Leda Cassette Head Cleaner

Here’s a rare old sight, which might bring back memories for a few of those who can recall the early 1980s. This is a Leda Cassette Head Cleaner. Pretty standard in design for a compact cassette-enclosed head cleaning tape. Ten tick-boxes on the orange paper label, indicating that the life of this unit was (at least intended to be) restricted to ten cleaning operations. It’s not apparent from the photo but you can see from impressions in the paper that the boxes have actually been ticked. It’s just that the cassette was used so long ago that the biro has faded to white!

Realistic Radio Shack Low Noise Audio Cassette

This photo serves as quite a stark warning message: the characteristics an audio cassette has today are not necessarily representative of the characteristics it had when new!

1994 Maxell UR90 Audio Cassette

Even though the Vintage Cassettes site categorises this cassette as remaining in production until 1993, I’ve logged this one as 1994. It could feasibly have been made in 1993, but it wasn’t bought until very late in ’94 at the earliest – possibly the beginning of 1995. Because of the type of blog this is, it suits me better to work on when the tapes were bought (rather than purely reference information) as a guide to their year. It helps give some insight into what was on sale in the UK shops, and when, as well as hinting that the tapes often took a considerable time to work their way through the system into the hands of the eventual consumer.