By 1994, the world of home multitrack recording was well along the road of transformation from tape to digital formats. But full computerisation of the process was still not a realistic proposition for most recording enthusiasts.
DAT – Digital Audio Tape – was sometimes used to create the finished master, and by some people for the actual multitracking. Additionally, such processes as MIDI sequencing were keeping more of the component synth sounds and beats in the digital domain until the mixdown stage. But true digital recording, to hard computer disk, was still limited both by typical disk capacities and by computer processing power. Therefore, amateur recordists were still most commonly using analogue tape, and Portastudio equipment, which allowed overdubbing on a high bias analogue audio cassette.
The TDK SA cassette was specifically recommended by Portastudio manufacturers Tascam for use in home multitracking. It was a high quality, high bias cassette with a Super Avilyn tape coating which rendered excellent sound preservation and detail across the frequency spectrum. It was also highly resilient, minimising glitches in the recording, which were one of the most serious problems with physically narrow tape media.
In the photo, you can see a 1994 TDK SA 90 sitting on a 1994 gear advert in a recording magazine. I’ve photographed other TDK SAs for this blog, but they changed in design through the years, so there’s no duplication.
Although this cassette would give 90 minutes of play time in a normal stereo tape deck, it would most likely only give 22 and a half minutes in a Portastudio. This was because the Portastudio used both sides of the tape at the same time (cutting 90 minutes down to 45), and also most often ran at double speed (cutting 45 minutes down to 22.5).
You might imagine that preserving work on these tapes over a period of decades would be prone to instability and decay. But a good standard of cassette like this one would actually offer the recording a much better chance of survival than 1994’s most affordable digital options. A number of my 1990s CD-Rs have decayed to the point where they can’t be accessed at all. That’s never happened to me with an analogue tape. And often, due to inadequate computer resources, the digital home recordists of ’94 would be forced to use a reduced sample rate, which would compromise the quality from the start. Then you’d have other potential digital catastrophes to budget in, such as hard disk failure.
Conversely, this cassette has preserved a four-track recording made in the mid 1990s, with no perceptible qualitative degradation at all. And the best news is that, here in 2020, it’s possible to transfer the four separate tape tracks to computer, and mix them using digital processing paraphernalia which just wasn’t available to mere mortals a quarter of a century ago, in the tape’s own day.
Tape Tardis 