Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

The pics are so cool, but it's the SMELL of new cassettes that I REALLY miss!!

 

Retrieved from my mum's loft a year ago... this was a very small part of my teenage collection!

 

I have a bunch of sealed cassettes TDK, Sony, and others...also a half dozen old stock BASF Reels...why? I don't use them?

 

used a lot of them for sure!

 

yes! those cases were so much better! and cool too!

 

I don't think I have any left to photograph, but in high school I bought my blank tapes from a Christian bookstore that sold unlabeled and unpackaged TDK tapes. You'd pay individually for the tapes, the cases and the labels, and it was a lot cheaper than buying the packaged TDK tapes at the drug store or record store.

 

I have an 8-year-old nephew who likes to write actual letters (as in handwritten and delivered by U.S. mail!) to his uncle. I'm sending him this new-old-stock Realistic cassette recorder to play with -- and to record his letters to me, so we can just send the tapes back and forth. He likes mechanical things and I think he'll like making his own tapes -- until, of course, he has his own iPhone and can much more easily make digital recordings and email them instantly!

 

Great thread!! I still use a four-track so I'm always looking for "blank" cassettes, whether they're blank or not. It's always kinda cool to find an "oddball" one and this thread is full of em!

 

I did a tape brand shootout using my Wallensack (sp.?) 8-track recorder and a German pressing of Badfinger's Straight Up. I'm not sure which brand won, but I started my cassette buying with TDK - SAs based on my experiences with the other format. Later I bought SAX. Service Merchandise and/or Best Products always seemed to have a sale going on where you got a free zippered case when you purchased 5 or 6 blank cassettes.

I had a 2-speed BIC cassette recorder, but I never stepped up to metal tape capabilities.

I remember buying a new LP, Discwashering it, then playing it through the tape deck so that I could set levels. The next day I would play it again, but record it this time. From then on I'd listen to the tape copy. I enjoyed the output level adjustment capability on the deck. It was like having a preamp signal trimmer to avoid burnouts.

 

Used to do the same thing with CDs! My first separates CD player had a 'Peak Search' function which would find the loudest points on any disc and play it on a loop to allow recorder levels to be set! First time I've remembered that feature in years!

 

I remember using those Tonemasters. I think they were sold without outer cases, two or maybe three packs in soft plastic hanging from peghooks. I might be thinking of some of the other cheapie brands though. I used a lot that you've posted, but TDK was my favorite, seems they were the least problematic.

 

In the early 80s I ported some programs for an engineer who had a Hewlett Packard desktop calculator running some programs overnight. I rewrote the programs in FORTRAN on a Pr1me computer and they ran in a few minutes. Instead of tossing the data cassette, I put some Horslips tunes on it. It sounded as good as the Maxells & TDKs that I had. I still have it someplace.

 

Here are a couple more old-style portable cassette recorders. These are both new-old-stock recorders I bought from Califone about a year ago.
The company makes audio equipment for schools, so their stuff is designed to be abused. Some of their units are built like tanks, so they're great for kids to use -- and you can often get them pretty cheap because school suppliers invariably overstock on them. Note the control panels with the raised-surface symbols for kids with vision problems...

 

Those TDK-D90 were definitely my go to for mixed tapes when giving them to other people, I couldn't afford to just buy TYPE II or IV cassettes for regular give away tapes! I found the D100 also held up with the same quality as the D90 but no longer than that for music. I really liked the Fuji ZII you can see in the pic below, very nice high frequency playback.

 

Here's a Denon tape that actually contains Memorex tape inside!

One night in early 1980, I recorded a band at an Irish pub, using a portable tape recorder, two Memorex MRX2 Oxide cassettes and a single microphone. Surprisingly, the recording came out great! But sometime in the late 1990s, one of the Memorex tapes lost the felt pad that sits behind the tape where the head comes in contact with it. So I bought a set of Denon cassettes that have screw-assembly shells, disassembled both Memorex cassettes and carefully laid the tape reels in the Denon shells and then screwed the Denon shells back together. It worked great. Of course, I now have both cassettes archived digitally, but I've kept my Denon-Memorex hybrids, too.

 

It was a big deal for my siblings and I when we were deemed "old enough" to be given our first tape recorders. I still have most all of my childhood tapes.

 

I used to use TDK AD tapes with my Panasonic boombox and they sounded great for what it was. I liked them better than TDK D, which were still pretty good and cheaper. Hitachi/Maxell UD-XLI were great too, but not as easy to find, compared to their high-bias companion (UD-XLII).

Got a Technics cassette deck and TDK SA tapes became a staple until I went to TDK MA metals. Also used a lot of Maxell XLII. The upmarket SA-X and XLII-S really didn't much on most decks, despite being a better tape, since a fixed bias on most decks didn't work in their favor.

I also used the various Denon made flavors of their tapes - Denon brand, 3M Blackwatch/Scotch XS series, Panasonic. This was after 3M/Scotch gave up making audio cassettes and just sold them. They later had Saehan make their cassettes after Denon, which were not as good.

I also had a few Victor-JVC made ME-90PII tapes. Excellent metal tapes that were briefly sold in the US. The rest of the JVC line up was outsourced, later to Fujifilm.

Sony's UCX-S and metals were also quite good. So-so with the rest of their tapes. Some pretty lousy, some just average (UCX). Did not like their video tapes for VHS at all.

Triad ("That's" in other countries and made by Taiyo Yuden) were pretty good also. BASF were OK, but didn't have good bias match with the deck and had some reliability issues. PDMagnetics (Philips branded in most of the world) were similar. Memorex were just garbage.

Hands down the best tape I used for dynamic range was Matsushita/Panasonic's "Angrom" Metal evaporated tape - similar to MiniDV camcorder tapes' formulation, as opposed to metal particle. These tapes could be recorded at very high levels compared to metal tapes. Only problem was cost- about 50% more than metals. The few I had came from Japan sold under their previous brand "National" and also sold as "Technics" in Europe.

Generally had good results (no bias adjust) with:
Normal bias: TDK AD, AD-X, Maxell XLI, Denon DX3/Scotch XSI
High Bias: TDK SA, Maxell XLII, Denon DX7/Scotch XSII/3M Blackwatch 2020/Panasonic RT-EX, Sony UCX-S, Teac's "real to reel" which were Maxell tape; National Panasonic Angrom DU metal evaporated
Metal: TDK MA, MA-R (!), Sony metals, Fujifilm metals, JVC ME-PII - bias seemed to be less of a factor and more just tape

BTW, you can see some of the Philips cassette designs in the PolyGram prerecorded shells, since Philips owned PolyGram!

 

Pour Cd.....

 

These were what my money could buy on a regular basis.

 

Oh, yes. And this were the ones for the special ocasions.

 

Down here they used to say that Metal Cassettes were 'heads-eaters'... Don't know if it was true...

 

Yeah, SA-90's were the way to go in the 80's -- definitely. I bought them by the case and sold them to fellow students at a profit yet cheaper than the campus store was selling them. I was like an SA-90 pusher.

 

I'm so happy for this thread. I am in a tape mode right about now, and I am going to be making tapes of the original Beatles cassettes in their weird running orders.

 

Me too, and I wish I had these now!

 

Besides the Sony's, I got a lot of these as well. Most of my mix tapes from 1989-1993 were done on these tapes!