Mid 1990s TDK SF 60 Compact Cassette Tape

A lot of people don’t realise that Tape Tardis was set up as a photo blog. As the content progressed, the posts incorporated more and more information, until the site was serving primarily as an information source, which just happened to have some nice pictures.

This post, however,

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.

1993 TDK SA-X 60 Super Avilyn Audio Cassette

The early to mid 1990s TDK SA-X 60 audio tape was the upmarket high bias product in the range. TDK had notably used their own Super Avilyn tape coating for high bias Type II cassettes right through the era when chrome was the most popular Type II formulation. But by the time this cassette was manufactured in the early 1990s, most rivals had dropped chrome and followed the TDK path, adopting a cobalt-ferric mix of some sort.