The fun bygone days of making your own cassettes

[Nimbus]

Some great browsing here. hxxp://vintagecassettes.com/index.htm

Nice link. I was 99% TDK but one of my other favourites was Memorex. Not for the tape though (which was rubbish) but for the cool case they came in.

[C90]

Some great browsing here. hxxp://vintagecassettes.com/index.htm

Nice link. I was 99% TDK but one of my other favourites was Memorex. Not for the tape though (which was rubbish) but for the cool case they came in.

Ha, yes. Memorex always had unique cases. There was another style, more like the regular, standard format but with slightly rounded corners.
I used to like BASF cassettes, although one snapped with some (to me) priceless stuff on, so I switched allegiance to TDK. But BASF tapes had their own unique SMELL when you cracked open the cellophane wrapper! I can remember it now....!!!

[Lord Reith]

Yeah, whatever DID happen to TDK? And Maxell, and Memorex, and BASF?
I used them all.
I preferred the TDK AD90s - one up in their range from the D90s. And there was the SA-C90... and the SA-X C90... I think they were 'Chrome' (CrO2) tapes.
And I even had one... ONE... 'metal' format TDK MA-R9 C90, which came in a cool-looking metal alloy shell and weighed a ton. So pricey, I asked for one as a gift one Christmas. It cost about the same as regular LP at the time, I think,
And I still have them all.

Some great browsing here. hxxp://vintagecassettes.com/index.htm

Yes the ones pictured from the early 80s are all the ones I used. But AD-54? Who in heck thought a 54 minute cassette was a good idea?!

SA stood for "super avilyn" which was an alternative formulation to Cr02. personally, I thought it was crap. AD was the one I used for the better sounding bootleg compilations I would make, being slightly brighter in sound.

I also found that by adjusting the bias frequency level you could really improve the quality of recording. I suspect that the manufacturers of the decks were in cahoots with the tape makers in the same way that the electric bulb manufacturers were in cahoots with each other (ie: deliberately halving the lifetime of incandescent bulbs to make people replace them more often). If the bias level is too low, high frequency response tends to be poorish unless you use the flashest tapes. That meant people buying more expensive cassettes. But i found that a simple tweak of two trimpots inside the deck effected a spectacular improvement on the high frequency response. After that point, I never bothered buying anything other than TDK-D except in exceptional circumstances.

It’s funny that this topic came up as I was in my storage shed a couple of days ago an came across a whole bin of cassette tapes from the 70’s to the 90’s full of everything Beatles related that was circulating at the time. I had several cassette decks and one of them I rigged up so I could control the pitch on playback. Later on, you could buy decks had that. I did that because so much of the bootleg material wasn’t at the right speed. I knew what key the Beatles played a song in, so I would adjust the playback speed I could play along with it on a guitar. I also bought a Sound Shaper 3 equalizer to try and make the music sound better. It was the most elaborate equalizer on the market. That was about all you could do in those days.

I had seen a varispeed cassette deck as early as the mid 80s but it was a real high-end job. It was about 1993 before I figured out that the speed control trimpot is actually inside the motor casing. Once I realised that it was a simple matter of replacing the tiny trimpot with a normal pot mounted on the front.

I also got a varispeed Denon cd player in 1993 and, wow, was that useful. Before you could rip cds to a computer and change the speed, this was the only way to hear bootleg cds at the right speed in full quality. So later when I also got a cd recorder I remastered all my Yellow Dog boots at the right speed (or at least what i thought was the right speed!) onto new discs. I still have that Denon machine and it is great. Made in Japan right at the height of cd technology. It puts to shame the garbage that passes for cd players these days. But do I ever use it? No. I don't think I could ever go back to cds again. Cassettes, yes, just for the nostalgia. But cds were always an interim format for me.

[Egg_Crisis]

But AD-54? Who in heck thought a 54 minute cassette was a good idea?!

For fussy people who wanted to record an LP on a c60 but didn't want to have very much blank at the end of each side?
But yeah it's an utterly pointless tape length.

[Ziggy C]

Back in the late 60's, early 70's, when I was living in New York, my Dad had a reel-to-reel deck. He had a friend who owned a record store in New York. Dad would borrow records and commit them to tape. He had (still has...in storage) an immense reel collection. His tastes are varied. So there were Classical, Flamenco, Pop, Jazz, Spoken Word, you name it. A good friend of ours was an archivist specializing in old time radio. (Ken Greenwald passed away a few weeks ago.) Ken would give Dad hours upon hours of old radio shows; Bob & Ray, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee.

Anyway, when my Dad finally bought a stereo cassette deck, I would make cassette copies of many of his tapes. One of them was kind of an oddity, to me anyway. It was called, "With The Beatles." Weird that it started the fourth song in (from Meet The Beatles.) At the time, I had no clue that the US releases were so different from the originals. So I thought there was either something wrong with the tape. Or something wrong with my Dad.

I would spend hours sitting by the radio, waiting to record my favorite songs as they came up. Casey Kasem's AT40 was a good source, save for all his damn talking over the intro's and his early fade-outs. I also recorded many an album off of Joe Benson's Seventh Day on KLOS. I recorded my favorite Dr. Demento songs off KMET. And I kept a keen ear for any live concert special broadcasts so I could tape those, too. I also, as many of you probably did, checked records out from the local public library and made copies of those.

The tape recorder was quite the versatile tool. I still have many of the tapes I made. They're crated up in storage as I currently don't own a tape deck.

And now I feel old. Time for a drink winky.

[Lord Reith]

Anybody else remember... Elcaset?

The Edsel of the tape world!

Elcaset_and_Compact_Cassette_size_comparison.jpg (166.93 KiB) Viewed 613 times

elcassette.jpg (381.93 KiB) Viewed 613 times

[mojofilter]

I saw them in stereo shops when they were new, and heard them demonstrated. The Elcaset was a huge improvement over cassette format. But, like other formats introduced by Sony, it never caught on (Betamax, DAT, or minidisc anyone?), and most of the units shipped to stores were returned unopened.

I knew a guy who ran an audio shop in the '70s, who had a cassette deck with a front panel switch to make it run at 3.75 IPS, and that was a dramatic increase in sound quality. I can't remember the brand name now, it was so long ago. That format never caught on either, seeing as how a C90 would only hold 22:30 per side, and you couldn't play the high-speed tapes on any other machine.

[apesrfools]

I have about 5-10 sealed Maxell XS cassettes. I don't seem to have it in me to bin them.

[Lord Reith]

I have about 5-10 sealed Maxell XS cassettes. I don't seem to have it in me to bin them.

You should mount them in a frame on the wall.

I knew a guy who ran an audio shop in the '70s, who had a cassette deck with a front panel switch to make it run at 3.75 IPS, and that was a dramatic increase in sound quality. I can't remember the brand name now, it was so long ago.

It would have been dead easy to do that, just a matter of switching in a different resistor on the circuit board inside the motor casing. I wish I had thought of that. It would have given much better sound quality for making compilations.