An evocative lineup indeed, featuring six as-new blank audio cassettes of the early 1980s. The group includes five different Sony variants, and gives a great insight into the colour mixes that buyers would be seeing on the shelves of the audio stores between 1981 and 1983.
The red cassette is a 1981 CHF 60 – a normal bias ferric of baseline quality. Costing about 69p at the time, this product’s advised use would be voice recordings such as dictation. It was meant for simply preserving sound rather than reproducing a musical experience in high fidelity. However, because of its low cost and better than average performance for its class, it was very commonly used for recording music – especially in unofficial redistribution, i.e. bootlegging.
The green cassettes are BHF 90s – normal bias ferrics of higher quality than the CHF, but still not maximum quality for a standard ferric tape. Two of the three (upper left and lower right) are of the post 1982 design, with a metallic finish on the labels and a slightly more emerald shade of green. The other one (upper right) is of the pre-1982 design, with a regular semi-gloss paper finish on the green label areas. Priced between around 85p and 95p, BHFs were the tapes that a lot of young music fans used to home-record albums – although for legal reasons, that was never a use Sony themselves could recommend.
The purple tape is a UCX 60 in the post 1982 design, with a metallic finish on the label. These were Type II high/chrome bias cassettes with a better fidelity of reproduction than any of the ferrics. They were more expensive, costing significantly over a pound, and were intended for musical applications where the definition of the sound was important. They were great for things like band demo tapes. Or recording FM radio concerts, which in the UK would sometimes be accompanied by televised footage.
TVs were all mono in the early ’80s, but many people had good stereo hi-fi systems, so the BBC would frequently simulcast or even triplecast live bands to TV and radio. On triplecasts the usual distribution protocol would be BBC2 (TV), Radio 1 (Medium Wave), and Radio 2 (VHF). The VHF would be of high sonic quality, and if your hi-fi had both a tape deck and a radio receiver, you could get direct sound onto a cassette. Use a high bias job like the Sony UCX 60 and you would end up with an extremely nice recording.
The gold-coloured cassette is a real maverick. It’s a ferrichrome FeCr 90 in the pre-1982 non-metallic finish. It was not available post 1982. There’s a full documentation the ferrichrome concept in the FeCr ferrichrome post, but suffice it to say that this product was part of a short-lived experiment that was more or less doomed from the start. If your equipment was compatible with the FeCr – and most wasn’t – you’d probably use it for similar applications to those you’d use the UCX for.
Not depicted, but also worth investigating from the same period, were the Sony AHF and the Sony Metallic tapes.
Tape Tardis 