1970s Scotch Dynarange C90 Audio Cassette

I don’t have a date of purchase for this blatantly very old Scotch Dynarange tape, but there’s one recording on it featuring me as a child, with kids I knew at junior school. The case design ties in with that shown in the 1971 to 1973 stock on http://vintagecassettes.com/, and there’s nothing to contest the fact that my Mom would have bought the cassette during that period. The recording of me as a child wouldn’t have been as early as that – it’s more like 1975 or 1976 I think. But this is a retro cassette, good and proper.

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.

1985 Sony HF-S 90 Audio Cassette

The Sony HF-S cassette was a normal bias Type 1, which was of a superior grade, and described by the manufacturer as Super High Fidelity. There was a big difference in sound quality between these tapes and the very basic ‘Low Noise’ range-proppers – although most high bias chrome tapes would still quite noticeably subordinate them in terms of frequency response.