Funny how just the sight of something can bring back a flood

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sweetbeats

sweetbeats

Reel deep thoughts...
My brother is digitizing all of his cassettes. He's done now and asked me if I wanted to check in the pile and see if there was anything useful or sentimental I wanted to keep. Then I found this:

image.webp


This is the blank cassette that came with my brother's first boom box almost 40 years ago...it had built-in condenser mics and we used the $HIT outta that blank tape making up radio shows and all sorts of stuff. Practically wore the oxide off of it.
 
Hello Cory,

I too have hundreds of them. I used to run a machine all day long while developing song ideas and arrangements. I used a Onkyo cassette deck that had a very neat feature. In fast forward mode, it would "audition" about 5 or so seconds of each new section and then fast forward on to the next if I didn't hit the play button. A very useful feature and I wish I could get the right channel working again to be able to use that feature again, but alas, it's broken.
 
When me and a few friends started out our first band, we got our hands on a 4 track and used it to record all our songs/demos/jams on old cassettes we'd find in our parents music collection. There was one cassette we found that was gold and we used it to record only the most serious songs we thought were worthy of the 'gold' tape because we thought that tape was the coolest looking one.

We recorded over that tape ten times over... luckily I made poorly mixed MP3's each time we reached the end of the tape.

It's funny that the 'gold' tape we thought was so cool was actually a TDK SA-X 90, the only type 2 high bias cassette we had. Of course, we didn't know or care about that at the time.

tdkc002.webp
 
Chilljam said:
When me and a few friends started out our first band, we got our hands on a 4 track and used it to record all our songs/demos/jams on old cassettes we'd find in our parents music collection. There was one cassette we found that was gold and we used it to record only the most serious songs we thought were worthy of the 'gold' tape because we thought that tape was the coolest looking one.

We recorded over that tape ten times over... luckily I made poorly mixed MP3's each time we reached the end of the tape.

It's funny that the 'gold' tape we thought was so cool was actually a TDK SA-X 90, the only type 2 high bias cassette we had. Of course, we didn't know or care about that at the time.

View attachment 88091
Click to expand...

Anybody remember the early Maxell XL-IIS tapes that were all mirror gold lookin'?
 
pianodano said:
Hello Cory,

I too have hundreds of them. I used to run a machine all day long while developing song ideas and arrangements. I used a Onkyo cassette deck that had a very neat feature. In fast forward mode, it would "audition" about 5 or so seconds of each new section and then fast forward on to the next if I didn't hit the play button. A very useful feature and I wish I could get the right channel working again to be able to use that feature again, but alas, it's broken.
Click to expand...

That's ironic...the tape deck my brother has been using is my old Onkyo TA-2058 that has that scan feature...very handy indeed. Coincidentally that deck is ALL original, probably 30 years old now and is still running and sounding like a champ. I originally purchased it with a CD player, turntable and receiver...all the others died long ago but this cassette deck just keeps going which is funny considering it is the most mechanically laden of the bunch.

Not mine, but a pic of one snagged from the interweb:

ONKYOTA-20584.webp
 
My finest cassette deck is...

the Technics RS-955.
This thing is rare like the chupa cabre.
I also have maybe hundreds of unlabeled tapes in bins with nearly endless sonic meanderings of all sorts!
I've made a few passes & attempts to listen to & label more of it, from time to time.
Sweet!
 

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sweetbeats said:
That's ironic...the tape deck my brother has been using is my old Onkyo TA-2058 that has that scan feature...very handy indeed. Coincidentally that deck is ALL original, probably 30 years old now and is still running and sounding like a champ. I originally purchased it with a CD player, turntable and receiver...all the others died long ago but this cassette deck just keeps going which is funny considering it is the most mechanically laden of the bunch.

Not mine, but a pic of one snagged from the interweb:

View attachment 88139
Click to expand...

Yes, that is what I have. I seem to remember that cassette being around $500.00. Do you know ? Weird but I bought my turntable and Onkyo power amp during the same period. Around 1982 maybe. Put new belt on it last year but there is a tiny one behind the left reel I can't locate.
 
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