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Show us your vintage cassettes!

restorer-john

restorer-john

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There's few things apart from fishing lures, fragrance bottles and anodized LEDs torches that just press my buttons like the wonderful packaging of cassettes (particularly TDK) back in the 1980s. Not only were their tapes phenomenally good, they just looked awesome.

Here's just a tiny selection of some of my sealed NOS cassettes, scanned on my flatbed scanner so you can relive the 1980s! Each time TDK changed the packaging or mechanism/tape, I kept some cassettes or a box or two of the old ones, just in case the 'new' formulation was no good.

Vive la Mix Tape! :)

tdk ad90.JPG


tdk ad90_01.JPG


tdk sf90.JPG


tdk sax60.JPG


tdk adx60.JPG


tdk adx90_01.JPG


tdk adx90_02.JPG


tdk adx90_03.JPG


tdk arx90.JPG


Just for fun, go search eBay for a sealed one of these and prepare to be shocked...
tdk maxg90.JPG


Come on, I know you've still got some cassettes- let's see them!
 
No 120 min cassettes ? (didn't have them either)
 
solderdude said:
No 120 min cassettes ? (didn't have them either)
Click to expand...

120 min were way too thin, I don't think I even have one anywhere in my collection.

TDK 90 minute cassettes were 135M long. If your cassette deck was spot on speed wise, you got some extra time.

(2 minutes 14.6 seconds extra) Nothing worse than an album tailing off into the leader tape...
 
I just went looking for my cassettes but did not find them... I DID find DAT tapes, 1/4" tapes and an editing block, 3.5" floppies, Zip disks(!), and some cylinder records. I can at least play the cylinders (I have an Ambrola) but the rest are curiosities for students. I reckon the cassette tapes must be at home in the dead media archive there.
 
Nobody's got the Teac with fake reels ? My father had one.

I had some TKD 100 minutes cassettes, but I quickly stopped using them because of speed variations (wow).
Before recording directly to hard drives, I was using TDK MA cassettes. Very good quality and not too expensive.

I noticed that the last generation of TDK SA cassette cases were playing with flutter in my Teac deck. When I had to copy them on hard drive, I first had to open them and temporarily put the reel in a MA case, that would play with much less flutter.

I also used the TDK 135 meters tapes to calibrate the speed of my deck :)

Here are some of my cassettes... of another type :
Cassettes.JPG
 
I've got a few drawers with unopened varieties of most of those shown so far. Plus some Yamaha metal cassettes, and a couple odd companies. I'll have to get a pic of them.

Also have one of the data cassette machines for a Commodore computer along with the Commodore branded cassette tapes.
 
Blumlein 88 said:
Also have one of the data cassette machines for a Commodore computer along with the Commodore branded cassette tapes.
Click to expand...

Probably worth a small fortune to old computer retro collectors!
 
I don't have any new cassettes, I only bought one when I needed it.
A selection of different tapes I still have and what I usually bought.
P2070163.JPG


The 46 mins and 100min tapes were the odd ones out.
I liked the reel-to-reel look tape, unfortunately it was cheap and noisy ferrotape.
 
solderdude said:
I don't have any new cassettes, I only bought one when I needed it.
Click to expand...

That's a sensible way to do it. You wouldn't have sealed ones 35 years later taking up room like me!

When I was a young bloke, my best mate and I would go "half" (5 each) on a box of TDK ADX-90s. The ADX wasn't stocked by most stores and there were only a few duty free stores that kept it in stock. A box was around $42-47 in 1982/3, so we'd ride our bikes in and do the "deal" which was a decent discount on individual prices.

Once I was earning real money, I made sure I never ran out of tapes by stockpiling them as TDK was cheapening the formulation and the quality was dropping off. By the end, all they had was D and AD equivalents.
 
where can you sell vintage cassettes?

I've got hundreds and hate to just toss them in a landfill
 
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