1981 Sony BHF 90 Audio Cassette

This is the old, paper (as opposed to foil-type) label version of the Sony BHF 90, from 1981. I know that I was buying these paper label jobs through 1982 as well as in latter ‘81, but by spring 1983 I was getting the shiny label versions.

1997 BASF CMII Chrome Maxima Audio Cassette

I wonder how many of the people buying BASF CMII Chrome Maxima cassettes in the late 1990s realised that they weren’t buying chrome tapes?

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.