Voice of the Beehive – Let It Bee Audio Cassette (1988)

In 1987 and 1988, I was a trainee working with a group of largely incompetent painters and decorators…. Papering walls, doing odd jobs, accidentally pulling down the odd ceiling, and once in a while being ordered to take a door off its hinges and burn it because the customer was so dissatisfied with the painting. Invariably, we’d have the radio on, and Voice of the Beehive tracks such as I Walk The Earth and Don’t Call Me Baby would keep us as enthusiastic as was feasible. When this Album – Let It Bee – was released in June ‘88, combining existing hits with new or lesser known songs, I bought it straight away.

The Type II Chrome Bias Audio Cassette

A classic blast from the past, in the shape of a mid 1980s BASF CR-E II cassette. A real chromium dioxide formulation, and for many, the epitome of the high bias tape.

The Type II high bias audio cassette is actually much older a development than many people realise. The rise of the Type II tape is generally associated with the 1980s, but in fact, it was introduced, with a chromium dioxide (CrO2) tape formulation, at the dawn of the 1970s.

Chrome tapes were, technically, a big advancement from the start. Du Pont’s chromium dioxide formulation gave an undeniable increase in high frequency response over the often rather muffled tone of the existing Type I ferric cassette. This meant much better definition – a major improvement in fidelity, and an ability to preserve all the zing and sparkle at the treble end of the original sound.

1993 TDK AR60 Type I Audio Cassette

The TDK AR60 was one of the better Type I audio cassettes. The sound from Type I tapes could vary enormously, going from a woolly blob of poorly defined warbling at the low end of the market, up to a frequency-rich and high fidelity experience in the more expensive echelons. Not that Type I cassettes could ever be described as expensive in themselves, but if you used a lot of them and bought in bulk, there’d be a dramatic difference in price between a batch of low end Type Is and the high end alternatives.