1984 Sony UCX 60 Audio Cassette

This was a tape which certainly had the looks, but did it have the sound to match?…

1984 TDK SA 60 Audio Cassette

The TDK SA 60 was a really nice Type 2 high bias tape with a round but well defined sound. It also seemed a pretty durable piece of manufacture, and this one, whilst not having been played regularly since I moved its content to digital media in the late 1990s, does still sound very good – well over a quarter of a century after it was produced. ‘SA’, incidentally, stood for Super Avilyn, which was the receptive coating formulation TDK used on the actual tape.

1985 Sony HF-S 90 Audio Cassette

The Sony HF-S cassette was a normal bias Type 1, which was of a superior grade, and described by the manufacturer as Super High Fidelity. There was a big difference in sound quality between these tapes and the very basic ‘Low Noise’ range-proppers – although most high bias chrome tapes would still quite noticeably subordinate them in terms of frequency response.