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.

1981 Sony CHF 60 Audio Cassette

Sony CHF tapes were among the very first I used for my own recordings after I hit my teens. They were good, if basic, normal bias cassettes with quite a warm sound, but also an acceptable amount of definition for a Type I range-propper. Pretty noisy though.

The two other cassette models in the 1981 Sony Type I range were the Sony BHF, and the Sony AHF. The BHF was a noticeable upgrade on the quality of this CHF. And the AHF was a hugely improved, essentially pro-grade product of very high quality – coming with a much higher price tag.

I’ve got a fair old few Sony CHFs, and the material on them ranges quite widely. At one end of the scale there are some all-too-clear renditions of my own instrumental tracks, played on a Bontempi B370 organ. At the other, performances by chart bands of the day, recorded from the TV, with a cheapish tape recorder placed in front of the set’s speaker, and my family jabbering away in the background.

1994 Maxell MX-S 46 Metal Bias Audio Cassette

In the mid 1990s I started to make the switch from analogue to digital recording. However, the process of transition was slow, and actually took some years. It was 1998 before I completed the transition and for the first time began creating multi-tracked home recordings entirely on a computer. Between 1994 and 1998 I was still mastering my songs to audio tape, mostly using a combination of vocals and guitars recorded to tape on a Portastudio, and electronic MIDI instruments synthesizing various parts (including drums) on a live sync-up.