Cassette tape quality

[Martin Bush]

Hi all

I have quite a lot of Type 1 cassettes and I also keep my eyes open for Chrome/ Type 2s.

I know that Type 1s can be variable and, for various reasons, can be counterfeit and you can even end up with "Type 0", but I was wondering about the quality of Type 2s.

Is it likely that NOS own brand Type 2 cassettes (ie Woolworths, Curry's etc) will be of decent quality? I am basing my question on my assumption that Type 2 production would require more investment and, therefore, there would be less factories producing them and therefore less variation in quality.

Martin

[Lloyd 1985]

Best ones I’ve got are Sony ones, good sound quality and very few dropouts, not sure what type they are, just C90’s. Also had some TDK’s, black cased ones, but they were not as good as the Sony’s. These were NOS, still in their cling film!

Regards
Lloyd

[paulsherwin]

For house brand type IIs, look for the country of origin. Generally speaking, anything from Japan will be pretty good. I have some excellent Boots and Woolworths Japanese own brands. Of the big names, again anything Japanese is likely to be good - TDK, Maxell, Sony, Fuji.

I'm surprised Lloyd had problems with TDKs, as they were a very high quality manufacturer. They did make a wide range of tapes though, and not all were intended for HiFi use. Brand quality did slip towards the end of the cassette era, as manufacturing was outsourced.

European stuff is much more variable in quality, and also tends to have odd bias requirements.

[Martin Bush]

Thanks chaps.

My question was inspired by spotting a Woolworths cassette on ebay and thinking seeking out less fashionable own brand ones might be a good way to get my hands on some cassettes at a reasonable price. Having done some more research it seems I was mistaken

I think I still have some sort of prejudice towards anything that is not one of the well known tape brands from when I was growing up. It's good to know that if I do come across Woolworths, Boots tapes etc that they are worth using.

[paulsherwin]

Check the general feel of the cassettes and, as I said, where they were made. Own brand cassettes could and did come from anywhere. This is certainly true of Woolworths/Winfield cassettes - I don't remember any of them being really awful, but they did use a range of suppliers, and some were much better than others.

Brands to be wary of are Philips (oddly enough), Scotch, Pyral and Ampex. These all used very dodgy mechanics at one time or another. BASF used good mechanics but their tape stocks needed strange bias and Dolby tracking.

No-brand cassettes (i.e. not store brands) were almost always dire.

[Martin Bush]

My dad used BASF for a long time on his Sharp music centre. In fact I will have some of them knocking around.

At that time, seeing as they were mainly played in the car, they sounded fine and I expect we wouldn't have known what bias was. I would shy away from buying any of those now for the reason stated above.

As regards no-brand, I recall out local "cheap shop" used to sell ones branded Maxim. While it is a brand in a sense, I believe what was inside could only loosely be called cassette tape.

[Lloyd 1985]

Those TDK’s that I have aren’t bad, they play back well enough, they just seemed to have more little drop outs than the Sony’s, they were probably from the end of the cassette era, a friend from work gave them to me. Sound quality apart from the drop outs is easily as good as the Sony tapes.

Now the worst tapes I ever encountered were also from a ‘cheap shop’ (Brierly’s in Daventry back in the 90’s!), they seemed to buy in things which we thought were fire damaged stock! These tapes were branded ‘Waltham’ and were utter garbage! Most of the pack of 5 caused the auto stop to operate because the reels would jam, and you couldn’t actually record on them! There would just be some muffled noises on playback, and on the supposedly blank ones if you played them and turned up the volume full you could hear muffled music on them fading in and out. I returned them and got my 50p back... it was a lot of money when I was 10!

Regards
Lloyd

[Timvintage]

Hi Martin, particularly boots Tapes from the 80s and 90s are good to look out for, these are actually rebadged Maxell. As Paul said, other brands vary, at one point curries used Philips tape, which isn’t really any good.
Also you can’t go wrong with most TDK, Maxell, Sony etc. The only TDK I don’t like are the CDIng cassettes, these were end of line, and vary wildly and often have problems with one channel being low, or not playing freely etc. Also don’t feel like you need to buy sealed tapes, most of the time reusing Tapes is absolutely fine, and that’s what I do all the time.

