A lo-fi feast, in the shape of a two-hour Scotch Dynarange audio cassette, from an era long before the personal computer was a thing – let alone the Internet. In fact, it even predates Pot Noodle. Us kids were all still getting our powdered food fixes from Vesta curries, paellas and chow meins when this beast was sitting on the retailers’ shelves.
The cassette, made in Italy, bought in England, and hailing from the mid 1970s, is a basic ferric with a bumper reel of very thin tape – inevitably prone to wow, flutter and glitch. As was typical for ‘seventies Scotch tapes, the bass response is very strong and evocative, and considering it’s only a Type 1 product the high frequency definition is very respectable.
I’ve looked at earlier orange label and green label Scotch cassettes on the blog, but this blue label variant is one that rarely pops into view these days. You can criticise it to ribbons in technical terms, but if you’re looking for a true and natural lo-fi sound, it does not get any better than this.
Load the tape, record whatever you want, and it’ll play back with all the lo-fi elements you could possibly want. That subtle pitch-instability, a re-sculpted frequency range with high end filtering, ‘seventies lows that make you think of old juke boxes, and of course, the characteristic tape saturation which softens all the transients and fluffs up the mids with a slight distorted edge. Oh yeah, and joy of joys – real tape hiss, although the amount of hiss is well into “low noise” territory so it’s not intrusive. Lo-fi heaven.
One of the hallmarks of cassette manufacture prior to the late 1970s, was the absence of “Type I” position markings and Dolby on/off tick boxes on the label. In 1975, hardly anyone using this type of non-specialist cassette would have possessed equipment that could understand what noise reduction was, or the difference between a Type I (normal) or Type II (chrome) tape. Putting such information on cassette labels would just have bewildered people.
In fact, in ’75, if your cassette player could even reproduce sound in stereo you were ahead of the game. But a lot would change over the next five years, with typical home equipment becoming much more sophisticated, and by 1980, blank tape labels identified their media type by default.
If you lived in England in the early to mid 1970s, you’ll almost certainly remember Scotch tapes as the go-to cassette brand. The original Scotch Type Is are lo-fi, and they always were, but they were attractively priced, assertively voiced, and they could withstand a good amount of wiping and re-recording – even in very long formats like this 60 minutes per side C120. That was easily enough to lead the market, back in the heady era of glam, prog and pub rock.
Tape Tardis 