Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

This is a photo of my first cassette recorder, the Ampex Micro 50. (not my photo)
It was made by Phillips in Holland for Ampex.
My early tapes were recorded on this machine.
No Dolby, and it only recorded on standard cassettes. It was stereo but only had one V/U meter.

 

They made decks to be rebagged as Panasonic, etc. I know this deck, and I never got the perfect levels out of it that I put into it during recording. Always a channel lower than the other. Of course, this was before tapes got really good starting about 1975/76. Certron, and PFANSTIEHL brand for drug store 3-packs is what I was using. But anyway, once CR02 hi-bias tapes came around this deck was history, and everyone knew it.

 

Again, I never saw an Advent cassette deck, and BASF cassette tapes were rare out here.

 

What make of machine did you own? Curious. I've owned other makes of machines as well, including JVC, Technics (3 times), Pioneer, and Sony to name some examples. I also owned two Akais as well. I was late to the BASF formulas by the way. I used a lot of Sony and the better 3M/Scotch formulas. By 1975, I bought my fair share of TDK by the way, and Maxell when they became available to me. It was 1977-1978 when BASF began getting available in my area.

 

Sharp, Kenwood, Pioneer, JVC, Sony. The JVC is a 2000's model.

I define good sound as being a sound that is most faithful to the source.

 

Wow - that is amazingly early cassette deck! I wonder if those Norelco cassettes were made by Ampex.

I know later Philips through their then PolyGram joint venture had a US cassette mfg plant for pre-recorded tape and not sure if they made the tape or sourced it like most duplicators.

 

I

Got my Basf chrome tapes from Pacific Stereo in San Jose. Same place I waited in line for hours to buy the Synchronicity Lp and on Cro2 Audiophile Cassette!

 

Don't know about way back then, but in the 80s the absolute worst blank tapes in the 80s in the US were Certron and the other 3-pack cheap drug store/box store tapes with no plastic cases. Brand new they sounded like worn out tapes. Next worst was 'Laser' made by Swire Magnetics in Hong Kong and also sold as the 3M/Scotch BX blue cassette. Drop outs from the beginning. Radio Shack had a similar lowest price tape that was better or "less worse" - 'Concertape' .

I only bought them out of curiosity and they were so cheap, with no intention of using them for any thing serious. All pretty bad both sound (way down in output and dropouts, tracking). Had to do a good headcleaning after a few uses and threw them out!

Reaffirmed how much better TDK D and Maxell LN/UR for their cheapest, which I rarely got also, since the better formulations (Normal and High) were much better.

Funny about Grant's comments about BASF hard to find out there. It was the same for certain brands here beyond the big guys like maxell, TDK, Memorex, 3M/Scotch.

You could find BASF or Fuji, Sony, but only certain chain stores sold them or only a few formulations - usually the basic Normal and High/CrO2. Some brands like That's/Triad, Denon, were very hard to find around here, if at all, but sold elsewhere.

3M/Scotch's good tapes (i.e. made by Denon in Japan) became super rare to find later ('3M Blackwatch') and only cheapo Korean (same as later Memorex db) made tapes were sold at many box stores.

 

Tandy Radio Shack bought Memorex at one point, didn't they? I recall Concertape vanishing from their stores, being replaced by Memorex. Which wasn't much of a trade up...

I do remember a really cheap Memorex metal tape that came out during the mid-to-late '80s. Crazy cheap. It wasn't as good as a decent Maxell or TDK metal tape, but it was cheaper than their high bias tapes and sounded about as good. Noise was actually a bit better since you could record loud.

 

I grew up in Phoenix - BASF tape wasn't impossible to find, but it was much rarer than Maxell, Memorex, TDK, Sony or even Denon, and it became even more difficult to find as Fuji expanded their footprint in the late '80s onward.

It also performed like crap in my Sony deck and my uncle's Mitsubishi deck. I think I bought it two, maybe three times then gave up. You were paying Maxell prices for Memorex performance. I was so excited to be buying "real" chrome tape, then brutally disappointed.

 

When Memorex was at their best they still kept going with foam pads when all other good brands were going with a metal spring plate with felt padding which lasts 1000% longer than the foam. So I ended up years later splicing and reeling in Memorex tape into new better shells in order to digitize the content off of the tapes. many years later Memorex went with the spring plate / felt design. Too late to save that brand. How could they screw up their marketing and sexy black wrapper image? They even had Ella singing their praise, yet took the brand to the bottom.

I still have my tape splicers and splicing tape. I did less than 6 tapes. But when you need to work on a tape, it is nice to have that open of doing it right.

My Scotch chromes are mostly all becoming squeaky against the heads of my players. I copied a KBFH concert off of one recently, and just after the program finished is started the screech, halfway through side two. I'm sure all of that brand are goners now. I am lucky I recovered that FM show.

 

Yup. Exactly! I was buying my blank cassette tapes at the PX so you'd think BASF wouldn't have been hard to find, but they tapes were rare. The BASF VHS tapes were much easier to get here in Arizona.

