1987 TDK AD 90 Audio Cassette

Zipping back a quarter of a century to 1987, for a recollection of this TDK AD 90 audio cassette. These were mid-level Type I tapes – normal bias, but formulated to reproduce music at decent, if not jaw-droppingly impressive fidelity.

TDK HCL-11 Head Cleaner Cassette

One of the more recent head cleaning cassettes. This TDK HCL-11 is from the late 1990s, and features TDK’s RC-II Rigid Construction Mechanism. All sorts of recommendations would be made by purveyors of recording devices in relation to cleaning, demagnetising or whatever, but running one of these every so often would, in my experience, keep a basic tape deck or tape recorder working without hitch. Home multi-trackers, however, needed more care, and with those, I found head cleaning tapes to have little impact when sound quality was starting to suffer.

1993 TDK CDing II C90 Audio Cassette

If ever there was a case of a manufacturer setting themselves up for failure, then this was surely it. An audio cassette with a picture of a compact disc on the outer packaging, and a boast that the tape could reproduce CD sound like for like. In a world where home CD burning was still some way in the future, being able to exactly copy a CD to an audio tape was a very attractive thought. There was, however, one ever-so-slight drawback… It didn’t work.