1970s Scotch Dynarange C90 Audio Cassette

I don’t have a date of purchase for this blatantly very old Scotch Dynarange tape, but there’s one recording on it featuring me as a child, with kids I knew at junior school. The case design ties in with that shown in the 1971 to 1973 stock on http://vintagecassettes.com/, and there’s nothing to contest the fact that my Mom would have bought the cassette during that period. The recording of me as a child wouldn’t have been as early as that – it’s more like 1975 or 1976 I think. But this is a retro cassette, good and proper.

1993 TDK CDing II C90 Audio Cassette

If ever there was a case of a manufacturer setting themselves up for failure, then this was surely it. An audio cassette with a picture of a compact disc on the outer packaging, and a boast that the tape could reproduce CD sound like for like. In a world where home CD burning was still some way in the future, being able to exactly copy a CD to an audio tape was a very attractive thought. There was, however, one ever-so-slight drawback… It didn’t work.

1990 That’s EX 90 Audio Cassette

The That’s brand made some truly excellent audio cassettes, and in the early 1990s I used little else for my most serious home recordings. Probably the most impressive thing about That’s was the durability of their tape, which kept ‘drop-outs’ and qualitative interruptions to an absolute minimum. That’s as a brand offered some of the smoothest recording available on audio cassette tape. The That’s EX was unusual in that it had a metal tape formulation, but a Type 2 classification (and thus bias), which would normally be the preserve of a chrome (CrO2) cassette. Metal tapes were typically classed as Type 4s and ran with a higher bias.