Hello, I have two records that I would like to record onto a 90 minute cassette tape. I'm looking for some suggestions on a good quality blank tape.
From what I gather, the only tapes still being manufactured are Type I Normal Bias. Type II Chrome cassettes are available as new old stock (NOS) at various price points. The most popular Chrome tapes are the Maxell XLII, and XLII-S. For best sound, a Type 4 metal cassette would be best, as long as your system has a selector for Type 4. I have no experience with metal cassettes.
The current Type 1 cassettes being manfactured sound fine when recording from LPs. However they dirty up the cassette mechanism pretty fast unlike the higher quality blank tapes from the 90s. Type 2 and Type 4 blank cassettes are out there but they have gotten expensive.
New Type II high bias tape (actually cobalt, not chrome) is now being manufactured, but they're still working on the formulation, so the quality isn't as good as Type II tape of decades past. Your cheapest option would be to simply find some old cassettes whose contents you don't care about, and record over them. Cassettes are typically 50 cents to a dollar each at thrift stores, and as long as it's not moldy and the felt pressure pad is intact, a 40-year-old cassette can still sound perfect when you make a new recording on it today. There are various ways to quickly erase an entire cassette, as shown in Techmoan's video below, but I've rarely had any problems simply recording over the existing audio on the tape. As long as your recorder's erase head is properly aligned, there should be no trace of the old recording left once you make a new one on the tape.
What a crazy world we live in that you can get a blank CD for like 10 cents that will sound dramatically better than it's $30 30 year old blank cassette. Mind blown. I always like the TDK SA-90 or SA-X 90 cassettes back in the day. Maxells were great too.
Never to back to cassette tapes for me. And that was my era. no thanks to the forward / rewind and tape hiss And I won’t even get into the other myriad of issues.
To listen music is a hobby. Cassette decks are nice skills...If you like them, go for...BUT the REAL cassettes are from the golden age. TDK, Maxell, BASF, etc...For a very good quality/reasonably price, take chrome. They last more and the sound is very good.
You can buy Maxell UR type 1 cassettes on Amazon - how do these compare to the XL1's I used to use in the 70s and 80s ?
Maxell URs are still fine Type I tapes. I've compared them to ones from the '90s and don't notice any difference. TDK has not manufactured any new cassette tape since their factory in Thailand got wiped out by flooding in 2011. Considering the then-steeply-declining market for audio tape, they decided not to rebuild the equipment to manufacture it.
I’d agree to go NOS. You don’t have to pay eBay prices, they turn up at record shops all the time. I just got 2 TDK Type II c90s handed to me for free the other day at a shop.
Dunno which ones you are talking about but current production Maxell Type I UR90s are not crap IME/IMHO. Are they as good as a quality Type II? No, and they never will be. They are higher quality than a lot of stuff out there though. I'm specifically referring to offbrand type Is (which are really "type zero/voice grade") tapes from China and some of the stuff the duplicators/bulk sellers will sell you as blanks.
Most of my taping on type Is was done in the mid/late 80s and all through the 90s. The current UR90s are just as good as any brand name type 1 I purchased back then. Some NOS Type Is might be slightly better, but not by much. Certainly not anything the average person would notice. Audio analysis on Tapeheads.net confirms this. With any blank a lot depends on the quality of your deck and the source material, how you set levels, bias, etc.
Calibrating your deck to the tape counts for more in terms of getting the best sound of it and tapes like UR and 90's/2000's TDK D are decent tapes when used respecting their budget origins. As for vintage tapes Maxell UD1 and XLI plus TDK AD/AR are excellent type I's that if well cared for should sound fantastic with little hiss even for non dolby fiends like me while for type II's the Maxell UD/SXII, XLII and XLII-S sound great and are reliable without some of the tramline issues that affect certain batches of TDK SA.
Personally I prefer chrome tape but that’s not available new. This is great tape, I’m using that type on my R2R. Check availability with your local distributor.
Best all-season, all around for the money with intermediate quality Type I tape I used that's likely biased to your Yamaha deck. Still available today.
That is just type 1. In the USA, those tapes will be almost 8 dollars each per tape after shipping and tax from a USA retailer. Not a good value for type 1. For that kind of money you can buy sealed type 2 tapes and have money left over.
You realize that your cassette copy won't sound as good or last as long as the LPs, right? C60s will typically last longer than C90s, but neither will outlast an LP.
Yeah, I realize that it won't sound as good or last as long. I was just wanting to record a couple of LPs onto a cassette to be able to listen to them in my truck.