I even went as far as photocopying album artwork and squeezing them down with a photocopier! A Maxell UDII chrome and That’s MG-X metal cassette. As long as you done that, all was golden. Or, a special tape cleaning kit that came with a bottle of cleaner to dab onto the cleaner tape reels, brushes or similar. All that was needed, was a periodic clean once a month of the tape head, pinch wheels and capstan with a cotton wool bud and methylated spirits that could be bought off the shelf from a chemist. Some of my blank tapes, that still sound as good as ever.įor the most part, as long as proper maintenance of your tape deck was carried out and you used decent blank tapes to record on – they performed admirably, especially if you used decent hi-fi separate style kit or a similarly high spec Walkman style player. The dubious quality of record decks and tape decks on 1980s and 1990s midi systems eventually forced those mediums to die off and people shifted towards CD’s. Also, very much like vinyl – tapes sounded dreadful on cheap kit whereas Compact Disc it was possible to make a cheap or expensive system and it still sounded mostly good. The Armchair Anarchist blog is here to squash that myth, and also give some sound advice to those who were too young to remember tape and want a machine of their own to collect these weird tape EP’s and albums doing the rounds today.įor those who remember tape the first time around, they didn’t suffer poor equipment and maintenance gladly. Sadly, most people’s memories of tape was a horrid format suffering from muddy sound that used to become mangled in the machine – spewing tape everywhere. Essentially, the grandfather of the MP3 player. They were highly popular, and brought music to the car, or wherever you wanted with the advent of portable players such as the Ghetto Blaster and Walkman. Phillips perfected the process in 1964, and over a period of time gained many design improvements which gave it (under right conditions, decent tapes, and decent kit) superb sound quality that can mirror the source component it was recorded from. Compact cassette (for ease of simplicity we shall call it tape) evolved from shrinking down reel to reel tape to a small, compact size factor. With the vinyl renaissance doing the rounds, the underground and independent scenes have resurrected another supposedly dead format – the humble compact cassette. The second part will cover the functions, and terminology. In this two part series Armchair Anarchist blog will cover the resurgence in the compact cassette format, and what to look out for those who never owned a tapedeck and for those who want to own another machine who had one in the past. TDK MA-XG -The veritable king of blank tapes
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