Avocado Memories: Photos of long-forgotten blank cassettes

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Clark V Kauffman, Mar 23, 2014.

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  1. bleachershane

    bleachershane Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glasgow, Scotland
    Exactly the problem I found... They should've ditched production of Normal type cassettes and at least kept Chrome (Type II) for semi-pro uses (4-tracks being one of the last bastions of cassette use I know of these days...)
     
    jack static likes this.
  2. Picca

    Picca Forum Resident

    Location:
    Modena, Italy
    Max Florian likes this.
  3. clhboa

    clhboa Forum Resident

    turnersmemo likes this.
  4. HiFi Guy 008

    HiFi Guy 008 Forum Resident

    Location:
    New England
    Used a lot of these back in the day:
    image5043.jpg

    And two of these, which were wonderful:
    image2574.jpg
     
  5. no.nine

    no.nine (not his real name)

    Location:
    NYC
    "Thank you, I love you." :D

    I remember Uncle Steve's! I bought my first real receiver there, I suppose it must've been in '79. It was a Technics, and I seem to remember the model number being SA-500. Got a pair of JBLs there, too. Ah, memories....
     
    utopiarun likes this.
  6. Platterpus

    Platterpus Senior Member

    Great pics, a couple brands I never knew even put out blank tape. I love cassettes and have taken good care of mine.
     
  7. Clark V Kauffman

    Clark V Kauffman Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Des Moines, Iowa
    Some of the premium cassettes should have won awards for their packaging design.
    Here are some more favorites...

    photo-1.JPG
    photo-4.JPG



    photo-3.JPG
     
    Jon H., Simon A, Aftermath and 14 others like this.
  8. A. Scrounger

    A. Scrounger Forum Resident

    Man, you nailed that wonderfully. One of my all time favorite posts. :righton: :tiphat:
     
    Max Florian and hi_watt like this.
  9. vanhooserd

    vanhooserd Senior Member

    Location:
    Nashville,TN
    007.JPG 008.JPG 010.JPG
    A quick trip to the basement & I brought back these tapes & labels. The Scotch tape is the oldest, dating back to around 1977.
     
    Jon H., Max Florian, SirMarc and 19 others like this.
  10. Clark V Kauffman

    Clark V Kauffman Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Des Moines, Iowa
    Scotch Dynarange! I had forgotten about those. And those Maxell labels look to be very early. There are no Maxell Points on them.

    Speaking of which, I once got two free black canvas overnight bags with my points. They were very nicely constructed and I still use them! Did anyone else here claim a prize with their points?
     
  11. Wally Swift

    Wally Swift Yo-Yoing where I will...

    Location:
    Brooklyn New York
    Here's some cassette pics from my Photobucket account;

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
  12. Maggie

    Maggie like a walking, talking art show

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    No, they could be new. I was still buying those from the local convenience store in 2005. The same label sheet was included inside (no points). The tapes looked like the top-left one in vanhooserd's second image.
     
    Mark Nelson likes this.
  13. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    I still have a dubbed copy of Pete Seeger's double 10-inch album Frontier Ballads on one of these cassettes. Still has the case,too. Until I can find a real copy of that album, the cassette's a keeper. I dubbed it in 1974 and it still sounds as good as it did then.
     
    dennman6 likes this.
  14. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    I still use them.
     
  15. Mark Nelson

    Mark Nelson Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I bought a bunch of these at the time, and every one snapped or got eaten in my deck over the course of a year or so.

    I get the heebie-jeebies just looking at that image, the memories of frustration it brings back.
     
    Vidiot likes this.
  16. Technocentral

    Technocentral Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    [​IMG]

    Used them all, from really cheap awful no brand ones, to the metal ones, but these were my favourite great sounding (for cassettes!). Great memories of taping indie shows from Capital Radio in Dublin in the mid 80s.
     
  17. sixelsix

    sixelsix Forum Resident

    Location:
    memphis, tn, usa
  18. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    zebop likes this.
  19. Clark V Kauffman

    Clark V Kauffman Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Des Moines, Iowa
    All hail the XLI-S.
    I don't know that any tape formulation I ever used sounded better than these top-of-the-line, normal-bias tapes that Maxell produced from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. (After that, I sensed the overall quality of their tapes wasn't quite the same...)
    Maxell_XLI-S_1985.jpg
    maxell_xli-s_90.jpg
     
    Jon H., Aftermath, buzshaws and 10 others like this.
  20. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    This was my tape of choice in the 80s:
    TDK_SA_C90_Altul_071128.jpg
     
  21. Dukes Travels

    Dukes Travels Forum Resident

    Boy, this is one area where the old adage "you get what you pay for" sure rings true. When I was a poor 13 year old, I used to buy cheapo non brand name blank cassettes to tape stuff off the radio etc. You know, the kind that came wrapped together in packs of 10, with no cases. They seriously sounded ****.
     
    OneStepBeyond likes this.
  22. Dukes Travels

    Dukes Travels Forum Resident

    Other peoples music collections were not safe in my house either...sorry mum. :D

    [​IMG]
     
    Max Florian, kBear, dennman6 and 13 others like this.
  23. Izozeles

    Izozeles Pushing my limits

    I just remember tapes came with this thin stickers to lable each side. They were everywhere in my bedroom!!
     
    Max Florian and Bill In WV like this.
  24. rl1856

    rl1856 Forum Resident

    Location:
    SC
    I still have many of the tapes I made in HS and College. I haven't played them in years, then again, I haven't even plugged in my cassette deck in about 10 yrs.... (3 head Denon).

    From back in the day, I was a fan of Maxell UDXL-II, Sony UXC-S and UX-Pro, Denon HD8.

    I remember reading the cassette tape tests and reviews in Audio and marvelled at the Nakamichi tape decks and how TDK SA forumlations almost always seemed to perform as well as the highly priced Nakamichi brand tape. Nakamichi tape was 2-3x the price of TDK and Maxell at the time. Much later I found out that Nakamichi tape was in fact relabled TDK, meaning that their decks were optimized at the factory for TDK tape. No wonder TDK did so well in comparison tests !
     
  25. Hey Vinyl Man

    Hey Vinyl Man Another bloody Yank down under...

    Anyone else remember the blank Capitol cassettes with the early '70s C logo (from the lime-green record label) and the pastel labels? I remember the cartridges themselves were white and the 60-minute tapes had pink labels, 90s had green, and there was a shorter tan one (15 or 30?) which I only saw once. Regrettably, I can't find any images of them online.
     
    McLover and Clark V Kauffman like this.
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