Audio Tape Shoot-Out: BASF, TDK, Memorex, That’s

Okay, so this is in no way a fair contest, but unfair usually makes for more interesting reading, so no apologies for that. In this post, I’m comparing the performance of four well-kept and barely used 60 minute audio tapes, made between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. The idea was not to make a champion of a particular brand, but to explore how varied old audio cassettes can be in the way they handle a modern recording.

Early 1970s Scotch Dynarange C-120 Audio Tape

I was quite flippant about the performance when I posted a photo of a Scotch Dynarange C-90 in 2012, but it’s often very hard with old tapes to evaluate them properly, since so little is known about the recording conditions, and there’s little or no space to record new sequences for test purposes.

Gladly, however, I’ve now unearthed an early ‘70s Scotch Dynarange C-120 with plenty of blank space on Side B, so I set about establishing what these 40+ year-old stalwarts are like when it comes to preserving a known quality of signal.

1980s Sony BHF 90 Audio Cassette Dismantled

Firstly, I should mention that this is not the 1983 BHF 90 I photographed previously (or indeed the 1981). This is another variant with a few small detail differences from the ’83.