Another home multitrack recording time capsule – this time from the year 1992, when analogue tape-based formats were still very firmly at the forefront of the genre. Back then, the For Sale columns in the audio recording magazines headlined on Cassette Recorders and Reel to Reel, with Computing coming right at the end, after Percussion and Guitars.
The photo freezes a TDK audio cassette standing on a 1992 magazine ad for Tascam Portastudios – including the 464, 424 and Porta 05. And providing the ultimate backdrop, the Tascam 424 itself, still solidering on in fully working order after 28 years.
The cassette is of exactly the same brand and series as the 1994 job in the previous post, but we’ve dropped into an earlier era of design, so it has a different look. And there are other snapshots of the TDK SA on this blog, dating back to the first half of the 1980s. TDK’s Super Avilyn tape was an enduring product whose image moved with the times.
Those with a photographer’s eye will doubtless have noticed how grey the image is, with only the odd dab of colour to distinguish it from a monochrome. Although 1992 recording magazines didn’t seem to lack colour in their day, a huge number of the pictures in their ads – especially dealer ads – were still published in black and white. So when you look back through them after nearly three decades of publishing progress, it’s very noticeable how many of the pages are either tri-colour or fully greyscale.
And only a decade and a half before that – in the era of this Agfa High Energy tape – equivalent mags were almost entirely monochromatic, with a lot of the pictures in hard black and white bi-tone, like this…
It’s so easy to take a quick glance at an old audio cassette today, and walk on past it. But next time you see one, stop and think about the world it inhabited. It wasn’t just recording that was so much more primitive in 1992. It was a world with no home internet, no smartphones, and print publishing was still not yet fully out of the age of black and white.
If you’re old enough to have bought one, you probably chucked out your 1992 television as life-expired before the end of the last century. You don’t even remember what it looked like. And yet the cassette tapes that lived in the cupboard next to where it stood, still survive, perfectly usable. They’ll probably outlive you. I can pretty confidently suggest that the smartphone you bought last week will not.
Tape Tardis 