[knobtwiddler]

BASF held the patent on Cr02 - hence other makers using terms such as 'chrome position' - i.e. not actual chrome tape. Legend says that Japanese decks tended to be optimised for the type-2 position 'pseudo chrome' tapes made by Japanese OEMs, whereas BASF actually made genuine chrome.

I haven't researched this at great length myself, but I do know for a fact that Japanese decks from Sony, Denon etc. work extremely well with TDK SA. I have read that Revox decks supposedly work well with genuine chromes (I had a Revox for a while and it worked great with TDKs - never thought of trying it with BASF).

Having spent the recent lockdown period digging my tapes from the mid 80s through 90s, it seems to me that the TDKs have aged well (could be compatibility with my Japanese machines - no Revox in the house at present). The MAs sound exceptional, with crystal clean HF. The SAs aren't far behind.

The Maxell XLII seem to have more 'fffff' in the HF, but this could be an azimuth issue that I haven't tackled, or because I used Maxell more often with a Marantz deck (no HX Pro) - and TDK with the later Denon HX Pro machine, so I'm not comparing apples with apples.

I can't think of any Japanese-made tape that I've had issues with TBH. I do think that it's worth being aware of the adage that Japanese decks were optimised for 'super avilyn' tapes such as SA, and European decks supposedly for BASF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium(IV)_oxide

NB - some of the big brand tapes changed factories in the later days of tape, and you will notice that these cassettes fetch a lot less than their earlier Japanese-made brethren on auction sites.

And add Fuji to the list. Japanese-made ones are likely as good as any other of the big brands.

[paulsherwin]

Japanese decks were almost always optimised for TDK or Maxell pseudochrome in the type II position. These dominated the HiFi market, which left BASF in a tricky position, as their 'real' chrome stock sounded awful on them. In the event they stuck to their guns, with just minor tweaks to the formulation to try to increase compatibility, but I think that was a commercial mistake.

The BASF Chromdioxid stock actually sounds very good on decks properly set up for it.

[ben]

I have some Woolies tapes that are OEM BASF. mid90s era. Later ones were Saehan, fairly average.Will post some pics of the gems later!

[arjoll]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

Brands to be wary of are Philips (oddly enough), Scotch, Pyral and Ampex.

The first metal tape I purchased was a Pyral from David Reid Electronics - it was an odd brand here and barely as good as type I tapes from other manufacturers.

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

BASF used good mechanics but their tape stocks needed strange bias and Dolby tracking.

Of the three types of cassette I've struck shedding with, two were were BASF - green "Ferro Super" and a yellow one that I can't recall the sub-brand of. The other type were cheap "Music World" tapes - NZ assembled custom loads with glued cases that were pretty bad when new.

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

No-brand cassettes (i.e. not store brands) were almost always dire.

Interestingly enough, Direct Imports NZ who did Teac/TASCAM here had both their own brands and custom loads that were way better than they deserved to be. They had a brand "Galaxie" which was a generic type I, ok and really cheap. "Teac SDR" was TDK D in a custom shell and just as good as the original, while they did custom loads of tapes called "D", "AD" and "SA" which were also from pancakes of TDK stock of those tapes. The shells were not quite as good as the originals but not the worst around either, and using the same tape as TDK meant they were really quite good. Near the end of the cassette era the names of the custom loads were just "standard" and "mastering" and they were more designed for in-shell high-speed duplication with the likes of the Telex 1+1 - record your service or whatever on mastering, duplicate to standard; I think the only difference was that the mastering ones were C62 and C92, slightly longer so any variations in length didn't cut off the end of side 1, start of side 2.

