1987 Sony Metal-ES 60 Audio Cassette

I won’t try to hide the fact that I loved Type 4 metal tapes. This is a nice one from Sony – a 1987 Metal-ES, in a 60 minute format. I felt this was a tougher tape than Sony’s earlier Metallic, from 1983 and 1984 (I’ll photograph the ’83 Metallic for this blog in due course, but in the mean time it’s depicted in my 1980s Audio Cassettes article)… (UPDATE: I’ve now added my 1983 Sony Metallic to this blog. You can find it via THIS LINK).

TDK HCL-11 Head Cleaner Cassette

One of the more recent head cleaning cassettes. This TDK HCL-11 is from the late 1990s, and features TDK’s RC-II Rigid Construction Mechanism. All sorts of recommendations would be made by purveyors of recording devices in relation to cleaning, demagnetising or whatever, but running one of these every so often would, in my experience, keep a basic tape deck or tape recorder working without hitch. Home multi-trackers, however, needed more care, and with those, I found head cleaning tapes to have little impact when sound quality was starting to suffer.

1990s Sony FXII 60 Audio Cassette

If you wanted to find weasel words in the mid 1990s, I doubt the first place you’d look would be on the outer packaging of an audio cassette case. However, the term ‘reference quality’, used in relation to what was really quite a low-end Type 2 tape, would surely make a PR officer smile. Sounds impressive; doesn’t really mean anything – the Holy Grail for anyone in the business of selling decidedly unremarkable goods.