1992 BASF Chrome Extra II 60 Audio Cassette

BASF maintained their commitment to chrome as a Type 2 formulation into the 1990s, and this was how things were looking in 1992. The BASF Chrome Extra II was the ‘entry level’ chrome tape in the range. It had a very typical BASF sound – quite glassy, with so much weight at the extremes of the frequency range, it was almost as if some of the midrange had been scooped a little. If you liked that sound, this was a great value tape, proving itself a lot more resistant to drop-outs than early ’80s BASFs in my experience.

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.