1988 TDK SA 46 Audio Cassette

A few years on from the TDK Super Avilyn tape I photographed for THIS POST, the TDK SA cassette had evolved into what you see here. This is a 1988 example, and despite less than four years’ timespan between the two variants, the one depicted here looks markedly different from the 1984 version on that link. The multi-track (Portastudio) format recording this tape preserves is from the early 1990s, so I’m guessing that won’t have been the first material I put onto it. Typically for a TDK SA, the sound is very good.

The cassette’s ‘anti-resonance’ build is denoted on the shell, and this was something various manufacturers seemed to get quite excited about. However, I found it hard to consider as anything much more than a gimmick. If a cassette was made properly, it really shouldn’t have problems with resonance in the first place, so the boast always seemed to me like the manufacturers were trying to get us to regard basic standards as some kind of bonus.

1982 Memorex MRXI C90 Audio Cassette

This one took a bit of searching out. It’s a 90 minute Memorex MRXI (or MRX1), bought at the end of 1982. I’d bet that a fairly hefty proportion of these normal bias tapes ended up in the bin, as did the shells for most of mine. I liked the sound of these and used them almost exclusively to record rehearsals for the very first ‘band’ I was in, through the winter and into the spring of 1983. The MRXIs were bold, they could take a good amount of level, and they had considerable quantities of treble for a normal bias tape – albeit around the region of 6 KHz rather than much higher up in the spectrum like a chrome tape. It was a hard sound, which gave our rather polite instrument setup some much needed teen cred.

1989 BASF Chrome Extra II 60 Audio Cassette

This was a BASF chrome cassette design that brought down the curtain on the 1980s black-encased products, which had evolved visually in both subtle and more dramatic increments through the course of the decade.