I also thought I was gettin' the real thing but, nope. I never really used the true chrome Memorex tapes, but the few I did have flaked easily and was ruined.

Thank goodness for CD-R! And, the Fujis had a quality issue, too.

Memorex was at their best in the 70s and very early 80s. From about 1983, their quality took a dive. TDK and Maxell were king.

 

I don't know if Memorex took a huge quality dive - it's more like the other brands kept getting better and better and Memorex didn't. The pads were only part of the problem, although I seem to recall my older Memorex tapes had a felt-like pad, not foam, and it didn't degrade. But the spring designs were typically better, although I did have a couple of cheap tapes where the little felt pad on the spring got pulled to one side because the glue partially failed. So even that design wasn't foolproof.

The best decks were dual-capstan, with the pinch rollers sized slightly differently so that the tape was always pulled taut against the head, lifting it off the pressure pad entirely.

 

Which I agree with. My favorite JVC was the KD-V6 I once owned. That was a nice machine which made superb recordings. Had a Sharp RT-10 at one time, which was OK. My Sony was the TC-153 SD field recorder which was a superb machine.

 

Memorex was at their best in the 70s and very early 80s. From about 1983, their quality too. TDK and Maxell were king.

You owned that Sharp RT-10 too? That was a miserable little machine! It supported metal tapes, but it was awful. I paid somewhere around $100 at the PX for it in 1980.

I wish I had known how good JVC machines were before I wasted all that money on the Sony decks. The Sony decks on the 90s sounded great, among the best ever, but they were mechanically flimsy.

My current JVC has been rock-solid for the last two decades that i've had it.

 

Fun factoid, the gifted Sony TC 153 SD ( A friend of mine, now deceased gave me that machine) replaced that Sharp POS. And recorded far better on Type 1 tape than the Sharp did on the lowest bias Type IV tape. Grant, your ears are telling the truth on that one big time. The JVC KD-V6 I owned was superb, a very underrated machine.

 

I look at the 80s-era Memorex tapes in my collection today and with most of them, the little foam pad has deteriorated. Surprisingly, the ones from the 7os are still intact and work well.

It's a shame what happened to the little metal pad support for the TDK tapes in the mid-80s. They got flimsy and often broke. It's obvious to me that they were trying to save money, cut corners.

 

I even owned a JVC turntable. Not the best in the line, but it was a real workhorse for 20 years until about around the year 2000.

 

Like I have always said, the Memorex Achilles heel has been their foam pressure pads and their shells. The tape was excellent and amazingly fine for Type 1. 3M/Scotch made some great tape, the same problems apply to their shell design (Master I and II the exception). What is even worse about 3M was their horrid fixed metal rollers.

 

Maxell shells were great until the late 80s when Tandy bought them.

I used Scotch cassette tape mostly in the 70s. Good stuff. The old Highlander tape in the mid 70s still holds up today. The quality of their tape went downhill in the early 80s.

Capitol had some good tape in the 70s. I'm not sure when they went away.

 

My grandparents had one very similar although I think it was Sony. I also used to play with one of these.

 

Highlander and 177 were my favorite economy open reel tapes, too. I could buy 1800" for $2.29 at discount. The AM/FM combo I worked for young, had an arrangement where station personnel could buy that tape for store cost. I started with an Ampex 1800 machine, got a Sony, then a Teac A 2300S (flea market buy from a departing scientist from Oak Ridge, who was returning to Germany, $80, and 12 reels of Scotch 206 with it, box and manuals and a few pre-recorded tapes). Teac was as new, low hours. He was nice enough to haul the deck to the WATO studios for me.

 

It really needs a three head deck with calibration to get the best of them.

They top out at 0db so any pushing them into the red causes distortion, completely different to what we became accustomed to with the Japanese tapes that take a hot signal.

I got a bunch of them around 15 years ago, luckily I had read about how gentle you need to go with them so was prepared, if I hadn’t of known I would have thought they were crap too.

When properly dialled in they sound really wonderful with no hiss whatsoever, probably the lowest noise floor of any cassettes I have.

 

Does anyone remember a cassette than came in a black plastic cover that clipped open and closed, kind of similar to a modern DVD cover?

It may have been Ampex. I remember having one as a child and it’s the only one I ever saw.

 

Scotch made a case with a push button "spring" drawer opening, and they were stackable with a slide in clip to keep them as a set of drawers. A red drawer with black plastic case. I just saw I have one of them still. It must not have caught on but it looks cool.

I realized over the last few days looking through desk drawers that I saved an awful lot of cassettes, various case designs and unused sticker labels.

I also saved any clear shell cassette with the metal reels inside just because they look cool. They look especially cool turning in a deck that does not use a door slot type of loading, but just an open space to snap the tape into place like some of the JVC decks we've talked about.

I wonder if I can group together some of these used tapes, like the gold label XLIIS, or TDK-MA and sell them on ebay? Some were recorded on once and never played after. And I own a good bulk eraser which I could do on them if buyer wanted?