality chromium oxide tapes.
That is not a rule, or a guaranteed situation, it is just that in general that is what I have found.
Also, whenever I ordered high quality bulk amounts of special length cassettes for my studio they were always in clear shells. I don't know if that is any indication, or just a fluke.
Perhaps as tape got better clear shells became more common, simply because early tape manufacturers might not have wanted you to be able to see all that oxide shedding in them. The insides of clear ones normally have good parts as well as lubricant plastic sheets.

 

I'm not encouraging you in your "choice method" of getting high.

 

Agreed, those are pretty cool...

 

I think the only real high will be a reminiscence of youth and taping my favourite songs off the radio, which was always fun.

 

Makes me wonder if Humble Pies Back On Track is on cassette.

 

Shell color may have not made a difference but if you took a green marker and colored the outside edge of the shell all the way around...

 

I know that a lot of earlier record club editions (Columbia House, BMG...) seemed to opt for the white shell cassettes whereas the retail copies would lean toward clear shells. The record club editions may have utilized inferior masters and that could explain some of the difference in quality you're noticing between the two.

That said, I maintain that most retail cassettes sounded like ****.

 

Nice one! I forgot about that cover.

I might be wrong about the exact time but I seem to remember all the labels moving over to clear shells in the late 80s, record club or not. I used to prefer many of the white shells at the time too, as many of those newer clear tapes had Dolby applied to them and it never decoded right at home, either with Dolby on OR off. Some of those newer tapes had a lot of hiss and a jacked hi-end - they were being made to sound good on lowest-common-denominator and/or badly-aligned equipment at that point, I think.

There were a few good pre-recorded tapes I remember hearing - in particular, there was a high-bias chrome tape release of "Synchronicicty" that sounded awesome at the time. But yeah, most of them were dog s**t.

 

Very good point.

Early cassettes were garbage, but I think as time went on and decks got more sophisticated the tapes started getting much better. The labels were competing with home made tapes, which most tapers used Maxell and TDK chrome . I think by the 80s most of the crap tape was gone.

 

Shells weren't a surefire indicator of anything, but the tabs at the top of the cartridges were.

Top cassette here (Type I - 120 µs) is iron oxide. Second one down with the extra slot (Type II - 70 µs) is chrome and cobalt. The bottom two (Type IV - 70 µs) with the added central perforations are metal.

Type III was ferric oxide and chrome. They didn't have a very linear frequency response and disappeared by the mid-80s.

That sickly sweet smell is the one thing I miss about cassettes.

 

I can add a tiny bit of clarification. My family (and in turn myself since I was a kid) used the RCA Record Club, which of course turned into BMG sometime in the late '80s, and we used it til probably around 1992 when I signed up for a Columbia House account since I was the only one even using it and I liked that CH's stuff was usually identical to the retail copy. Anyway, based on that I can say that BMG was definitely still using white cases up until at least '92-ish, and it seemed to be for *every* tape, including lots (probably most by then) not available in retail as "white" case tapes. Columbia by then was sending out stuff that was all but indistinguishable from the retail version, save for maybe a small CRC mark somewhere. If retail had a white case, so did the CH version - if it was clear, so was the CH.

 

If you go through your old cassettes, I think you will find that the majority that are housed in the clear shells, will be the WEA (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic), titles, with the Capitol titles the second most common. WEA started issuing the clear shells in 1984. The Columbia titles, and their related labels stuck with the white shells almost to the very end.

As for a difference in sound quality? I personally always felt the WEA and Capitol label titles always sounds better than the Columbia and associated titles. But that was even before WEA and Capitol switched to the clear shells. As a side note, I loved the sweet smell of those clear shell cassettes.

 

I used to own a music store years ago and what you posted was my experience as well. Generally speaking.

 

Yes, Capital cassettes seemed to have great sound. I have no idea why some of those tapes smelled so good but I suspect it wasn't the tape, but rather the ink on the J card inserts. Kind of like those old handouts we would get in school in the 60's-70's....remember sniffing those?

 

I used to get some really weird colored tape shells from Columbia House..

 

The first time I saw translucent prerecorded tape shells was in 1990. before then, they were all white or a cream color, or even a blue or pink color, if you're talking about the early 70s and before.

 

There is a clear difference.