1982 Memorex MRXI C90 Audio Cassette

This one took a bit of searching out. It’s a 90 minute Memorex MRXI (or MRX1), bought at the end of 1982. I’d bet that a fairly hefty proportion of these normal bias tapes ended up in the bin, as did the shells for most of mine. I liked the sound of these and used them almost exclusively to record rehearsals for the very first ‘band’ I was in, through the winter and into the spring of 1983. The MRXIs were bold, they could take a good amount of level, and they had considerable quantities of treble for a normal bias tape – albeit around the region of 6 KHz rather than much higher up in the spectrum like a chrome tape. It was a hard sound, which gave our rather polite instrument setup some much needed teen cred.

1989 BASF Chrome Extra II 60 Audio Cassette

This was a BASF chrome cassette design that brought down the curtain on the 1980s black-encased products, which had evolved visually in both subtle and more dramatic increments through the course of the decade.

1984 Sony UCX 60 Audio Cassette

This was a tape which certainly had the looks, but did it have the sound to match?…