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.

1988 TDK SA 46 Audio Cassette

A few years on from the TDK Super Avilyn tape I photographed for THIS POST, the TDK SA cassette had evolved into what you see here. This is a 1988 example, and despite less than four years’ timespan between the two variants, the one depicted here looks markedly different from the 1984 version on that link. The multi-track (Portastudio) format recording this tape preserves is from the early 1990s, so I’m guessing that won’t have been the first material I put onto it. Typically for a TDK SA, the sound is very good.

The cassette’s ‘anti-resonance’ build is denoted on the shell, and this was something various manufacturers seemed to get quite excited about. However, I found it hard to consider as anything much more than a gimmick. If a cassette was made properly, it really shouldn’t have problems with resonance in the first place, so the boast always seemed to me like the manufacturers were trying to get us to regard basic standards as some kind of bonus.