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.

1998 TDK SA 90 Audio Cassette

It’s hard now to imagine how life would be without fast PCs and intuitive operating systems. Even though it was made in the Internet era, this tape predates the release of Windows 98 (imagine that). So we’re back in the territory of Windows 95, and a climate in which most consumers were only just learning what USB was. The computers on many people’s desktops still didn’t feature CD burners, and so there was still a big market for blank audio cassettes.

1990s Mitsubishi C60 Audio Cassette

One of the brands less synonymous with the manufacture of audio cassettes was Mitsubishi. This Mitsubishi C60 tape was given to me by someone I was teaching to play keyboards, near the end of 1999. So there’s a lot of stuff I can’t be sure of about. What I can say is that this is a Type I normal bias cassette, and hiss levels are not at all intrusive. Beyond that, there are some problems, but how much blame the cassette should take for that isn’t clear.