They also distributed various Japanese-sourced Teac cassettes which weren't bad - CDX was a bog standard type I, EDX was a short-lived type I which was actually really, really nice when recorded on a deck with adjustable bias and tweaked, and HDX which was a reasonably type II but weirdly enough one batch of them "squeaked" when used on my W580R auto-reverse deck for some reason - it was fine on a V680 three head and any single-direction two head. A bunch of the HDX tapes I had also seem to have developed some white mould, but there's nothing important on them.

[paulsherwin]

Pyral was the French BASF as far as cassettes were concerned. Their consumer marketing was very hit and miss outside France so most people in the UK had never heard of them in the 70s and 80s. They seemed to specialise in supplying educational and industrial consumers - I used to buy Pyrals from one of the language lab techs at Birmingham University in the 70s.

It's odd to learn that Pyral were a significant brand in NZ - I'm surprised the French managed to sell anything to NZ consumers after the Rainbow Warrior sinking (no further discussion of that here please).

[knobtwiddler]

I have a Pyral which I'm a tad scared to play. It has the lightest brown colour I've ever seen, and is very matte. I have visions of it shedding a cloud of dust. The rusty look also makes me a little nervous about it abrading the head as well!

I have a few genuine BASF chromes. I seem to remember the tape being particularly black in appearance. I suspect that they were recorded via my Marantz SD720 (a deck I wish I'd kept). I shall see!

Maybe I'll play it in my partner's deck

[jamesperrett]

I seem to remember that the Woolworths Alpha cassettes came out well in a Hifi magazine review back in the late 70's or early 80's.

There were some very poor TDK look-alike tapes around which were mainly sold on market stalls which didn't perform well but I've not really had any problems with genuine TDK or Maxell.

At the studio we used to buy unbranded custom length type 2 tapes which were loaded with Japanese tape. I think it may have been Fuji but I don't know for sure. There was only one supplier of these as far as I know. These worked far better in our machines than the similar tapes that nearly everyone else used which were loaded with BASF chrome tape.

[Richard_FM]

My Dad bought some Woolworths branded blank tapes in the mid 1990s that seemed to give trouble, I can't remember if it was the recording quality or physical problems.

I used a lot of TDK CDing tapes that were normally OK in a mains powered machine, but in a personal stereo sometimes seemed to play slow in the middle of a side for some reason.

[Restoration73]

I agree with many comments. I have extremely old CrO2 tapes BASF and Agfa that are
still ok decades on. TDK SA and AD we used to sell anyway, the cheap EMI Soundhog
was a bit noisy. MA and MA-R were excellent Type 4, and the Philips Type 3 (FerriChrome)
produced very interesting distortion. I used a lot of Fuji type 2 from the 90's (their S-VHS
were excellent too) and I was fooled by my local Tandy who offered a "Maxwell" brand.
U.S. Radio Shack cassettes were assembled in Mexico.

[Andrew2]

I quickly discovered that Memorex were awful, mainly from a mechanical aspect. They generated a terrible 'rubbing' sound that did not inspire confidence.
One of the best sounding tapes I ever used was an old EMI bog-standard ferric. This was in the mid 70's and it was a few years old even then. It sounded great - a smooth sound with very good top end and a decently low noise. It seemed to work best in my Philips deck, rather less so in my Sharp one.

[paulsherwin]

The Philips is likely to have been optimised for lower bias European type Is like BASF LH (and Philips' own tapes of course). Although some of the Japanese stocks like the original TDK D were quite low bias, their more upmarket Is needed significantly more bias, particularly TDK AD which needed very high bias indeed when first introduced (they later tweaked it).

Japanese decks were normally set up for Japanese type Is targetted at the HiFi market, so used a lot of bias. Type I tapes with low bias requirements suffered very pronounced top end rolloff on these decks.

[wireman]

I used to use TDK AD, SA, SA-X, passed on MA (cost) but latterly moved to Maxell XLII I think because of the mechanism and not the tape itself. Recorded with Dolby B (not C).
But this was a long time ago.
Still have some old tapes, and some blank unopened ones.